How the Internet Can Reinforce Authoritarian Regimes: The Case of North Korea

Abstract

How the Internet Can Reinforce Authoritarian RegimesThe Case of North Korea Johannes Gerschewski (bio) and Alexander Dukalskis (bio) There is almost no Internet access in North Korea. International bodies like the World Bank or United Nations that track Internet penetration either do not report any data for North Korea or list its penetration rate as zero. Given this isolation, could the advance of Internet communication technologies (ICTs) threaten the country's dictatorship? This raises a larger question: How do autocracies deal with the challenge of Internet penetration, and how do they manage to reverse or forestall the Internet's democratizing potential? Focusing on North Korea (or the DPRK, standing for the Democratic People's Republic of Korea), this article first discusses scholarship about how authoritarian regimes maintain their power in general. Broadly, contemporary research has furnished three categories of arguments to explain the foundations of authoritarian rule: co-optation, repression, and legitimation.1 This article then argues that North Korea has used a mixture of these three pillars to harness ICTs for authoritarian resilience. How Do Autocracies Remain Resilient? Several quantitative cross-national studies have attempted to establish the relationship between Internet penetration and democratization.2 While these studies serve a useful purpose, we set forth that it is important to first understand how contemporary authoritarian regimes remain resilient in general without specific reference to ICTs. This examination will provide a foundation for [End Page 12] thinking about how mechanisms of the offline world can be translated to the online world. A useful starting point to understand the sources of autocratic resilience is to think of three pillars that sustain authoritarian rule: co-optation, repression, and legitimation. Co-optation is the ability to bind strategically relevant elites or groups of elites to the regime, often through material inducements, rewards, and policy concessions. Repression, in turn, aims to punish or deter activities that the state finds threatening. Legitimation is the process of encouraging people to support the regime by highlighting regime successes or drawing on an ideology that justifies its rule. Taken together, these three pillars provide a reasonably comprehensive way to understand the sources of authoritarian resilience, thereby allowing for the construction of theoretical expectations about how authoritarian regimes may confront the Internet. Co-optation Contemporary research on authoritarianism tends to understand co-optation as occurring through institutions. Institutions help to tie actors to the regime by stabilizing expectations and providing information to elites. Generally, autocratic institutionalization is seen as an elite phenomenon and is concerned with understanding how intraregime cohesion is achieved and defections are prevented.3 Autocracies can harness the institutional mechanisms of legislatures, political parties, elections, deliberative or consultative fora, and other ostensibly democratic devices to bolster their rule.4 What do insights about offline co-optation tell us when applied to ICTs? If a regime successfully adapts to the Internet, then the lucrative business of Internet hosting, infrastructure, and platforms becomes a source of spoils that can be distributed for the purposes of co-optation. The authoritarian regime can best use ICTs for co-optation if it is an attractive but scarce resource and if the regime can act as a gatekeeper that grants or withholds both access and business opportunities. An effectively adapting regime can also be expected to use ICTs to replace or supplement some of the functions associated with elections and/or deliberative institutions, namely, gathering information about the performance of subordinate regime agents so as to better coordinate members and supporters of the government. Repression If co-optation is designed to ensure elite cohesion and to avoid potential threats that stem from the elite, state repression is meant to squelch real or potential threats that emerge from potential opponents. A useful analytical distinction can be drawn between "high intensity" and "low intensity" forms of repression, or between "hard" and "soft" forms of repression. Hard repression violates the physical integrity of the person and includes killings, torture, and disappearances. Soft repression involves less visible forms of coercion such as surveillance, censorship, harassment of journalists and activists, and the use of administrative procedures to prevent opposition gatherings. A focus on repression generates a number of expectations for how autocracies adapt to the Internet...