Is North Korea expertise all talk?

Intelligence analysis requires knowledge of the subject, target, and analytical competency

Among Russia, Middle East–North Africa, China and North Korea watchers, there’s a recurrent debate – one responsible for snide comments at conferences, heated social media arguments and even, from what I’ve witnessed, physical altercations. It revolves around one question: Can you be an expert on a place without speaking the main language? In the case of North Korea, of course, that means Korean, and whether an analyst can read, write and speak Korean.

The debate is a modern incarnation of an earlier 1950s academic debate, which arose with the split of area studies from international relations. Itself a relatively young academic discipline, international relations focused on how countries interact. Area studies, spurred on by the Cold War, sought a greater focus on why countries behave the way they do. The former emphasised the universal. The latter emphasised the particular – with an implicit acceptance that the humanities, including language studies, were a prerequisite to expertise.

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