North Korea

The Democratic People's Republic of Korea, commonly known as North Korea, occupies the northern half of the Korean Peninsula in East Asia, bordered by China, Russia and South Korea, with Pyongyang as its capital and largest city. It was established on 10 July 1948 following Japan's surrender in the Second World War and Korea's division at the 38th parallel, and the Korean War that followed from 1950 to 1953 killed an estimated three million people and devastated the country's infrastructure. North Korea operates as a unitary communist state under Kim Jong Un, who holds the titles of General Secretary of the Workers' Party of Korea and President of the State Affairs Commission, and functions in practice as a hereditary dictatorship, since all three of its supreme leaders have belonged to the Kim family under a pervasive cult of personality. Amnesty International has described North Korea as having the worst human rights record in the world; the country maintains an active duty army of 1.28 million soldiers and possesses nuclear weapons, and its government formally abandoned the goal of Korean reunification in 2023 and 2024.