Charles K. Armstrong

In February 2020, Armstrong's 2005 article: ‘“Fraternal Socialism”: The International Reconstruction of North Korea, 1953-62’, published in the journal Cold War History, was retracted for plagiarism from Szalontai's book.

In an extensive interview in December 2019, Szalontai revealed that Armstrong had not worked in any Russian archives at all, and said "some of the East German sources [in Tyranny of the Weak] are fake, some are not fake," and further discussed some of the efforts by Andrei Lankov and other scholars to methodically check Armstrong's suspicious sources.

On September 10, 2019, Columbia University released a letter to faculty explaining that it had concluded a multi-part formal investigation of Armstrong's research conduct and determined that he had committed plagiarism. It further announced that Armstrong will retire at the end of 2020.

According to documents obtained by journalists Khadija Hussein and Karen Xia, Columbia's investigation concluded in January 2019 and its scope extended back to Armstrong's tenure file submitted in 2003. That tenure file included draft chapters of what would ultimately become Armstrong's book Tyranny of the Weak. According to Balázs Szalontai, who obtained a copy of the investigation's draft report in 2018, the investigation found evidence in the tenure file that Armstrong had plagiarized Szalontai's dissertation. A partial copy of an earlier draft of Columbia's investigation report was made public by the Retraction Watch website on September 20, 2019.

In June 2017, Armstrong returned the John King Fairbank Prize to the American Historical Association in response to critical queries made by the association. In its press release, the association stated that they had "identified a set of citations that did not meet professional standards" and that "Dr. Armstrong has corrected the citation errors and, out of respect for the AHA, has returned the Fairbank Prize." Columbia University made no statement at this time, but did announce on June 1 that Armstrong had been awarded a 2017 President's Global Innovation Fund Grant for work with Joseph Terwilliger on exchanges with North Korean physicians.

The return of the prize prompted the head of Cornell University Press to state in early July 2017 that the press would imminently issue a revised edition of the book. The new edition of the book appeared in the summer of 2017, without any formal announcement from the press. The new text contained few changes to the prose, but did feature changes to dozens of footnotes now citing Szalontai's Kim Il Sung in the Khrushchev Era rather than archival documents. It also included two new sentences from Armstrong in the front matter of the text: "I would like to add a special note of thanks to Dr. Balázs Szalontai, whose pioneering research was insufficiently acknowledged in the prior printing of this book and who pointed out to me numerous attribution errors in chapters 2 and 3. I apologize for my previous oversights and gratefully acknowledge Dr. Szalontai's assistance in correcting these errors."

Beginning in September 2016, the book was severely criticized by a number of North Korea scholars (Andrei Lankov, Balázs Szalontai, Brian Myers, Fyodor Tertitskiy and others) for deceptive scholarship. Szalontai asserted that many parts of the text closely resemble text in Szalontai's Kim Il Sung in the Khrushchev Era and were supported by documents that either did not exist or were completely unrelated to the subject. Szalontai compiled a table of 76 problematic cases and later expanded the table to include 90 of such cases.

Soon after the allegations were made public, Armstrong responded to NK News that he "did not comment on any specific issues critics have raised with the book". On December 30, 2016, Armstrong directly addressed the issues raised by the critics, stating: "For those who find the book flawed, inaccurate or insufficiently researched, the answer is simple: write a better book." Armstrong stated that he had submitted 52 corrections to Tyranny of the Weak to the publisher Cornell University Press and these would be included in the next printing of the book. The press confirmed this with a single tweet on January 11, 2017, saying "Charles Armstrong responds to critics, issues corrections to Tyranny of the Weak" and linking to Armstrong's blog post. However, Armstrong later deleted the post and his entire blog.

In 2013, Charles Armstrong's book Tyranny of the Weak: North Korea and the World, 1950–1992 was published by Cornell University Press. The book sought to reassess North Korean foreign policy in the Cold War. The book received positive reviews, particularly because it appeared to draw from so many foreign archives and materials in multiple languages including Russian, Chinese, German, and Korean. The book was the 2014 winner of the John K. Fairbank Prize, given to the best book in East Asian History by the American Historical Association.

He was a Visiting Professor in 2008 at the Graduate School of International Studies at Seoul National University, has given keynote lectures at major Asian studies conferences, and is a regular fixture in US media coverage of the Korean peninsula, including documentary film and television.

He joined the Columbia faculty in 1996 and before his retirement was announced in 2019, taught courses on Korean history, U.S.-East Asian relations, the Vietnam War, and approaches to international and global history.

Armstrong earned his B.A. at Yale University in 1984, and continued his studies at Yonsei University in Seoul, earning a diploma in Korean language in 1986. He received an M.Sc. at the London School of Economics in 1988, and his Ph.D. at the University of Chicago in 1994.

Charles King Armstrong (born 11 February 1962) is an American historian and the Korea Foundation Professor of Korean Studies at Columbia University. His works deal with revolutions, cultures of socialism, architectural history, and diplomatic history in the contexts of East Asia and modern Korea, with a focus on North Korea. His 2013 book, Tyranny of the Weak, won the John K. Fairbank Prize, but he returned the prize in 2017 after issues with the citations, including plagiarism and source fabrication, were raised. A Columbia University investigation later determined that he had committed plagiarism. On leave for the 2020 academic year, he is expected to retire from his post at the end of 2020.

His book The North Korean Revolution, 1945–1950, published in 2003, was based largely on captured North Korean documents in the U.S. National Archives, and was a step forward for efforts to understand North Korea more at the local level and beyond more conventional Cold War or Korean War-centered approaches. He has published articles in peer-reviewed journals on such subjects as Kim Il Sung's Manchurian guerrilla heritage, the "cultural Cold War" in Korea, and assessments of North Korean studies as a whole.