[1] The only fully dedicated institution to the study area is the University of North Korean Studies, Seoul,[2] but many universities run undergraduate courses and postgraduate research programs.
[3] The field has been unable to achieve consensus on even some fundamental questions, such as whether North Korea should be characterized as a communist or fascist state and what is the level of involvement of the government in human right abuses.
[1] North Korean studies suffers from a lack of primary sources from the country, although the situation varies by decade.
Some were smuggled out of the country, but the bulk of scholarship is done on reports of Eastern Bloc embassies in North Korea.
As of 2018[update], Soviet documents from the 1960s are in the process of being declassified, but sources from Eastern European countries are already available.