With the all-important Ninth Party Congress on the horizon, a reckoning may be coming for some of the top officials in Kim Jong Un’s regime.

North Korean politics has long been synonymous with purges, and precedent suggests that a reshuffle of personnel is all but certain at the upcoming congress.

But not all purges are created equal. NK Pro analysis shows that DPRK leaders have exerted authoritarian control in multiple ways over the years, from demotions and exile to total erasure, and the exact methods that Kim Jong Un leans on this time could