ABSTRACT
North Korea opened the political stage of 2016 with a sense of developmental drama. This was to be the year of the Seventh Congress of the KWP, the fi rst since 1980. The 1980 Sixth Party Congress had been, essentially, the denouement for classical Soviet style central planning as far as Pyongyang was concerned. Because there is a formal symmetry, then, North Korea’s ambitions for the middle of the second decade of the second millennium and 2016’s Party Congress could not surely as be as downbeat as those of the early 1980s. Kim Jong-un’s demands for a revolutionary urgency to connect to the importance of the congress and its attendant events were reiterated throughout North Korea’s institutional and bureaucratic narratives. The sense that big things were afoot and progress was to be made was further dramatised on a global scale by Pyongyang’s testing of a nuclear device (claimed to be a hydrogen bomb) in January and by its second launch of a satellite, the Kwangmysong-4 , into space. 1 Both of these events were quite predictably conceptualised to agitated geopolitical actors as threatening and prohibited. 2 However these events and their triangulations within the nexus of North Korean priorities were certainly not new. Developmental possibilities in 2016 in the wake of North Korea’s assertive action on the world scale have not yet been articulated with quite the level of previous years. The framework for the future of North Korean institutional activity will surely be outlined in the proceedings of the congress, some months away as the author writes this, but readers do not have to look back too far in the historical record to fi nd a similar moment.
