Reinventing East Asia

This paper investigates the shift from disciplinary societies (the visible and physical violence of power) to control societies (the modulating and normalizing techniques of power) in South Korea. At the institutional level, during the period of repressive and disciplinary society in Korea (1948–1992), the regulatory control systems of the state were mainly performed by two formidable apparatuses: the national ID system and the National Security Law. On the other hand, the deployment of institutional power since 1993 has been based on the logic of free-floating control, dispersion, normalization, and modulation. The present study examines how the techniques of power were gradually transformed from a centralized and hierarchical model into a distributive and dispersed network model, based on flow, speed, and mobility.