The dynamics of military regimes, the security behavior of non-democratic regimes, and the domestic survival strategies of autocratic leaders have all received abundant scholarly attention in recent decades. This paper combines insights from these often disparate streams of literature by examining the emergence and impacts of the military of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK or North Korea) as an economic and political actor. It argues that when the state was weak or faced crises it turned to the military to bolster its resilience. These decisions had path-dependent effects which made it difficult to decrease the power of the military in domestic politics. Emboldened by their privileged position in legitimating the regime and their relatively autonomous income generation opportunities, military actors developed their own set of priorities that did not always cohere with those of other segments of the DPRK leadership. As the military became more powerful and legitimated in domestic politics its priorities ought to have been reflected in North Korea's foreign policy behavior. By process tracing the role of the DPRK military in North Korea's foreign policy using both Korean and English language sources, this paper tests these theoretical expectations and illuminates more general relationships between domestic autocratic survival, military legitimation, and foreign policy behavior.
