Everyday Authoritarianism and Resistance in North Korea

• Date: Thursday, October 11, 2018. 16:00-17:30

• Venue: 201, Political Science & Economics Bldg., Korea University

• Lecturer: Alexander Dukalskis (University College Dublin)

At the Political Science Workshop in October, Professor Alexander Dukalskis of University College Dublin was invited to give a lecture on the relationship between changes in everyday life in North Korea and authoritarian resilience. On the one hand North Korea is perhaps the world’s most tightly controlling dictatorship, but on the other hand, its society has undergone important changes in the last 25 years.  Changes such as marketization, flows of information, and increasing corruption help illuminate how shifts in everyday life influence the power, if at all, of a long-lasting autocratic government. This presentation will systematically examine these specific domains of everyday life and their relationship to authoritarian resilience in North Korea. Drawing primarily on interviews with North Koreans in South Korea, the main finding is that processes associated with marketization, flows of information, and private gain of state officials have not provided the foundation for collective challenges to the North Korean system. However, it is clear that state institutions have been weakened or significantly changed form to adapt to new realities. Theoretically, this argument suggests that authoritarianism at the “everyday” level plays an important role in the dynamics of autocratic resilience.