The Red, Big Family: Utopian Surveillance in North Korean Cities

Surveillance and social control permeate life in North Korea’s cities perhaps more than anywhere else in the world. For the North Korean state, the surveillance mission has always held a utopian character. It has sought to use surveillance and social control not only to suppress certain thoughts, expressions, and behaviors but also to foster people into better communist humans. Using North Korean publications, this chapter focuses on two surveillance institutions, the inminban and the Songbŭn systems. It examines how the North Korean state has sought to use surveillance and social control to bring society closer to socialist utopia, often through citizens rather than the state fostering and holding one another accountable.