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How does civil society come together and disperse inside a rapidly industrialised and democratised nation? South Korean civil movement organisations is an ethnographic study of the social movements and advocacy organisations inside South Korea as well as practical methods in democratic transition more generally. The book is based on two years of fieldwork inside a handful of NGOs, NPOs, and think tanks in Seoul as the ‘386 generation’ came to lead during the Roh Moo Hyun presidency (2003-8). It is a rich exploration of the many crises, hopes, practical projects and pragmatic theories that animated South Korean activists, coordinators, lawyers, politicians, ‘social designers’ and academics of various stripes. From the Citizens’ Alliance for the 2000 General Elections (CAGE) to the 2002 World Cup co-hosted by Japan and South Korea, this book tells the stories of consequence to freshly render South Korean politics relevant to many Asian, European, Middle Eastern, and North as well as South American contexts. At the same time, it uniquely frames the theoretical and methodological moments for new ethnographies through the shared, yet disparate experiences of pragmatism, (social) design, and (democratic) transition.
Introduction The Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK, or North Korea) is well known in the media and amongst policymakers in relation to its cult of personality surrounding the Kim family, abuses of human rights, and nuclear weapons programme. In recent years, the DPRK’s relationship with the United States and the Republic of Korea (ROK, or South Korea) has seen both flickers of engagement and periods of increased animosity. In 2017, US President Donald Trump was threatening the DPRK with ‘fire and fury’, but less than a year later met with North
states, others, like the GATT [General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade], were only for the capitalist world. There was an order, which, in theory, combined Western democracy with a more-or-less regulated capitalism: the so-called liberal order – although perhaps ‘liberal’ isn’t the most precise term, either in political or economic terms. There were of course other characteristics. The promotion of human rights became one, for example, albeit selective. When South Korea was still under dictatorship, we would ask ‘What about South Korea? Shouldn’t it
Democratization is a major political phenomenon of the age and has been the focus of a burgeoning political science literature. This book considers democratization across a range of disciplines, from anthropology and economics, to sociology, law and area studies. The construction of democratization as a unit of study reflects the intellectual standpoint of the inquirer. The book highlights the use of normative argument to legitimize the exercise of power. From the 1950s to the 1980s, economic success enabled the authoritarian governments of South Korea and Taiwan to achieve a large measure of popular support despite the absence of democracy. The book outlines what a feminist framework might be and analyses feminist engagements with the theory and practice of democratization. It also shows how historians have contributed to the understanding of the processes of democratization. International Political Economy (IPE) has always had the potential to cut across the levels-of-analysis distinction. A legal perspective on democratization is presented by focusing on a tightly linked set of issues straddling the border between political and judicial power as they have arisen. Classic and contemporary sociological approaches to understanding democracy and democratization are highlighted, with particular attention being accorded to the post-1989 period. The book displays particularities within a common concern for institutional structures and their performance, ranging over the representation of women, electoral systems and constitutions (in Africa) and presidentialism (in Latin America). Both Europe and North America present in their different ways a kind of bridge between domestic and international dimensions of democratization.
Situated in one of the most militarised regions in the world, South Korea has a long-standing relationship with nuclear weapons that is evident in three domains. The first is that South Korea initiated and subsequently shelved an indigenous nuclear weapons programme. Fearing abandonment and looking to reinforce South Korea’s capacity for military self-reliance in the face
1 Entanglements [T]he general difficulty of attaining unity over means, let alone ends, among people who have been robbed of political power. (Kenneth M. Wells) Despite the frequent and approving outside mentions of democracy and civil society in South Korea, many who worked inside the organisations charged with promoting democracy and civil society spoke more about the threats, failures, crises, and overall weaknesses they faced. One colleague, Scholar Lee, went so far as to assert in 2004: ‘there is no civil society, only civil groups [in South Korea] (simin
individualism, conceiving of the social as a simple aggregation of individual behaviour. It remains normatively committed to promoting instrumentally ‘rational’ decision-making and overcoming the distortions of non-economic factors. Thus, even for behavioural economics, social context and cultural dimensions – such as those that create the speculative subjectivity seen recently in South Korea – are excluded
The film industries of North and South Korea adopt totally different production and distribution systems under opposite state ideologies: communism and capitalism. This is manifest in the representation of ideology in their films. The comparative analysis of the selected films from South and North Korea divulges a complex relationship between the political and economic bases, and the cultural forces of society
, political and economic developments in both North and South Korea under such authoritarian or totalitarian states for the next four decades. This chapter examines the notion of nationhood held by contemporary Koreans from two interrelated perspectives, political and cultural. Until the national division in 1945, Korea had maintained both political and cultural unity for over thirteen centuries. This historical
-liberal governance in South Korea. This was particularly true during the Roh Moo Hyun administration, which remade relations between government and civil organisations. While some critiqued this pragmatic demand, others took it as an invitation to pragmatically change. Lawyer Park (Pak Byeonhosanim) is an exemplary figure of the latter. He necessitates a chapter rather than a short history because of the scaled up figure he cuts in Korean law and politics. Lawyer Park is a prominent ‘first generation’1 civil leader who elicited deep passions and large aspirations among the civil