South Koreas Candelight Revolution

This book examines key features, problems, and implications of the 2016–2017 Candlelight Movement, a historical cornerstone for democracy and social movements in South Korea. The Candlelight Movement brought profound social changes with important lessons and questions for scholars, practitioners, activists, and the public. To examine the full complexity of the movement, this edited volume utilises wide-ranging methodological and theoretical approaches, which include case study approaches, ethnography, survey, feminist film criticism, critical discourse analysis, and rhetorical criticism. Chapters place ‘communication’ at the centre of their analyses, calling attention to the mediated and mediatised, the performative and other discursive practices of the 2016–2017 Candlelight Movement. In doing so, the book discusses not only the usual players and factors – nor the institutions that exert their influence through democratic politics and the public sphere – but also the counter-public embracing new and social media, collective singing, the body, and performance, as their choice of political media. As such, this volume offers important insights into how communication plays a critical role in forming, moving, and transforming new social movements. The Candlelight Movement, Democracy, and Communication in Korea will appeal to students and scholars of communication and media studies, political science, sociology, and Korean studies.

This book is a record of the massive candlelight rallies led by citizens in South Korea from October 29, 2016, to April 29, 2017, calling for the resignation of President Park Geun-hye.

The recent candlelight protests in the fall and winter of 2016 and 2017 marked a critical moment in the maturation of South Korean democracy. Through complex connections between contributing actors involving the protesting public, the National Assembly, and the Constitutional Court of the Republic of Korea, President Park Geun-hye became the first South Korea president to be impeached through democratic procedures. While acknowledging the significant differences that distinguish this most recent protest wave with contentious politics of the past, this article highlights the foundational legacies of South Korea's authoritarian history. In addition, I reflect on how the contemporary candlelight protest industry draws on organizational and cultural resources first established in past democracy movements. In short, the political contest that brought down Park Geun-hye in 2016-2017 was in some tangible and intangible ways a reenactment of the authoritarian and democratization legacies that dominated much of South Korea's modern history.

We are currently witnessing some of the greatest challenges to democratic regimes since the 1930s, with democratic institutions losing ground in numerous countries throughout the world. At the same time organized labor has been under assault worldwide, with steep declines in union density rates. In this timely handbook, scholars in law, political science, history, and sociology explore the role of organized labor and the working class in the historical construction of democracy. They analyze recent patterns of democratic erosion, examining its relationship to the political weakening of organized labor and, in several cases, the political alliances forged by workers in contexts of nationalist or populist political mobilization. The volume breaks new ground in providing cross-regional perspectives on labor and democracy in the United States, Europe, Latin America, Africa, and Asia. Beyond academia, this volume is essential reading for policymakers and practitioners concerned with the relationship between labor and democracy.

While popular movements in South Korea rightly grab the headlines for forcing political change and holding leaders to account, those movements are only part of the story of the construction and practice of democracy. In Top-Down Democracy in South Korea, Erik Mobrand documents another part – the elite-led design and management of electoral and party institutions. Even as the country left authoritarian rule behind, elites have responded to freer and fairer elections by entrenching rather than abandoning exclusionary practices and forms of party organization. Exploring South Korea’s political development from 1945 through the end of dictatorship in the 1980s and into the twenty-first century, Mobrand challenges the view that the origins of the postauthoritarian political system lie in a series of popular movements that eventually undid repression. He argues that we should think about democratization not as the establishment of an entirely new system, but as the subtle blending of new formal rules with earlier authority structures, political institutions, and legitimizing norms.

​Igniting the Internet is one of the first books to examine in depth the development and consequences of Internet-born politics in the twenty-first century. It takes up the new wave of South Korean youth activism that originated online in 2002, when the country’s dynamic cyberspace transformed a vehicular accident involving two U.S. servicemen into a national furor that compelled many Koreans to reexamine the fifty-year relationship between the two countries. Responding to the accident, which ended in the deaths of two high school students, technologically savvy youth went online to organize demonstrations that grew into nightly rallies across the nation. Internet-born, youth-driven mass protest has since become a familiar and effective repertoire for activism in South Korea, even as the rest of the world has struggled to find its feet with this emerging model of political involvement. Igniting the Internet focuses on the cultural dynamics that have allowed the Internet to bring issues rapidly to public attention and exert influence on both domestic and international politics. The author combines a robust analysis of online communities with nuanced interview data to theorize a “cultural ignition process”—the mechanisms and implications for popular politics in volatile Internet-driven activism—in South Korea and beyond. She offers a unique perspective on how local actors experience and remember the cultural dynamics of Internet-born activism and how these experiences shape the political identities of a generation who has essentially come of age in cyberspace, the so-called digital natives or millennials. South Korea’s debates on the nature of youth-driven Internet protest reverberated around the world following the events in Tahrir Square in 2010 and Zuccotti Park in 2011. Igniting the Internetoffers numerous points of comparison with countries following a path of technological development and urban youth formation similar to that of South Korea with a thorough consideration of general structural changes and locally specific triggers for Internet activism. Readers interested in social movement theory and new media in social context as well as students and scholars of Korean studies will find the work both far-reaching and insightful.

An analysis of rights-based activism in South Korea, including case studies of women, workers, disabled persons, migrants, and sexual minorities.

This book explores the evolution of social movements in South Korea by focusing on how they have become institutionalized and diffused in the democratic period. The contributors explore the transformation of Korean social movements from the democracy campaigns of the 1970s and 1980s to the rise of civil society struggles after 1987. South Korea was ruled by successive authoritarian regimes from 1948 to 1987 when the government decided to re-establish direct presidential elections. The book contends that the transition to a democratic government was motivated, in part, by the pressure from social movement groups that fought the state to bring about such democracy. After the transition, however, the movement groups found themselves in a qualitatively different political context which in turn galvanized the evolution of the social movement sector. Including an impressive array of case studies ranging from the women's movement, to environmental NGOs, and from cultural production to law, the contributors to this book enrich our understanding of the democratization process in Korea, and show that the social movement sector remains an important player in Korean politics today. This book will appeal to students and scholars of Korean studies, Asian politics, political history and social movements.