Exporting labour, importing risk: The paradox of the North Korean Overseas Labour Programme

North Korea’s overseas labour programme exposes a central paradox of totalitarian control: a state that demands absolute obedience at home deliberately sends its citizens abroad, risking ideological exposure in exchange for hard currency. Drawing on ten semi-structured interviews with former North Korean labourers dispatched to Russia between 2007 and 2021, this study investigates how the programme functions simultaneously as coercion, survival strategy, and site of awakening. Chapter One traces Pyongyang’s calculated export of labour and loyalty, highlighting recruitment, surveillance, and the diplomatic use of workers as bargaining chips. Chapter Two examines lived experiences abroad, showing how harsh quotas, surveillance, and forced remittances coexist with small acts of resistance, epistemic rupture, and decisions to defect or quietly return transformed. Chapter Three assesses international responses, sanctions, compliance regimes, and advocacy, arguing that interventions risk reinforcing state control even as they seek to dismantle exploitation. The study concludes that North Korea’s overseas labour system, while designed as a tool of extraction and control, paradoxically seeds its own ideological erosion.