North Korean state media projects an image of strength: Kim Jong Un presiding over nuclear missile parades, hosting Russian military officials, addressing vast crowds at the Ninth Party Congress in February 2026. Externally, the regime presents itself as unassailable. Internally, it is prosecuting a war against something it cannot missiles or treaties defeat: the possibility that North Korean citizens might come to know the outside world.
A detailed report by the Seoul-based Transitional Justice Working Group (TJWG), released May 2026, documents how execution patterns under Kim Jong Un have fundamentally shifted. Analyzing 144 cases involving at least 358 individuals executed or sentenced to death, the data reveals a regime that increasingly fears not foreign armies, but foreign culture.
The COVID-19 border closure of January 2020 was the inflection point. Pyongyang framed it as an epidemic control measure. The practical effect, according to the TJWG analysis, was the reorganization and intensification of population control along more coercive lines. Before the closure, the typical grounds for execution were violent crimes — murder, robbery. After the closure, the leading grounds became watching South Korean dramas, listening to foreign music, practicing religion, or engaging in any form of political expression that suggested comparison with the outside world.
The numbers are stark. Over equal time windows of 1,783 days before and after the border closure, cases of execution or death sentence rose 116.7 percent — from 30 to 65. The number of individuals executed or sentenced to death climbed 247.7 percent — from 44 to 153. What the TJWG calls the “post-COVID governance structure” was not a temporary intensification. It became the new normal.
The mechanism is not complicated to understand. The regime’s legitimacy rests on a single proposition: that life inside North Korea, under the Kim family’s leadership, is superior to anything the outside world offers. That proposition becomes harder to sustain the more North Koreans learn about life in South Korea, the United States, or anywhere beyond the border. The border closure — physical, then ideological — was designed to prevent that knowledge from arriving. The executions are the punishment for those who attempt to acquire or share it.
There is a direct regional security dimension to this. South Korea and Japan have been deepening their security cooperation precisely because of the threat North Korea poses, including its nuclear program and its deepening military partnership with Russia. The Lee-Takaichi summit in Andong on May 19, 2026 produced energy cooperation agreements partly designed to reduce vulnerability to external economic pressure — the same external pressure Pyongyang uses as justification for its own information wall. The more the Kim regime fears internal knowledge, the more aggressively it will act externally to prevent the collapse of its legitimacy. That makes North Korea’s information control architecture not merely a domestic human rights concern, but a regional instability factor.
The 2026 Ninth Party Congress projected strength through nuclear weapons and anti-American solidarity. The TJWG data reveals the opposite: a regime that has organized itself around the prevention of a specific kind of knowledge. Kim Jong Un does not fear foreign invasion. He fears his own citizens watching a South Korean drama and imagining a different life. That fear is what drives the escalation of coercion, and that fear is what regional actors — South Korea, Japan, the United States, and ASEAN — must account for when assessing North Korea’s trajectory.
The wall built during COVID did not come down when the pandemic ended. It became structural. Until that reality changes, the external behavior of the Kim regime — its missile launches, its troop deployments to Russia, its diplomatic provocations — will continue to be shaped by an internal calculation that has nothing to do with international relations and everything to do with the regime’s survival against the only enemy it truly fears: information.
Written by Fatima Al-Rashid, Senior Middle East Analyst
Fatima Al-Rashid
Fatima Al-Rashid is a senior Middle East analyst covering social trends, identity, and the forces shaping public life.