For 2022, a ruling party event once again replaced North Korean leader Kim Jong Un’s annual New Year’s address, with a state media editorial on the outcome of the December plenum providing an official look back at the past year and outlining some of the key strategies for the future.

Yet despite a regular supply of such programmatic reports and other types of information, our knowledge and understanding of events in North Korea, and our ability to influence these in a targeted way, remains limited. The reasons are manifold, but one stands out: the very common