North Korea

State

North Korea, officially the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK), is a country in East Asia constituting the northern half of the Korean Peninsula; its capital and largest city is Pyongyang. After Korea was divided in 1945 into a Soviet-occupied north and a U.S.-occupied south, the Soviet-aligned DPRK was formed in 1948. Its 1950 invasion of South Korea started the Korean War, which ended in 1953 with an armistice and a demilitarized zone rather than a peace treaty. It is a totalitarian hereditary dictatorship with a cult of personality around the Kim family, and in 2024 North Korea formally abandoned efforts to reunify Korea and designated South Korea as a separate, hostile state.