Kim Jong Un in the context of "General Secretary of the Workers' Party of Korea"

The Korean People's Army (KPA; Korean: 조선인민군; MR: Chosŏn inmin'gun) encompasses the combined military forces of North Korea and the armed wing of the Workers' Party of Korea (WPK). The KPA consists of five branches: the Ground Force, the Naval Force, the Air Force, the Strategic Force, and the Special Operations Forces. It is commanded by the WPK Central Military Commission, which is chaired by the WPK general secretary, and the president of the State Affairs; both posts are currently headed by Kim Jong Un.

The KPA considers its primary adversaries to be the Republic of Korea Armed Forces and United States Forces Korea, across the Korean Demilitarized Zone, as it has since the Armistice Agreement of July 1953. As of 2021 it is the second largest military organisation in the world, with 29.9% of the North Korean population actively serving, in reserve or in a paramilitary capacity.

North Korea ranks among some of the most extreme censorship in the world, with the government able to take strict control over communications. North Korea sits at one of the lowest places of Reporters Without Borders' 2025 Press Freedom Index, ranking 179 out of the 180 countries investigated.

In North Korea, all media outlets are owned and controlled by the government, and all news content are produced and censored by the Korean Central News Agency. The media dedicate a large portion of their resources toward political propaganda and promoting the personality cult of the Kim family (Kim Il Sung, Kim Jong Il, and Kim Jong Un). The government of Kim Jong Un still has authority over and control of the press and information and has been repeatedly ranked one of the top 5 countries in the world with the least amount of media freedom.

On November 24, 2014, the hacker group "Guardians of Peace" leaked confidential data from the film studio Sony Pictures Entertainment (SPE). The data included employee emails, personal and family information, executive salaries, copies of then-unreleased films, future film plans, screenplays, and other information. The perpetrators then employed a variant of the Shamoon wiper malware to erase Sony's computer infrastructure.

During the hack, the group demanded that Sony withdraw its then-upcoming film The Interview, a political satire action comedy film produced and directed by Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg. The film stars Rogen and James Franco as journalists who set up an interview with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un only to then be recruited by the CIA to assassinate him. The hacker group threatened terrorist attacks at cinemas screening the film, resulting in many major U.S. theater chains opting not to screen The Interview. In response to these threats, Sony chose to cancel the film's formal premiere and mainstream release, opting to skip directly to a downloadable digital release followed by a limited theatrical release the next day.

Howard Lee, known professionally as Howard X, is a Hong Kong-born Australian music producer, political satirist and media personality. He is best known as the world's first professional impersonator of Kim Jong Un, the Supreme Leader of North Korea.

Amongst Howard X's most well-known pranks are his appearance at the Rio Summer Olympics in 2016 and when he visited North Korean cheerleaders on Valentine's Day at the PyeongChang Winter Olympics in 2018 which attracted media attention. Throughout his career as a professional impersonator he has also worked with multiple organisations and celebrities to create parodies and to stir up conversations of politics and human rights. He believes that humour is a very powerful weapon and he often makes it clear that he imitates the dictator to satirise him, not to glorify him.

The 2018 North Korea–United States Singapore Summit, commonly known as the Singapore Summit, was a summit meeting between North Korean Chairman Kim Jong Un and U.S. President Donald Trump, held at the Capella Hotel, Sentosa, Singapore, on June 12, 2018. It was the first-ever meeting between leaders of North Korea and the United States. They signed a joint statement, agreeing to security guarantees for North Korea, new peaceful relations, the denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula, recovery of soldiers' remains, and follow-up negotiations between high-level officials. Both leaders also met separately with then Singaporean Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong.

Immediately following the summit, Trump announced that the U.S. military would discontinue "provocative" joint military exercises with South Korea, and stated that he wished to bring the U.S. soldiers back home at some point, but reinforced that it was not part of the Singapore equation. On August 1, 2018, the U.S. Senate passed the military budget bill for 2019, forbidding funding the reduction of active United States Forces Korea personnel below 22,000; significant removal of US forces was considered a non-negotiable item in denuclearization talks with the North.

Officially, the Workers' Party of Korea (WPK) – the ruling party of North Korea (Democratic People's Republic of Korea) – is a communist party guided by Kimilsungism–Kimjongilism, a synthesis of the ideas of Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il. The party is committed to Juche, an ideology attributed to Kim Il Sung which promotes national independence and development through the efforts of the masses. Although Juche was originally presented as the Korean interpretation of Marxism–Leninism, the party now presents it as a freestanding philosophy of Kim Il Sung. The WPK recognizes the ruling Kim family as the ultimate source of its political thought. The fourth party conference, held in 2012, amended the party rules to state that Kimilsungism–Kimjongilism was "the only guiding idea of the party". Under Kim Jong Il, who governed as chairman of the National Defence Commission, communism was steadily removed from party and state documents in favour of Songun, or military-first politics. The military, rather than the working class, was established as the base of political power. However, Kim Jong Il's successor Kim Jong Un reversed this position in 2021, replacing Songun with "people-first politics" as the party's political method and reasserting the party's commitment to communism.

The WPK maintains a leftist image, and normally sends a delegation to the International Meeting of Communist and Workers' Parties, where it has some support. The WPK's party rules say it upholds "the revolutionary principles of Marxism–Leninism". However, a number of scholars argue that the WPK's ideology is better characterized as nationalist or far-right.

North Korea and Russia share close military and security relations. Both nations share interest in an geopolitical alignment in challenging the West. The two states share a border along the lower Tumen River, which is 17 kilometers (11 mi) long.

The Soviet Union occupied the northern part of the Korean Peninsula after the surrender of Japan in 1945. The Soviet Union was responsible for the creation of North Korea, and installed Kim Il Sung as the new nation's leader. After the proclamation of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea in 1948, the Soviet Union became the first country to recognize it as the sole legitimate authority in Korea. The Soviet Union supported North Korea during the Korean War. North Korea received major Soviet military and political support during the Cold War. The personality cult around North Korea's Kim family was heavily influenced by Stalinism. China and the Soviet Union competed for influence in North Korea after the Sino-Soviet split in the 1960s, leading North Korea to seek autonomy from both nations. In 1961, the North Korea and the Soviet Union signed a Treaty of Friendship, Cooperation and Mutual Assistance.

The economy of North Korea is a centrally planned economy, following Juche, where the role of market allocation schemes is limited, although increased to an extent. As of 2024, North Korea continues its basic adherence to a centralized planned economy. With a total gross domestic product of $28.500 billion as of 2016, there has been some economic liberalization, particularly after Kim Jong Un assumed the leadership in 2012, but reports conflict over particular legislation and enactment. Since the 1990s, informal market activity has increased, which the government has tolerated. These markets are referred to as 'Jangmadang', and were formed as a result of the economic collapse during the 1990s, which made the government unable to distribute food to its people.

After the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, the government tightened border control and began major crackdowns on private economic activities with a shift to a state-run monopoly on food sales, followed by greater centralization of foreign trade, and overall control over the economy.

The Kim family, officially the Mount Paektu Bloodline (Korean: 백두혈통), named for Paektu Mountain, in the ideological discourse of the Workers' Party of Korea (WPK), and often referred to as the Kim dynasty after the end of the Cold War, is the three-generation lineage of North Korean leadership, descending from the country's founder and first leader, Kim Il Sung. Kim Il Sung came to rule the north in 1948, after the end of Japanese rule split the region in 1945. Following his death in 1994, Kim Il Sung's role as supreme leader was passed to his son, Kim Jong Il, and then in 2011 to his grandson, Kim Jong Un. The three have each served as leaders of the Workers' Party of Korea (titled as Chairman from 1948 to 1966, General Secretary from 1966 to 2012, First Secretary from 2012 to 2016, Chairman again from 2016 to 2021, and General Secretary again since 2021) and as North Korea's supreme leaders since the state's establishment in 1948.

The North Korean government denies that there is a personality cult surrounding the Kim family, describing the people's devotion to the family as a personal manifestation of support for their nation's leadership. The Kim family has been described as a de facto absolute monarchy or hereditary dictatorship.