Newswise — Dec. 20, 2011 — Sheena Chestnut Greitens, a 2011-12 fellow at the Miller Center at the University of Virginia, is available for interviews about the transition of leadership in North Korea from Kim Jong Il to his son, Kim Jong Un.
Greitens began researching North Korea in 2004. She has published or presented on North Korea's illicit economic activities, its nuclear proliferation and the stability of the regime.
Topics she can explore are the future stability of the regime, the role of the military and security forces in the regime, and the policy of the U.S. and its allies toward North Korea given the transition.
During her fellowship, Greitens is studying a particularly timely question: Why are some authoritarian regimes at times more or less violent than others? By exploring a variety of regimes, she has the potential in her work to shed light not just on the nature of these states, but on the kinds of foreign policies best suited to dealing with authoritarian governments. Her dissertation is titled "Intelligent Autocrats: Secret Police & State Violence Under Authoritarianism."
Greitens is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Government at Harvard University. She holds a master of philosophy degree in international relations from Oxford University, where she studied as a Marshall Scholar, and a B.A. with distinction in political science and honors in international security studies from Stanford University. She has published in International Security.
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