Jerome Sauvage, "Witness to North Korea: Three Years on the Ground in the DPRK" (Bloomsbury, 2026)

Jerome Sauvage served as the United Nations Resident Coordinator and United Nations Development Program (UNDP) Resident Representative in North Korea from 2009 to 2013. In this capacity, he was the most senior UN official in North Korea during one of the most eventful political periods on the Korean peninsula in recent memory. Amidst the sinking of the ROKS Cheonan, shelling of Yeonpyeong Island, and death of Kim Jong-il, Sauvage had to resurrect and strengthen UNDP’s—and the UN overall’s—presence in North Korea by delicately navigating the politics of not only Pyongyang, but also the overall international development ecosystem. In this NBN episode, we talk with Sauvage about those experiences, which he recounts in his memoir Witness to North Korea: Three Years on the Ground in the DPRK (Bloomsbury, 2026).