With international pressure to comply with sanctions now easing as attention turns to the global pandemic, some North Korean enterprises are able to continue unabated in Southeast Asia, with the country’s sanction evasion tactics only becoming more sophisticated as time goes on. Shawn Ho, Associate Research Fellow at RSIS, said North Korea and Southeast Asia have a relatively warm history stretching back to the 1960s. “If you dig back through the [20th century] historic relations of the Southeast Asia countries, a lot of them treated the two Koreas quite equally,” he said.