Guns, Guerillas, and the Great Leader: North Korea and the Third World by Benjamin R. Young

Guns, Guerillas, and the Great Leader centers on North Korea’s “Third Worldism,” tracing its international-relations outreach to developing nations starting in 1956, when leader Kim Il-sung consolidated his domestic power, to 1989, when North Korea hosted the World Festival of Youth and Students. Young draws from such rich sources as newspaper articles from around the world, third-party embassy records, and North Korean state media reports. His globe-spanning study captures North Korean activities in far-flung locales, from Senegal to Mexico, Sri Lanka, Cuba, Vietnam, Uganda, Pakistan, Egypt, Zambia, and many more. It even reaches so far as the tiny Micronesian island nation of Nauru, where the president explained that his nation already had “relations with some countries they didn’t really like” when justifying his acceptance of North Korea’s diplomatic overtures in 1982 (123). These engagements, we learn, served several purposes for North Korea. Internationally, Kim Il-sung promoted the Democratic People’s Republic...