A Green Light at the End of Kim's Dock? North Korea and International Cooperation on the Environment
Abstract/Contents
- Abstract
- Conventional wisdom suggests that North Korea is an isolated state, with Pyongyang typically disengaged or excluded from various forms of international cooperation. North Korea, however, has ratified a significant quantity of multilateral environmental agreements (MEAs) since the country’s inception in 1948. Motivated by this apparent contradiction, this thesis asks: does North Korea actually comply with the MEAs it ratifies? If so, why? If not, why not? Prior scholarship on the relationship between North Korea and MEAs has been limited due to the lack of data on North Korea’s environment. This thesis, therefore, employs a special type of satellite imagery---namely, multi-spectral satellite imagery---to cover the gaps in the understanding of the evolution of North Korea’s environment. Specifically, this thesis utilizes spectral indices, which are proxies for on-the-ground environmental indicators that can be derived from multi-spectral satellite imagery, to chart the progress (or lack thereof) of different facets of North Korea’s environment between 1985 and 2011. This thesis examines North Korea’s compliance with MEAs by comparing the pre and post-convention trends for customized sets of spectral indices assigned to each MEA, across several sites in North Korea. This thesis finds support for the notion that North Korea complies with MEAs when doing so is consistent with buttressing the stability of the Kim regime, which offers important implications for future cooperative endeavors with North Korea within the international environmental domain.
Description
| Type of resource | text |
|---|---|
| Date created | June 4, 2019 |
Creators/Contributors
| Author | Derby Elizondo, Federico José |
|---|---|
| Primary advisor | Hecker, Siegfried S. |
Subjects
| Subject | North Korea |
|---|---|
| Subject | Satellite Imagery |
| Subject | Environment |
| Subject | International Cooperation |
| Genre | Thesis |
Bibliographic information
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- This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial 3.0 Unported license (CC BY-NC).
Preferred citation
- Preferred Citation
- Derby Elizondo, Federico José (2019). A Green Light at the End of Kim's Dock? North Korea and International Cooperation on the Environment. Stanford Digital Repository. Available at: https://purl.stanford.edu/mn713pn5379
Collection
Stanford University, Center for International Security and Cooperation, Interschool Honors Program in International Security Studies, Theses
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- Contact
- fderby@stanford.edu
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