Candlelight Protests Research Articles

Beyond Continuity: The Defiance of Ordinary Citizens and the 2016 Candlelight Protests in South Korea

Beyond Continuity: The Defiance of Ordinary Citizens and the 2016 Candlelight Protests in South Korea

Tackling the crunch mode: the rise of an enterprise union in South Korea's game industry

PurposeThe present study seeks to trace the unionization process of a global top 10 video game company (Company N) in which workers formed the first enterprise union in South Korea's game sector. Drawing upon the analytical framework of Kelly's (1998) mobilization theory, the authors investigated what motivated workers to form a union and what factors facilitated unionization.Design/methodology/approachThis study used a qualitative research method on a single case study basis. The authors collected 41 in-depth interviews with game developers, full-time union staff from the case company and union leaders in their affiliated union, as well as game journalists, labour attorneys, and human resource professionals in the video game industry. The authors had their original data supplemented and triangulated by archival data including union letters and other documents and media reports. They analysed the data using computer-assisted qualitative data analysis software (CAQDAS).FindingsThere are three key findings. First, in the game sector, a high barrier against unionization exists, arising from industry characteristics such as a project-based work system, high mobility, reputation-based hiring, meritocracy, and a continuous influx of game-loving young developers. Hence, although the time was ripe for worker activism, latent grievances failed to be converted into real collective mobilization, resulting in non-organized workplaces for the past decades. Second, the mandatory labour-management negotiations arising from a legal change acted as a key catalyst for unionization at Company N. The newly elected three employee representatives came to identify and develop their own collective interests through the direct experience of negotiations, which greatly augmented their negative emotions and improved their legal consciousness. These three representatives could identify numerous deep-rooted problems, attribute these problems to their employer, and realize that they are ordinary salaried workers different from their employer. Going through the three-month negotiation and post-negotiation period, a set of ordinary game developers transformed themselves into natural union leaders who started a union in the game industry, which was traditionally non-organized. Third, various layers of external factors, such as a sister union, the upper umbrella union, the changed socio-political atmosphere following the candlelight protests for presidential impeachment, and the improved union image facilitated the unionization at Company N.Practical implicationsThis study offers practical implications to governments, union activists, and employers in the game sector and more broadly in the tech industry, where labour-management conflicts are escalating across the globe.Originality/valueOur study of a rare unionization event in the difficult game sector offers a nuanced understanding of mobilization and its process. Theoretically, by introducing the dynamic process of natural leader emergence and spontaneous union formation in a young industry where neither pre-existing leadership nor extant union influence exists, this study suggests that the mobilization process is more complex and variegated than suggested by Kelly's study and subsequent studies. Therefore, this study can advance the current discussion of mobilization mechanisms in the field of industrial relations. Our study also contributes to current research by introducing collective mobilization in a new context, i.e. the young, dynamic game industry in a non-Western country, which is a context that has been under-studied thus far.

Socially Engaged Art(ists) and the 'Just Turn' in City Space: The Evolution of Gwanghwamun Plaza in Seoul, South Korea

Expanding the critical research on the role of arts and artists in (influencing) urban development and urban planning tenets, this article looks at how the interventions of socially engaged art(ists) committed to creating momentum for a 'just turn' in civic values and action can have tangible implications. We look into the threads of connection between the broader literature around the social and 'just turn' in the art world and urban planning approaches. Seoul is then presented with particular focus here as it is going through a watershed moment in what a city 'ought to be', amid 'paradigm shifts' that involve rethinking the relational connection between the arts and city space in tandem with social engagement as the new doctrine of governance. The article focuses on the case of Gwanghwamun Plaza in central Seoul as an example that embodies these scenes and changes. First, it goes over how the plaza's functions and image over time were influenced by both top-down and bottom-up dynamics, in the context of changing dynamics in the urban planning and art worlds. This leads on to more recent events such as the 2016–2017 'candlelight protests', where socially engaged art(ists) played a bottom-up, pivotal role in (re)characterizing a tourism-booster landmark into a public space for social dialogue. By examining the built environment implications from these artistic interventions in Gwanghwamun Plaza, the article considers how the practices and discussions from socially engaged art(ists) can be significant in characterizing the 'new normal' in the plaza's future and in urban/cultural policy and planning at large.

3·1운동 100주년의 대중정치와 한국 민족주의의 현재

This paper aims to analyze ‘popular politics’ and nationalism of Korea with the governmentled project to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the March 1 Movement and anti-Japanese boycott collective action. Firstly I suggest that the Korean nationalism should be viewed not as a singular ideology or a representation system but as a live ideology with a multilayered figure. In other words, nationalism is a real and present force that intersects neoliberalism, populism, division system and combines gender, race and labor. So when discussing Korean nationalism today, we should consider the influence of transnational capitalism and neo-liberal economic effect, and also consider the post-2000s ‘Daehanminguk nationalism’ and its hegemony.BRBased on these, I analyzed the characteristics and orientation of the government-led commemoration project for the centennial of the March 1 Movement. In particular, I argued what ideological effect on the politics of large-scale commemoration and of memory, and what political context they were in, focusing on the activities and discourse of ‘the Presidential Committee for the 100th anniversary of March 1 Movement and the establishment of the Provisional Government’.BRAnd also I examined the process of the mass anti-Japanese boycott movement in 2019 and its cultural politics. The 2016~17 Candlelight Protests created a new mechanism of public activism. I would argue that there is a link between the anti-Japanese boycott movement and the Candlelight Protests, including its limitations and weaknesses. Finally, I looked into the reaction and centrifugal force to the imagination and planning of nationalist popular politics. The main examples were the dissenting views on the nationalist fervor within the liberal/ progress camp amd the context of best-selling book such as “Anti-Japanese Racism”

사회운동공간에서 ‘차이들을 위한 영역화’ 전략에 대한 검토 : 2016년 광화문 촛불집회 페미존을 사례로

2008년 광화문 촛불집회를 통하여 출현한 다수의 정체성(여성, 퀴어, 장애인, 청소년, 비정규직 노동자 등)으로 구성된 새로운 운동주체들은 전통사회운동세력이 사용해오던 단수의 정체성(노동자, 시민 등)에 기반한 영역화 전략을 비판하고, 탈영역적 사고와 전략을 지향하였다. 이러한 탈영역적 흐름을 타고, 사회운동의 공간이 활성화된 상황을 환영하는 한편으로 본 연구자들은 영역화 전략을 구시대 유물로 간주하고, 서둘러 폐기시키는 것은 새로운 운동주체들이 사용할 수 있는 전략의 선택지를 협소하게 만들 수 있음을 우려한다. 본 논문은 가부장제와 자본주의에 맞서 다수의 정체성들이 결집하는 ‘차이들을 위한 영역화’ 과정을 주목하면서 새로운 운동주체들은 영역화 전략을 사회운동전략으로서 적극적으로 고려할 필요가 있음을 강조한다. 이상의 제안을 경험적으로 확인하기 위하여 지난 2016년 광화문 촛불집회 공간에 내재한 가부장제 코드를 드러내고, 비판하기 위하여 영역화에 기반한 대안적 운동공간을 생산한 ‘페미존(Femi-zone)’을 살펴본다.

A trajectory of a mediational means in protest: the hand placard in South Korea’s Candlelight Protests

ABSTRACT While positioning this research within the growing body of scholarship related to linguistic landscape of protest, we illustrate a distinctive form of analysis. Rather than giving a generalized, extensive, or quantitative description, we focus on a qualitative and in-depth analysis of a single protest tool in relation to protest actions and space-making. Drawing on the concept of “mediational means” from mediated discourse analysis, we analyze the linguistic and semiotic functions and effects of sonp’aenmal (hand placard), a protest tool uniformly and widely employed during South Korea’s 2016–2017 Candlelight Protests. Based on a corpus of protest images and our autoethnographic accounts of direct participation, we examine why this sign emerged as an important tool in the protest space, how it was utilized ritually and creatively, and the effects of its use on protesters’ experiences, sensitivity, and identity. Competing discursive effects caused by its uniform design and widespread use are discussed further.

South Korea’s Watergate Moment: How a Media Coalition Brought Down the Park Geun-hye Government

ABSTRACT South Korea had a Watergate moment in 2016, when a corruption scandal led to an impeachment of the president. Two media outlets in particular, the progressive newspaper Hankyoreh and JTBC, a TV station with roots in Samsung, first broke and then sensationalized the scandal that motivated the candlelight protests. Using textual analysis and oral history interviews, this article critically examines news institutions and journalistic culture to derive three main findings. First, the democracy movement of the 1980s provided institutional and cultural foundations. Second, commercial desires facilitated higher-quality journalism, rather than undermining it. The economic liberalization and the precarity of the economy as a whole influenced both the media industry at large and the specific business strategies that motivated JTBC. Third, there is an Americanization of journalistic norms and culture. While the two outlets were outnumbered by better-funded pro-government outlets, the duo ultimately prevailed with an irreverent culture of truth-seeking.

Ideological parallelism: toward a transnational understanding of the protest paradigm

ABSTRACT This study advances the protest paradigm as a transnational theory by examining how ideological affiliations within and across national borders influence the framing of a protest movement. Our empirical focus is the coverage of the 2016–17 South Korean ‘candlelight’ protests to oust conservative President Park Gyun-hye in Korean and US newspapers. Content analysis of 6 months of coverage suggests that liberal publications in both nations (Kyunghyang Shinmun and New York Times) were supportive of the movement, framing the protests as large yet peaceful and relying on protesters for information. In contrast, the conservative press in the US (Wall Street Journal) was closer in its coverage to Korea’s conservative publication (Chosun Ilbo), which was defensive of Park and her supporters. We argue that ideological affinities can operate beyond national boundaries – what we term ‘ideological parallelism’ – to make news organizations sympathetic or hostile toward a social movement. But nationalist sentiments also remain significant to the extent that a foreign (Korean) social movement affects a nation’s (US) foreign policy. We identify a novel framing device – Gaze – under which the coverage of both US newspapers converged and considered the adverse implications of candlelight protests for America’s relations with South Korea and its containment of North Korea and China. We also show how the US media’s Gaze recursively shapes South Korean press coverage, indicating that transnational protest frames impact local perceptions of social movements and can potentially influence their legitimacy and outcome.

The fifteen days: building claims and contexts

This paper examines the process of protest claim-making by reconstructing the semantic structure of online communication that took place prior to the first street event of a protest. Topic networks are identified on the basis of topic modeling outputs, deeming topics to be connected if they share the same terms. Semantic communities within such topic networks are specified by patterns of inter-topic relations with the aim to delineate the emergence of cohesive semantic communities as protest claims. This paper argues that protest claims are developed through the repetition of specific arrangement of topics, which generates relevance among topics discussed concurrently and continually over time. The iterated patterns shape semantic coherence through brokering terms that connect topics in consistent ways. Findings are presented by investigating 17 daily corpora of digital posts produced on a bulletin board from April 16 to May 2, 2008, which constitutes the pre-protest period of the Candlelight Protests in South Korea against a government policy on beef trade with the United States.

Two Koreas in the spotlight: from candlelight protests to summits

Two Koreas in the spotlight: from candlelight protests to summits

Strategies, Struggles, and Sites of Transformation in Korean Political Economy

Strategies, Struggles, and Sites of Transformation in Korean Political Economy

Determinants of Unaffiliated Citizen Protests: The Korean Candlelight Protests of 2016–2017

Determinants of Unaffiliated Citizen Protests: The Korean Candlelight Protests of 2016–2017

Articulating Inequality in the Candlelight Protests of 2016–2017

Articulating Inequality in the Candlelight Protests of 2016–2017

Democracy in Myth: The Politics of Precariatization in South Korea

After undergoing a series of mass demonstrations during the past three decades, including the 2016–2017 candlelight protests that led to the impeachment of President Park Geun-hye, many commentators in South Korea are confident that their country has become a land for what Karl Marx called “free men.” Korean citizens are portrayed as being ready to participate in voluntary political associations and collective actions and to pursue their interests in the public sphere. However, the data are showing the opposite to be true: citizen participation in public-sphere activities has substantially decreased since the mid-2000s, while the government has managed to improve or at least maintain its political responsiveness during the same period. Explaining the unnoticed background to this imbalance, this essay sheds light on the myth of the benefactor state in Korean democracy, arguing that this has emerged because neoliberalism has not only placed an increasing number of people in precarious positions but also neutralized them politically. The Korean government has capitalized on this situation to mythicize itself as a benefactor state that possesses an incomparable administrative capacity to take care of precarious people. By investigating the period of Park’s presidency (2013–2017) and the current rule of President Moon Jae-in (2017–), this essay shows how the myth of the benefactor state has emerged and created a unique cycle of Korean democracy.

Theorizing a 'Civic Politics' Model with Special Reference to the 2016-17 Candlelight Protest in South Korea: An Instruction

Theorizing a 'Civic Politics' Model with Special Reference to the 2016-17 Candlelight Protest in South Korea: An Instruction

The Color of Dissent and a Vital Politics of Fragility in South Korea

Inspired by the life and work of the late anthropologist Nancy Abelmann (1959–2016), this essay reflects upon public evocations of human vulnerability as central to understanding recent cultural phenomena and political transformations leading up to and during the Candlelight Revolution in South Korea. In this regard, how did the color vivid yellow come to define both spaces of protest and markers of dissident identity? Considering the prevalence of yellow ribbons, yellow balloons, yellow butterflies, and yellow paper lifeboats, what does it mean for such objects to have been circulated and recirculated in layered metaphorical assemblages that constituted new forms of public memory and new practices of political mobilization? This article addresses both the massive, peaceful Candlelight protests of 2016–17 that took place in downtown Seoul and the decade-long peace movement centered on Jeju Island's Gangjeong Village in order to theorize a vital politics of fragility that has imbued influential narratives, activist coalitions, and the material culture of protest in South Korea.

Candlelight for Our Country’s Right Name: 
 A Confucian Interpretation of South Korea’s Candlelight Revolution

The candlelight protest that took place in South Korea from October 2016 to March 2017 was a landmark political event, not least because it ultimately led to the impeachment of President Park Geun-hye. Arguably, its more historically important meaning lies in the fact that it marks the first nation-wide political struggle since the June Uprising of 1987, where civil society won an unequivocal victory over a regime that was found to be corrupt, unjust, and undemocratic, making it the most orderly, civil, and peaceful political revolution in modern Korean history. Despite a plethora of literature investigating the cause of what is now called “the Candlelight Revolution” and its implications for Korean democracy, less attention has been paid to the cultural motivation and moral discourse that galvanized Korean civil society. This paper captures the Korean civil society which resulted in the Candlelight Revolution in terms of Confucian democratic civil society, distinct from both liberal pluralist civil society and Confucian meritocratic civil society, and argues that Confucian democratic civil society can provide a useful conceptual tool by which to not only philosophically construct a vision of civil society that is culturally relevant and politically practicable but also to critically evaluate the politics of civil society in the East Asian context.

Analysis on the Spatiality of the 2016 Candlelight Protests in South Korea

Analysis on the Spatiality of the 2016 Candlelight Protests in South Korea

Similarities and Differences in the Realization Elements between “Gookpung81” and “Candlelight Protests for Park Geun-hye’s Resignation”

Similarities and Differences in the Realization Elements between “Gookpung81” and “Candlelight Protests for Park Geun-hye’s Resignation”

Candlelight Protests in South Korea:The Legacies of Authoritarianism and Democratization

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.