Can women's football help reconnect North and South Korea?

For the first time in more than seven years, North Korean athletes will compete in the South. Analysts are divided on whether it is a clever propaganda move by Pyongyang or a genuine step towards detente.

North Korea's Naegohyang Women's FC is due to play a South Korean women's team in Suwon on May 20, the first time Pyongyang has permitted its athletes to travel to the South in more than seven years.

For some, it is an indication that the North is deploying "sports diplomacy" to ease strained bilateral ties.

The rare visit comes as North Korea has framed the South as its "primary foe and invariable principal enemy" in a recently rewritten constitution that removes notions of reunifying the peninsula, which has been divided since the 1950-1953 Korean War.

Victor Cha, Korea chair at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) in Washington, argued in an article published on the CSIS website on May 4 that, "sports diplomacy has always been an important tool of inter-Korean diplomacy."