From Humanitarian Relief to Democracy Aid: US Foreign Assistance Towards North Korea, 1996–2016*

Abstract

This study sets out to discover two hitherto unexplored areas entrenched in US foreign assistance to North Korea. First, it aims to conduct the complete enumeration of US aid projects targeting North Korea for two decades, from 1996 to 2016. A full coverage of humanitarian relations between the United States and North Korea contributes to tracing its evolving trajectories in a complete form. The second issue involves a more ambitious mission, intending to dig into Washington's strategic objectives which have been veiled under the philanthropic auspice of humanitarian aid. Given that donors always react sensitively to North Korea's nuclear threats, Washington exerted strategic control over the release of humanitarian assistance along with Pyongyang's conformity with aid conditionality. Considering the donor's national interest was hidden in humanitarianism, the study reveals not only whether humanitarian assistance has deviated from its main mission of emergency relief, but also which factor led to such a deviation and advanced the democracy aid framework as a new principle of reshuffling the usage of humanitarian assistance. Analyzing its moving frontier – from humanitarian relief to democracy aid – should be at the center of identifying the securitization process of US foreign assistance to North Korea.

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