The number of North Korean secondary migrants from South Korea has grown markedly in the last ten years. Drawing on semi-structured interviews, focus group discussions, and participatory observation conducted between 2012-2017, this article explores the motivations for North Korean secondary migration and the role of transnational networks in the migration and settlement trajectory. Our findings suggest that many North Koreans in South Korea feel discriminated against due to their origins, and unable to engage in upward social mobility. We argue that North Korean secondary migration to the United Kingdom (UK) is not a linear process of push and pull factors but a highly reactive and unpredictable one that depends on information fed by brokers. The UK hosts one of the largest communities of North Koreans outside Northeast Asia. Most North Koreans in the UK are secondary asylum seekers from South Korea. Their life in the UK, however, comes with its own set of challenges, some of which mirror co-ethnic or ideological frictions among North Koreans themselves, with the Korean-Chinese, or with South Koreans. This paper contributes to debates on multiple migration, providing a migrant-centric perspective to answer why people who are offered material benefits in the country they arrive in choose to on-migrate to a place where life can be often more challenging.

In this paper, I demonstrate the identity transformation of North Korean women in interaction with state and non‐state actors and domestic and regional structures, which I formulate for the purposes of this paper. From a state‐centric social constructivist perspective in politics and international relations, I examine how the identities and interests of North Korean women are constituted and reconstituted in the Democratic People's Republic of Korea, the People's Republic of China and five South‐East Asian countries along their migration routes before they reach the Republic of Korea – the so‐called “Seoul Train in the Underground Railway”. Back in their country of origin, North Korean women are socially constructed as Confucian communist mothers. In China, the most frequently depicted images of North Korean women are trafficked wives. By paying for smugglers to cross borders to neighbouring South‐East Asian countries, North Korean women finally become the agents of their own destiny, refugees in waiting to be transferred to South Korea.

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Over the past two decades, there have been notable changes in North Korean migration: from forced migration to trafficking in women, from heroic underground railways to people smuggling by Christian missionaries. The migration has taken mixed forms of asylum seeking, human trafficking, undocumented labour migration and people smuggling. The paper follows the footsteps of North Korean migrants from China through Southeast Asia to South Korea, and from there to the United Kingdom, to see the dynamic correlation between human (in)security and irregular migration. It analyses how individual migrant's agency interacts with other key actors in the migration system and eventually brings about emerging patterns of four distinctive forms of irregular migration in a macro level. It uses human security as its conceptual framework that is a people‐centred, rather than state‐ or national security‐centric approach to irregular migration.

Abstract-According to the extension and growth of the Northeast Asian economic bloc, the transfer of logistics between Northeast Asian countries and European countries has enlarged and the major countries of Northeast Asia have played a central role in the Northeast Asia economic bloc as logistics hubs. Currently, due to an increase in international freight volume, international shipping and air freight continues to increase. Due to lack of infrastructure and increase of transportation costs however, Northeast Asia's logistics competitiveness has weakened. It is therefore necessary to develop more efficient and reliable international transportation network. By analyzing the current status of major transportation paths between Northeast Asia and Europe currently in operation and their technical characteristics, this paper suggests an improvement plan for more efficient transportation and a transportation competitiveness enhancement plan, to solve realistic problems such as economic transportation technology and uncertainty of demand, and enhance the possibility of transportation costs and time savings. However, a result of comparative analysis of marine transportation and transcontinental railway shows that transcontinental railway competitiveness has decreased sharply. To enhance this, it necessary to invest and build mutual cooperation between countries, form a global network and create a mutual compensation system for an international transportation complex.