Benjamin R. Young is a Stanton Foundation nuclear security fellow at RAND. He is the author of the book, Guns, Guerillas, and the Great Leader: North Korea and the Third World (Stanford University Press, 2021). He currently has a second book manuscript under review with Cornell University Press, tentatively entitled, "The Afterlives of Communist Revolution: The Third World Left, Guerilla Warfare, and the Evolution of Insurgent Strategy from 1949 to the Present." He has taught a wide range of international and national security courses at Virginia Commonwealth University, Dakota State University, and the U.S Naval War College.
Young's research and teaching interests broadly revolve around authoritarianism, ideology, asymmetric warfare, and political radicalism. He has published more than a dozen peer-reviewed scholarly articles on Cold War international history, East Asian politics, and North Korean studies in peer-reviewed journals, such as the International History Review, the International Journal of Korean Unification Studies, and Souls: A Critical Journal of Black Politics, Culture, and Society. He was a 2018-2019 CSIS/USC NextGen US-Korea Scholar and has also written journalistic pieces for The Washington Post, The Diplomat, Foreign Policy, Nikkei Asia, The National Interest, The Hill, and NKNews.org. Young has lived in South Korea during a Fulbright fellowship and has traveled extensively in North Korea, Cuba, China, and Russia. He has a Ph.D. in East Asian history and Cold War studies from George Washington University, and an MA and BS in world history from SUNY Brockport.
PhD, George Washington University; M.A, SUNY Brockport; B.S, SUNY Brockport
