If potential threat to world peace is used as a yardstick, North Korea is one of the most important states in the world today. The inordinate amount of attention it attracts from policymakers and scholars alike owes primarily to its propensity to precipitate crises and its presumed nuclear capability.
The product of two conferences, one held at the Hiroshima Peace Institute in 2006 and the other held at Columbia University in 2007, this anthology of articles by 12 scholars, aims to illuminate how one of the two contending approaches to coping with the North Korean threat—namely, engagement as opposed to coercion—has worked. In the introductory chapter, the editors begin by reviewing the theoretical basis of engagement. In their words, the “distinguishing feature of engagement is the idea that positive inducements and the extension of benefits, rather than the promise of harm or the imposition of current costs, can either produce...
