The Korean Peninsula is seldom out of the news. With a new leader in the North, a presidential election in the South, and with the sixtieth anniversary of the end of the Korean War in July 2013, such attention will continue. Yet outside the narrow confines of scholarship and government, Korea, and especially North Korea, is relatively little known. This collection, drawing on Korean and foreign scholarship in English from the 1940s onwards, addresses the issues of war, peace and security, dictatorship and democracy, plenty and famine that have marked the peninsula since the end of the Pacific War. Some will find old friends, others new insights. All will learn about the complex world of modern Korea.