Description
K-Pop has developed an audience in North Korea despite rigorous censorship laws, which have increased since the 2020 border lockdowns. South Korean songs have been entering the ‘hermit kingdom’ through diverse, covert mechanisms, with observers arguing it has the potential to cause internal unrest and refugees labelling it a ‘peaceful version of the nuclear bomb’. To understand this phenomenon further, this paper goes beyond focusing on the projection of music, to follow constructions of popular music within North Korea and examine how popular music can become a subversive force when it is engaged with in the political-ideological framework of another state. This paper situates itself within Popular Culture and World Politics and addresses the ‘sonic gap’ in IR by developing an approach which considers music’s subversive impact through the context of its consumption. It takes an infrapolitical approach and utilises ‘repertoires of resistance’ to treat musical interactions as acts of resistance and observe how individuals assert their agency by drawing upon learned acts of resistance within the power configurations of their context.
