Defensible Selfhood and DIY-Surveillance: A Genealogy of Security Governance in South Korea

• In Event: Violence and Security Assemblages in Urban Environments

Abstract

This paper charts the history of South Korea’s security governance in the 20th century and its related histories of risk, safety, and ‘militarized urbanization’. A special emphasis is placed on the historical formulation of ‘defensible selfhood’ that drew on various techniques and practices of risk management such as urban planning, civil defense training, neighborhood patrol programs, workplace management, and high school curriculum. This paper inquires how these histories offer a way of understanding a deep cultural drive behind the proliferation of security and self-protection technologies in the 21st century South Korea.
As a country that has arguably been most affected by the Cold War, South Korea has experienced enduring ramifications of militarism articulated in the national security programs, policing technologies, and the culture of defensive self which organized individuals as the primary locus of self-protection. Although this overtly militant language of national security has become less conspicuous, the current surge of surveillance technologies and DIY-surveillance practices perpetuates the moral responsibilities of the self to serve as the instrument of security procurement and risk reduction. Based on this reflection, this paper investigates how the defensible selfhood is mundanely mediated in everyday life in the contemporary "smart cities" in South Korea.
A body of recent scholarship has discussed the implications of contemporary surveillance ranging from smart cities, CCTV, IoT, to the wearables technologies, mainly concerned with the economic imperatives of tech corporations and the government. This paper offers a different approach, thinking through how a history of militarism, cultural demand for safety, and historical formulation of defensible selfhood have amplified and constituted the current preoccupation with security and risk in the non-Western context of South Korea.

Author

• Chamee Yang, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign