Turning Down the Volume

A quiet gesture along the world’s loudest border could signal more than a pause in propaganda.

The Korean Peninsula has long been a place where diplomacy is measured not just in treaties or summits, but in decibels. Now, after years of shrill exchanges, both North and South Korea are literally turning down the volume.

South Korea’s military says it has observed North Korean soldiers dismantling some of the loudspeakers used to beam propaganda across the demilitarised zone (DMZ). The move comes in apparent response to the overtures of South Korea’s newly elected president, Lee Jae Myung, who campaigned on repairing ties with the North. Seoul had already removed some of its own loudspeakers earlier in the week, having halted broadcasts shortly after Lee took office in June.

While the gesture may seem trivial, in the lexicon of inter-Korean relations, the loudspeaker is no mere piece of military hardware. For decades, it has been both a weapon and a symbol: a way of making the invisible border deafeningly present. South Korea’s broadcasts, which have in recent years mixed K-pop anthems with news bulletins, were designed to chip away at Pyongyang’s information blockade. North Korea’s retort was less tuneful, featuring animal howls, martial music and denunciations of the ‘puppet regime’ in Seoul.

The tactic has an old pedigree. Psychological warfare along the DMZ began in earnest in the late 1960s, after a series of cross-border skirmishes. Loudspeaker duels became a low-cost, high-impact way of signalling displeasure, used as readily in times of tension as in the run-up to talks. They were suspended in 2018, during the brief diplomatic thaw that culminated in summits between Kim Jong Un and then-President Moon Jae-in. But in June last year, after a six-year pause, Seoul resumed the broadcasts in retaliation for Pyongyang’s crude balloon campaign by sending sacks of rubbish and leaflets drifting southward.

Border residents have long borne the brunt of this sonic warfare, sometimes jolted awake in the small hours by music, slogans or animal noises wafting over the hills. The South Korean military claimed its speakers could carry messages 10km by day and up to 24km by night - enough to reach North Korean garrisons and villages alike.

Yet there is more at stake here than the comfort of borderland communities. The removal of loudspeakers is a bellwether for the political climate between the two Koreas. Under Lee’s predecessor, Yoon Suk Yeol, relations had reached their chilliest point in years. Yoon’s hawkish policies, combined with his short-lived imposition of martial law in December last year, ostensibly in response to “anti-state forces” and suspected North Korean sympathisers, alienated Pyongyang and unnerved much of the South Korean public. His impeachment opened the way for a political reset.

President Lee inherits a uniquely fraught situation. The North, under Kim Jong Un, formally abandoned its decades-old policy of eventual reunification earlier this year. This was a watershed moment: since its founding in 1948, the North had maintained the fiction—enshrined in propaganda and the constitution—that the South would one day be “liberated.” By renouncing this goal, Kim signalled not rapprochement but resignation, perhaps recognising that reunification, on any terms acceptable to Pyongyang, was unattainable.

The two Koreas remain technically at war; the 1950-53 Korean War ended not with a peace treaty but an armistice. In the decades since, the DMZ has become both a symbol of frozen conflict and a flashpoint for sudden, dangerous escalations. Its status is shaped not only by the will of Koreans but by the interests of larger powers. The United States, with 28,500 troops stationed in the South, remains the ultimate security guarantor for Seoul. China, the North’s main ally and trading partner, prefers a stable but divided peninsula, wary that a collapse in Pyongyang could send millions of refugees streaming across its border and eliminate a strategic buffer against American forces.

Against this geopolitical backdrop, the silencing of loudspeakers is not the harbinger of imminent peace, but it is a sign of tactical restraint. Still, in an environment where even small moves can reverberate, dismantling the loudspeakers is a calculated step toward lowering the temperature.