North Korea's Informal Markets and the Increasing Role of Women.

This paper focuses on the spread of markets in North Korea and the role of women in this process. It does this by presenting individual accounts of North Korean female defectors and contextualizing these with data drawn from in-depth interviews with representatives of transnational and South Korean NGOs, government officials and North Korean experts and analysis of a variety of English and Korean language materials. In so doing the paper seeks to provide a more nuanced understanding of North Korean society at a time of unprecedented economic and social change.