|
|
Soh Jaipil Lecture Series
New Books in Korean Studies
| |
|
Seeds of Mobilization:
The Authoritarian Roots of South Korea's Democracy
Friday, October 18, 2024
11 A.M. – 12:30 P.M. (EDT)
Hybrid Event
Elliott School of International Affairs, Room B17
1957 E ST NW, Washington DC
Virtual via Zoom
| |
|
Event Description
South Korea is sometimes held as a dream case of modernization theory, a testament to how economic development leads to democracy. Seeds of Mobilization: The Authoritarian Roots of South Korea's Democracy (University of Michigan Press, 2024) takes a closer look at the history of South Korea to show that Korea’s advance to democracy was not linear. Instead, while Korea’s national economy grew dramatically under the regimes of Park Chung Hee (1961–79) and Chun Doo Hwan (1980–88), the political system first became increasingly authoritarian. Because modernization was founded on industrial complexes and tertiary education, these structures initially helped bolster the authoritarian regimes. In the long run, however, these structures later facilitated the anti-regime protests by various social movement groups—most importantly, workers and students—that ultimately brought democracy to the country. By using original subnational protest event datasets, government publications, oral interviews, and publications from labor and student movement organizations, Seeds of Mobilization shows how socioeconomic development did not create a steady pressure toward democracy but acted as a “double-edged sword” that initially stabilized autocratic regimes before destabilizing them over time. The book also reveals how the nonlinear path from economic development to democracy has led to enduring differences in political attitudes and behavior across generations, shaped by their distinct experiences of economic growth and authoritarianism.
| |
JOAN CHO is Associate Professor of East Asian Studies, and Associate Professor by courtesy of Government, at Wesleyan University. Her research and teaching interests are authoritarianism, democratization, social movements, and authoritarian legacies in Korea and East Asia. Dr. Cho’s first book, Seeds of Mobilization: The Authoritarian Roots of South Korea’s Democracy (University of Michigan Press, 2024), examines the roles of industrialization and tertiary education in South Korea’s nonlinear path to democracy. Her work on authoritarian regime support, South Korean democracy movement, and electoral accountability in post-transition South Korea are published in Electoral Studies, Journal of East Asian Studies, Studies in Comparative International Development, and Routledge Handbook of Korean Culture and Society. Dr. Cho is also an adjunct fellow (non-resident) at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) Korea Chair, associate-in-research of the Council of East Asian Studies at Yale University, and a member of the APSA Committee on the Status of Asian Pacific Americans in the Profession. Previously, she was Vice President and governing board member of the Association of Korean Political Studies and a 2018-2019 CSIS-USC U.S.-Korea NextGen Scholar. She received her Ph.D. in Political Science from the Department of Government at Harvard University.
| |
CELESTE ARRINGTON is Korea Foundation Associate Professor of Political Science and International Affairs at GW. She is the Director of the GW Institute for Korea Studies and Co-Director of the East Asia National Resource Center (2024- Present). She specializes in comparative public policy, law and social change, lawyers, and governance, with a regional focus on the Koreas and Japan. She is also interested in Northeast Asian security, North Korean human rights, and transnational activism. Her first book was Accidental Activists: Victim Movements and Governmental Accountability in Japan and South Korea (Cornell, 2016). She has published numerous articles and, with Patricia Goedde, she co-edited Rights Claiming in South Korea (Cambridge, 2021). Her next book, forthcoming in Cambridge’s Studies in Law and Society series, analyzes the legalistic turn in Korean and Japanese regulatory style through paired case studies related to tobacco control and disability rights. She received a PhD from UC Berkeley, an MPhil from the University of Cambridge, and an AB from Princeton University. She has been a fellow at Harvard, the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, and the LudwigMaximilians University in Munich. GW’s Office of the Vice President for Research awarded her the 2021 Early Career Research Scholar Award. Her article with Claudia Kim won the 2023 Asian Law and Society Association’s distinguished article award.
| |
This event is on the record and open to the public.
| |
Founded in the year 2016, the GW Institute for Korean Studies (GWIKS) is a university wide Institute housed in the Elliott School of International Affairs at the George Washington University. The establishment of the GWIKS in 2016 was made possible by a generous grant from the Academy of Korean Studies (AKS). The mission of GWIKS is to consolidate, strengthen, and grow the existing Korean studies program at GW, and more generally in the greater D.C. area and beyond. The Institute enables and enhances productive research and education relationships within GW, and among the many experts throughout the region and the world.
| |
|
|
|
|
