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Jieun Baek, PhD, is a nonresident senior fellow with the Indo-Pacific Security Initiative at the Atlantic Council’s Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security. Her work examines authoritarian governance, regime stability, elite political behavior, and information access in closed societies, with a particular focus on North Korea and Burma.
She is the author of North Korea’s Hidden Revolution: How the Information Underground Is Transforming a Closed Society (Yale University Press, 2016) and Privileged but Powerless: How North Korean Elite Grievances Reveal the Regime’s Greatest Weakness (Yale University Press, 2026). Her forthcoming books include North Korea’s Provinces: Hidden Layers Beyond Pyongyang (Yale University Press) and a co-authored book on North Korea’s information and communications technology landscape (Columbia University Press). Her research draws on more than fifteen years of fieldwork examining how information flows, institutions, and elite incentives shape regime stability and the emergence of dissent in authoritarian systems.
Her research and commentary on North Korea and authoritarian governance have been widely featured in major international media outlets, including The New York Times, The Washington Post, BBC, and CNN, among others.
Baek is the founder of Lumen, a nonprofit organization working to expand access to outside information for North Koreans. She previously led Labs at Liberty in North Korea and earlier served as Google Ideas’ North Korea expert (now Jigsaw, an Alphabet company). She has also held research positions at the Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs and the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy.
Baek is a term member of the Council on Foreign Relations and serves as adjunct faculty at the University of Oxford’s Blavatnik School of Government. She holds a PhD in public policy from the University of Oxford’s Blavatnik School of Government, a master in public policy from Harvard Kennedy School, a bachelor’s degree from Harvard College, and was a postdoctoral fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School.