North Korea may be best known for its nuclear brinkmanship and isolation, but as a new volume on its activities in southern Africa shows,  Pyongyang has long pursued an ambitious — and often overlooked — global agenda.

In “Comrades Beyond the Cold War,” Tycho van der Hoog details the various ways in which the DPRK has engaged with anti-colonial guerilla fighters, newly established postcolonial governments and various other revolutionary upstarts over the decades.

The work joins an emerging body of academic literature that interrogates the history of North Korea’s foreign relations beyond the typical U.S-Soviet Cold War frameworks,