Resilient peripheralisation through authoritarian communication against energy democracy in South Korea.

To understand anti-democratic barriers to accomplishing energy democracy, I examine how and why a centralised energy system can maintain itself based on an ethnographic analysis of the local protest of the Miryang community against the Korea Electric Power Corporation's construction of a 765,000-volt transmission line. In doing so, I incorporate the element of authoritarian communication into the framework of peripheralization – a socio-political reproduction of social, spatial, and environmental inequality caused by siting environmentally hazardous facilities in peripheral communities and reinforcing their powerlessness – to emphasize the aggressive role of government and industry actors. Composed of unidirectional projection, partial absorption, and forceful suppression, authoritarian communication makes the sacrifices of peripheral communities enduring, and consequently enables an undemocratic energy arrangement to be resilient and perpetual. To overcome this mechanism, I highlight the active roles of citizens to contest authoritarian communication and socio-environmental inequalities as a precondition to building a sustainable energy democracy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]