n this podcast, North Korean refugees who visited the University of Bradford share their harrowing experiences of life in North Korea, escape, and the challenges of building new lives in freedom. They are supported by Freedom Speakers International (FSI), a Seoul-based non-profit that helps North Korean refugees rebuild their lives through personalised English education, mentoring and public-speaking opportunities. Crucially, FSI enables refugees to tell their own stories in their own voices.

Their testimony reveals the human cost of repression in North Korea while highlighting the importance of the humanitarian work undertaken by FSI: helping refugees develop the skills and confidence to pursue their ambitions, rebuild their independence and ensure that their experiences are heard internationally.

Freedom Speakers International (FSI) is a Seoul-based non-profit organisation dedicated to supporting North Korean refugees as they rebuild their lives after escape from North Korea. Founded in 2013 by Casey Lartigue Jr. and Eunkoo Lee, it began as Teach North Korean Refugees and has developed into an organisation focused on empowering refugees through education, mentoring and public speaking opportunities.

FSI provides North Korean refugees with tuition-free, individualised English and public-speaking mentorship. This is particularly important because many refugees arrive in South Korea having experienced severe disruption to their education and face significant disadvantages in employment and higher education, where English proficiency can be important. FSI works with refugees according to their own objectives, helping them improve their language skills, confidence and ability to participate fully in South Korean and international society.

An especially important part of FSI's work is enabling North Korean refugees who wish to do so to tell their own stories. Through its public-speaking programme, its “I Am From North Korea” English Speech Contest and its Keynote Speaker Network, FSI gives refugees opportunities to communicate their experiences directly to international audiences rather than having others speak on their behalf. Its speaker network now includes more than 30 speakers.

The humanitarian importance of this work extends well beyond language teaching. North Korean refugees have often endured repression, traumatic journeys of escape, separation from their families and the considerable difficulties of adapting to an unfamiliar society. Effective resettlement therefore requires more than providing physical safety. It also means helping people recover independence, confidence and the ability to determine their own futures. FSI's personalised model is particularly valuable because it treats refugees not simply as recipients of assistance but as individuals with their own ambitions, experiences and voices. Its work helps turn escape from persecution into the possibility of a genuinely independent life.

At the same time, by enabling refugees to speak about North Korea from personal experience, FSI performs a wider human-rights function. First-hand testimony preserves awareness of conditions inside North Korea and ensures that the experiences of those who have escaped remain part of international discussion. Supporting North Korean refugees in finding their own voices is therefore both an important humanitarian activity and a contribution to the broader defence of human dignity and freedom.

Christoph Bluth is Professor of International Relations and Security at the University of Bradford.

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Implementing the Right to Decide Under the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities: Supporting the Legal Capacity of All Persons with Disabilities (Hart, 2025) addresses one of the most controversial questions in contemporary human rights law: how can persons with severe cognitive disabilities make their own decisions?

Historically, vulnerable persons have been considered incapable, and guardians were appointed to represent their interests, which has led to serious abuses. The Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD), adopted in 2006, requires that they receive support to make their own decisions. However, governments claim it is impossible to fully implement this international requirement.

In this book, Dr Janos Fiala-Butora tackles the issue of decision-making from both a legal and theoretical perspective. He explores how supported decision-making could incorporate safeguards to protect the vital interests of vulnerable persons in order to present a viable legal alternative to guardianship. The book accepts that some persons' abilities are very limited, but contends that guardianship is not the appropriate response, even in such cases. Instead, the book presents a unique Modified Support Framework, which can incorporate all persons with disabilities, fulfilling the goals of the CRPD.

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During the eventful summer of 2019 in Hong Kong, the Be Water Revolution formed to resist the proposed extradition of fugitives to mainland China’s courts. With its name derived from martial arts master Bruce Lee’s adage “formless and shapeless like water,” the incident turned out to be the city’s largest episode of contentious politics and was unique for using impromptu communication among participants and the absence of central leadership.

In Be Water: Collective Improvisation in Hong Kong's Anti-Extradition Protests (Temple University Press, 2025), Dr. Ming-sho Ho examines the dynamics of the city-wide uprising from the perspective of agency power. He seeks to understand how numerous and anonymous Hongkongers contributed to this epoch-making campaign as well as how they responded to the full-scale state repression that enveloped them. Dr. Ho praises and questions the durability of the inventive Be Water Revolution and how the activists encouraged protests spontaneously, through interpersonal networks and by voluntarily collaborating with strangers at great personal risk.

Dr. Ho posits a new concept of “collective improvisation” to make sense of such a decentralized yet creative way of protesting. Be Water seeks to understand the rise and long afterlife of this movement and illustrate its efficacy. As Dr. Ho shows, these dynamics of collective improvisation have implications for contemporary protest movements around the world.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts.

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