Fractured Panopticon: Surveillance, Marketization, and Fragmented Adaptation Among Pyongyang’s Youth

This article examines how young people in Pyongyang experienced and navigated surveillance in the context of marketization and expanding access to external information. Drawing on in-depth interviews with eight former Pyongyang residents, with five participants born in the 1990s forming the primary empirical focus, the study adopts an interpretive qualitative approach attentive to participants’ lived experiences. The findings show that, while foreign cultural content and trusted relationships have enabled limited forms of autonomy within physically and socially bounded spaces, marketization has not weakened state surveillance. Rather, political discipline and self-censorship have persisted and technological monitoring has extended surveillance into new domains. Money, social status, and informal networks shape individuals’ exposure to surveillance and their capacity to evade enforcement or manage the consequences of detection. To conceptualize these changes, the article develops the notion of the ‘fractured panopticon’: a surveillance order in which persistent disciplinary power coexists with technologically expanded yet socially differentiated forms of monitoring, enforcement, and evasion. Within this environment, young people engage in ‘fragmented adaptation’, combining self-censorship and outward conformity with selective cultural consumption, rule-breaking, and limited private autonomy. Marketization has thus reconfigured rather than displaced surveillance in Pyongyang.