North Korea all at sea: Aspiration, subterfuge, and engagement in a Global Commons, 2020, dark fleets and empty streets

In 2020 Chinese “dark fleets” replaced North Korean “ghost ships” in international discourse as symbolic of a certain form of global maritime threat and disturbance. This chapter frames internationalization and globalization on the high seas in an unconventional way, looking back to the globalization of the oceanic commons at the behest of post-1945 geopolitics and new forms and methodologies of fisheries science. With this globalization in mind, the essay explores the institutional and political fishing histories of North Korea, tracing developments in interaction with the Soviet Union in the 1970s. Drawing on newly encountered archival material from the Russian State Archive of the Economy and the Soviet Union’s Ministry of Fisheries Archive the chapter considers the reality of such interactions and what they might say about contemporary unwanted global challenges at sea.