Introduction

Since the breakdown in 2019 of high-level diplomacy with North Korea (officially
the Democratic People's Republic of Korea, or DPRK) and as a result of the fiveyear
military modernisation plan that the country announced in January 2021,
it has steadily expanded its military capabilities. It has not only conducted an
unprecedent number of missile tests and in the process introduced a range of
new missile technologies, but recently also introduced a new law that makes
significant changes to its nuclear doctrine.

At the same time, the rapidly changing geopolitical context, most vividly
exemplified by the intensifying US-China rivalry and Russia’s war against Ukraine,
not only makes a resolution of the international community’s conflict with North
Korea over its nuclear weapons and military capabilities even less likely, but
strains the central mechanism used by the international community to deal
with North Korea during the past years, i.e. the imposition of sanctions through
the UN Security Council (UNSC). Despite the unprecedented quantitative and
qualitative progress in North Korea’s military build-up, the UNSC has imposed
no new sanctions on the country since 2017.

This Policy Brief examines why and how the UNSC stopped being the central
theatre for imposing sanctions on North Korea and highlights the security
challenges that result from this shift. Next, it addresses the most crucial
implications of these security challenges. The analysis includes a discussion of
the central actors driving new decisions to impose sanctions on North Korea
outside the framework of the UNSC, and how these sanctions target one of
the country’s most crucial sanctions-evasion mechanisms: its cybercrime
programme. Based on this analysis, the brief offers policy recommendations
that underscore the value of recent coordination initiatives in the field of
sanctions and discusses what more needs to be done.