Olivier Guillard

Kim Jong-un's last days (in power) Olivier Guillard

In the twilight of 2019, with the Asia-Pacific region's many theatres of crisis, areas of tension and uncertainty - continuing hostilities in Afghanistan, the quasi-insurgency situation in Hong Kong and Kashmir, permanent friction in the South China Sea, the Sino-American trade war, among other worrying trends - East Asia and its febrile Korean peninsula are struggling to leave the front pages of the news. This is mainly due to the difficulties - the admirable euphemism here...- encountered by Pyongyang and Washington since February 2019 (and the very disappointing Hanoi summit) on the road to the normalisation of their relations, on the long and uncertain journey of denuclearization, the object of all the fantasies of an American administration in search of diplomatic success in this part of the world, one year before the next elections on the other side of the Atlantic. Faced with the empiricism of our daily study of the "North Korean case", of this Kimist dictatorship that has crossed the eras, decades and jolts of history without a blow, it seemed useful to take some distance from the daily life, to project ourselves, with modesty and the limits inherent in this type of exercise, a few years further. This, with the help of reflections and projections that are more audacious than provocative...