North Korea has a well-established reputation for instigating international crises that could potentially result in a resumption of war on the Korean peninsula. Several scholars have examined the North Korean government’s tolerance for high-risk behavior and possible explanations for this behavior have been developed. Yet none of these explanations have been consistently successful in explaining or predicting North Korea’s tendency to engage in highly risk tolerant international behavior.
This thesis was written to attempt an explanation of North Korean foreign policy behavior during periods of international crisis. A Prospective Theory method was adopted as the framework with which the hypothesis was developed and the data analyzed.
Through an examination of North Korean crisis-generating behavior in the 1990’s and the defining of the Central Actor as the ruling “regime” of North Korea, a hypothesis was developed that could potentially explain past crisis-generating behavior. This thesis contends that North Korea will become highly risk tolerant when it experiences a loss of a vital asset, or predicts the potential loss of such an asset. This risk tolerant behavior will continue until the asset is regained or successfully defended, or until the regime collapses. The threat to the North Korean assets may originate in either the international realm, or domestically.
This thesis suggests that there were three periods during the 1990’s when such circumstances occurred resulting in North Korean risk tolerant behavior, and subsequent international crises. Of the three crises, two are assessed by this thesis to have resulted from international pressure and one incident was the result of internal instability.
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