Like his father and his grandfather, Kim relies on and has cultivated tight, overlapping security organizations whose leaders are rewarded for their suppression of human rights and their loyalty. “The more zeal they demonstrate in support of the regime’s policies, including human rights denial,” North Korea researcher Robert Collins writes, “the greater the privileges they receive.” The hundreds of thousands of bureaucrats employed in North Korea’s half-dozen party and security organizations are in charge of surveillance and monitoring of every individual, including high-ranking officials, and ensuring the personal security of Kim Jong Un and senior leadership, in addition to running the political prisons and other apparatuses of repression. These repressive institutions—from the Organization and Guidance Department, which controls the appointment of senior functionaries and the surveillance of them, to the ministries in charge of the secret police, counterintelligence, local policing for criminality, and the protection of senior officials in Pyongyang—are organized to not only protect Kim from internal threats but also prevent these same organizations from turning against the leadership. The goal of coup-proofing, Sheena Chestnut Greitens argues, requires that the autocrat “increase the degree of fragmentation within the internal security apparatus” with “overlapping or competing responsibilities and limited lines of inter-organizational communication and coordination.” Kim and his father have done this well by elevating their family and chosen descendants of the guerrilla generation to emphasize that the livelihood of their senior leadership depends on the regime’s survival and by demonstrating that Kim has the sole authority to control personnel appointments.
Surveillance is a state-wide affair that involves every individual down to the neighborhood level. Vigilantes roam the streets looking for violations of social mores—a woman’s hair is too long or a man forgot to put his Kim Il Sung button on his lapel as he rushed to get to work. White-gloved inspectors barge into homes unannounced to make sure that the framed photos of Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il that are displayed in every household are spotless. And the heads of the inminban, a neighborhood watch system in which every citizen is enrolled, make sure that each small fact about every household under their jurisdiction is recorded, including what each family has in its possession, who stays overnight, and other intimate details of daily life. Everyone is an informer or a potential informer, and everyone is vulnerable to punishment for real and perceived crimes. Under this system, Hyeonseo Lee said, “the state made accusers and informers of us all.”
The infrastructure of repression that Kim Jong Un inherited and strengthened through the unprecedented execution of his uncle and ongoing purges has inevitably resulted in groupthink among his closest advisers, who are unlikely to veer too far from what they perceive to be his preferences. In fact, their very survival and their families’ futures depend on demonstrations of loyalty to Kim and only Kim. His unpredictability and boldness—and his advisers’ fear about what he might do next and who might be in his crosshairs—have minimized any potential negative consequences for his actions, while at the same time reinforcing his confidence about the correctness of his decisions. Kim’s determination to establish his supremacy in the domestic sphere through a combination of violence and promises of prosperity reflects his acknowledgment of the importance of elite loyalty and the necessity of repression.
Repression and the nuclear weapons program thus form the two pillars of his regime’s survival; the denial of human rights and the country’s status as a nuclear weapons power are mutually reinforcing. The regime’s narrative of a “hostile” United States bent on North Korea’s destruction justifies the aggressive weapons program, the diversion of scarce resources to support these strategic armaments, and even the regime’s crimes against humanity. The crushing of any potential dissent coupled with the leadership purges create an echo chamber in which Kim is surrounding himself with yes-men, even as he wants to be seen as a modern leader. As much as Kim might want to break from the old ways of thinking and create a twenty-first-century, amenities-filled country, he relies on the inherited infrastructure of terror for regime survival.
The regime’s decades-long practice of extreme repression and Kim’s efforts to bolster it through the bold purge of his uncle and other senior leaders has no doubt fueled his belief that he can manage the consequences of his actions, interpreting the absence of blowback—whether domestically or internationally—as validation. It has surely also increased his confidence that he can manipulate individuals and situations to yield