| Sumario: | The penal power of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK) has revived the traditional politics of extreme punishment amidst the erosion of the discipline that was essential for the blueprint for socialist ideals. During the period of state formation, the DPRK regime tried to rehabilitate lawbreakers, including political prisoners, to an active role in society through modern penal and prison systems and socialist correction. However, the regime still repressed political criminals and prisoners who rejected such a disciplinary power, and this developed after the early 1990s into neo-traditional penal practices with extreme forms of corporal punishments, such as public executions. The penal power of the DPRK lost the legitimacy of its rule by producing dissidents and a "hostile" class that has now expanded into the entire society. In the contemporary DPRK, homo sacer is an entity of "bare life," excluded from national laws and order, and thus paradoxically reinforcing the country's sovereignty. North Korean citizens have been disciplined in a repressive system that exerts control over the collective "bare life" of all individuals. By interweaving the perspectives of Foucault's disciplinary power and Agamben's sovereign power, this article examines how the DPRK's disciplinary penal power has been transformed into the politics of gulag.
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