The policy of the United States toward North Korea can be summed up succinctly: Sanctions, sanctions and more sanctions. The U.S. believes its policy of “maximum pressure” will cause North Korea to denuclearize, but it appears to be having the opposite effect, hardening North Korea’s resistance and strengthening its resolve to keep pursuing its nuclear ambitions.
Not only have the “maximum pressure” sanctions applied since 2016 failed to change policies in Pyongyang, they have led to grave costs.
New research commissioned by Korea Peace Now!, a women-led global campaign to end the Korean War, concludes that recent United Nations’ Security Council sanctions are severely affecting the civilian population, impeding the delivery of much-needed humanitarian aid, causing a sharp decline in foreign trade and pushing the economy into a recession.
These impacts are especially hard on women, who comprise 89% of those working in North Korea’s burgeoning retail trade. As observed in other sanctioned countries, when local market activity declines, women lose their income as merchants, making it more difficult for them to feed their families and increasing their vulnerability to violence and exploitation.
In fact, some sanctions explicitly target industries dominated by female workers. In 2017, for example, the U.N. Security Council banned textile exports from North Korea; women represent 82% of workers in that country’s textile and apparel industries.
Sanctions also hamper the work of international humanitarian organizations in North Korea, tying up their funding and preventing or delaying shipments of badly needed humanitarian goods. The sanctions have blocked the transfer of medical appliances and caused shortages of medicines.
Sanctions degrade women’s economic status and threaten their social rights, particularly in developing countries.
Yet, women have little influence over the decisions that are allegedly needed to lift the sanctions — whether in the male-dominated North Korean state, the U.N. Security Council or the Trump administration.
All this is happening amid mounting evidence that women’s participation in peacebuilding makes peace easier to achieve and more likely to last. In fact, scholars have shown that gender equality is a greater predictor of peace than a country’s level of democracy or economic wealth.
It’s time to chart a different path to peace — one that relaxes rather than tightens
Marie O’Reilly writes about gender, peace and security issues and is a co-author of “The Human Costs and Gendered Impact of Sanctions on North Korea.”
