Squid and Socialists: Power, Nature and the Unruly East Sea in North Korea, 1945–1964

Squid – ten-limbed cephalopods with lifespans of only a year and migratory habits – reveal a maritime history of North Korea defined by volatility and frustration. This paper reconstructs how squid in the East Sea undermined production quotas and eluded state planning from 1945 to 1964, showing how nonhuman herd agency exposed the limits of Pyongyang’s efforts to discipline oceanic nature. Briefly celebrated in propaganda as symbols of abundance in the early 1960s, squid soon revealed the fragility of postcolonial ambition and Soviet-style development. Drawing on underused Korean and Soviet sources, the study reframes the East Sea as a frontier of multi-species interaction, where nonhuman actors disrupted human designs. North Korea’s coastline emerges as an unstable zone of extraction, improvisation and ecological uncertainty. Placing marine life at the centre of analysis brings environmental history, Cold War history and Korean studies into conversation with more-than-human histories of labour, knowledge and resource extraction.