South Korean State Research Articles

Gendered militarisation as state of exception on the Korean Peninsula

ABSTRACT Conflict and tensions between the two Koreas prioritise the militaristic security concerns of the Peninsula. This article, however, analyses the situation through the heuristic prism of feminist security studies and of Agamben’s state of exception, which is described as the suspension of the legal system in order to protect the state from internal or external threats, to identify the insecurities of feminised citizens in the South Korean state. The article starts with the historically gendered ideologies which promote the discursive construction of the state of exception. The article then explores the way in which the military build-up on the peninsula generates a security dilemma of extreme dimensions between the two Koreas, which in turn legitimates a gendered state of exception, and finally, the article examines the efforts of the women’s movement to challenge the state of exception.

Militarising national security through criminalisation of conscientious objectors to conscription in South Korea

ABSTRACTSince the introduction of universal male conscription in 1949, the South Korean government has imprisoned the conscientious objectors to conscription as jeopardising national security. Historically, conscription, producing citizen-soldiers and fixing discursive boundary of the nation, has militarised understandings of citizenship and national security. However, through their alternative performance of citizenship, the conscientious objectors have indicated that the definition and practice of national security is open to negotiation and change. In this respect, I demonstrate how the South Korean state’s criminalisation of the conscientious objection has militarised the understanding of national security. The deconstructive discourse analysis of the South Korean Supreme Court and Constitutional Court decisions since the 2000s on the conscientious objection shows that the discursive construction of national security depends on fixing the meaning of social minorities as ‘internal threats’.

US-Soviet Dialogue on the Korean Settlement in 1943–1947: Basic Principles and Results

This article considers the history of Soviet-American relations on the Korean issue in the period of their development in the format of bilateral negotiations (1943–1947). The author aims to characterise the content and principles of the organisation of the dialogue between Moscow and Washington on the Korean issue during World War II and the postwar settlement, and to reveal the influence of this interaction on the fate of Korea. The author analyses the content of the dialogue between Moscow and Washington at the Tehran, Yalta and Potsdam conferences, describes the decision-making process on Korea at the Moscow meeting of foreign ministers in 1945, and examines the work of the Joint Soviet-American Commission, and the interaction between the Soviet and American occupation zones on the peninsula. The analysis is carried out with reference to published and unpublished documents of the diplomatic departments of the USSR and the US (including materials of the Foreign Policy Archive of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Russian Fede­ration, and Internet archives), declassified CIA materials, and memoirs of political establishment members. The research allows the author to conclude that the fixation of the Korean division in 1948 occurred despite the original aspirations of the superpowers, but it became a logical outcome of the Korean settlement process. After the liberation of Korea, the USSR and the United States failed to build effective cooperation in the complex internal political conditions of the peninsula. In the end, Washington decided to choose the path that led to the implementation of a fundamentally new scenario, i.e. the formation of an independent South Korean state.

The Re-organization of territory and the birth of Sudogwon (capital region) in the South Korean developmental state, 1960s.

The Re-organization of territory and the birth of Sudogwon (capital region) in the South Korean developmental state, 1960s.

Penile Necrosis, Military Medicine, and South Korean Participation in the Vietnam War, 1964–1973

This article examines the Korean medical history of the Vietnam War, particularly, the sexual activities and venereal disease control of the Republic of Korea Forces in Vietnam (ROKFV). For Ch'ae Myŏngsin, the commander of the ROKFV, the largest overseas military dispatch in the history of the South Korean military was an occasion to raise the profile of the infant Republic of Korea in the eyes of the world. However, the occasion also warranted possible sexual contact between South Korean soldiers and Vietnamese civilians and created potential complications. To caution the South Korean men away from Vietnamese women, Ch'ae circulated a mythical story about a fatal venereal disease endemic to Southeast Asia that specifically targets male genitalia. Using the theory of subimperialism and postcolonial readings of gender and colonialism, this article reads Ch'ae's story of penile necrosis against ROKFV records on sexual activities and venereal disease control to show how, in regulating sexual desires and bodily activities, the South Korean state came to replicate the colonizing practices of colonizers and reproduce imperialism as subimperialism in Cold War Asia.

‘Deferred Futures’: The diverse imaginaries of gay retirement in post-IMF South Korea

ABSTRACTThis essay examines the diverse imaginaries of gay retirement that have sprung up among the so-called ‘first generation’ of South Korean gay men in their 40s and 50s. During the liberalising period of Korean society in the mid-1990s, many encountered Westernised notions of gay identity and community for the first time in their lives. Inspired by films such as the ‘Wedding Banquet’ (dir. Ang Lee, 1994), they began to dream of creating a gay lifestyle for themselves. With the downturn of the Korean economy following the Asian financial crisis in 1997/1998, many have deferred if not abandoned these dreams. Temporarily folding their dreams for an out gay life, they are instead focusing on securing their future as single men without the financial and emotional support of their own wives and children. In focusing on the insecure lives of South Korean gay men, this essay discloses the particular mechanisms of family governmentality and Confucian biopolitics via which the South Korean state has strived to manage its non-normative populations and navigate the turbulent waters of neoliberal globalisation. It also provides a transnational and lifecourse approach to queer studies that goes beyond concepts of ‘syncretism’ and ‘hybridity’ to understand queer globalisation. Instead, working bottom-up through an ethnographically-grounded model of South Korean gay men’s lives, it theorises how non-normative bodies and desires are intimately imbricated with and co-constitutive of the broader processes and institutions of neoliberal capitalism, postcolonial nation-state formation, new consumer/cyber cultures, social movements and family in East Asia and throughout the world.

The Korean State and Social Policy: How South Korea Lifted Itself from Poverty and Dictatorship to Affluence and Democracy by Stein Ringen et al., and; State-centric to Contested Social Governance in South Korea: Shifting Power by Hyuk-Rae Kim

Reviewed by: The Korean State and Social Policy: How South Korea Lifted Itself from Poverty and Dictatorship to Affluence and Democracy by Stein Ringen et al., and; State-centric to Contested Social Governance in South Korea: Shifting Power by Hyuk-Rae Kim Jesook Song The Korean State and Social Policy: How South Korea Lifted Itself from Poverty and Dictatorship to Affluence and Democracy by Stein Ringen et al. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011. 137 pp. £35.99 (hardback) State-centric to Contested Social Governance in South Korea: Shifting Power by Hyuk-Rae Kim. New York: Routledge, 2013. 202 pp. $140.00 (hardback). $49.95 (paperback) A late industrializing nation-state, South Korea was characterized as "the miracle of the Han river" up until the Asian financial crisis of the late 1990s. And it was praised for rapidly overcoming the crisis, both by international financial organizations, such as the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, and by nation-states that went through contemporaneous national economic crises. Scholars and experts attributed these achievements to the role of the South Korean state and the strong government initiatives and intervention in business and markets that had marked its administration and bureaucracy since the Korean War. Scholarly work on the developmental state (Kim 1997; Woo-Cumings 1999) centered on whether the Korean government under the military regimes developed national wealth by largely controlling the big conglomerates (chaebŏl) or whether the regimes and the capitalists collaborated to produce economic growth. Despite the significant attention given to the economic growth of the South Korean developmental regimes, the role of the government in social development has been understudied. However, public awareness of social development, or "improving quality of living (sam ŭi chil hyangsang)," has been growing since the 1990s, when South Korea joined other nations in donating foreign aid and after the [End Page 459] establishment of the National Basic Livelihood Security in 1999 under the Kim Dae Jung regime. In this context, The Korean State and Social Policy: How South Korea Lifted Itself from Poverty and Dictatorship to Affluence and Democracy by Stein Ringen and colleagues and State-centric to Contested Social Governance in South Korea: Shifting Power by Hyuk-Rae Kim are timely contributions to the field of South Korean state and social-development studies. Reading these two books together is captivating because they seem to be having a dialogue with one another, even if they do not directly address each other. Both books consider the ways in which the South Korean government navigated its relationship with multiple stakeholders, especially participants in civic organizations, in working towards a democratic process. I would like to elaborate the imagined dialogue between the two books by identifying some key common narratives and differing perspectives or foci. The two books highlight the importance of detailing the institutional history of the South Korean state rather than simply lumping South Korea into the regional category of the (East Asian) developmental state (emphasized in Kim), or reducing the "mysteries" of rapid achievements to authoritarian state power (emphasized in Ringen et al.). The books share a narrative of "dynamics,""metamorphoses,""mutation,""shifting," and "change," whether it is from poverty and dictatorship to affluence and democracy (Ringen et al.) or from a (centripetal) state-centric mode of social governance to a (centrifugal) contested one (Kim). In particular, Ringen and colleagues, coming from a political science background with a thematic focus on social policy and the East Asian welfare state, contend that social development was gradually expanded throughout the history of modernization, including during the Japanese colonial regime and before, and during and after the military regimes. In other words, they argue that social development did not suddenly begin with the appearance of the universalized welfare state during the conjunction of the Asian financial crisis and the Kim Dae Jung regime. With this argument, they want to show that what matters is not measurement of the capacity of state power but interrogation of the art of state power—how such strong state power was used and administered to achieve a goal of national prosperity, including social development. For instance, they provide data demonstrating that civil volunteerism, as a sign of democratic social governance, was...

SOUTH KOREA CULTURAL HISTORY BETWEEN 1960S AND 2012

This paper examines the development of South Korean cultural policy from the 1970s to the present. It contextualises South Korean state, culture and its cultural policy within the framework of state developmentalism, so as to understand their dynamics and relationships. A detailed analysis of how the national cultural policy is interpreted and implemented through institutional practices, historically and in its contemporary context shall be made.

Overseas development aid as spatial fix? Examining South Korea’s Africa policy

This paper examines the extent to which South Korea’s developmental aid programme to Africa can be understood as a form of ‘aid as imperialism’. We argue against the depiction of a crude determinism between the ‘interests of capital’ and the international activism of the South Korean state through aid provision. Drawing on Harvey’s theory of the new imperialism, we argue that, while the structural transformations in the South Korean political economy explain Seoul’s ODA programme at a general level, it is strongly influenced by geopolitical objectives which often undermine South Korea’s ability to pursue distinctly mercantile aims.

Monetary Flows and the Movements of Children: The Transnational Adoption Industrial Complex

Abstract Beginning with the worldwide adoption of nearly 200,000 Korean children from the Republic of Korea (ROK, South Korea) following the Korean War, transnational adoption has become a solidified practice. This article examines how South Korea’s relationship with the United States has become a template for a multimillion dollar industry spanning the globe. Specifically, this article finds that smaller deterritorialized sites—the South Korean state, orphanages, adoption agencies, and American immigration policy—operate in conjunction with one another. From their interwoven connections, the transnational adoption industrial complex (TAIC) emerged. The deployment of assemblage theory exposes how seemingly disparate organizations and governmental policies and procedures are neither static nor isolated but rather interconnect to create a global adoption economy.

Global Capital, Business Groups and State Coordination: the Changing Profile of Chaebol-State Relations in South Korea

This article examines the effects of global capitalism and state coordination on the financial behaviour of <em>chaebol</em> (business conglomerates) in South Korea. This study focuses on the evolution from controller to coordinator in the post-developmental South Korean state. In recent times, the Korean government has been studied as the exemplar of the Asian newly industrializing economies (NIEs) based on its ability to <em>control</em> economic development. As civil society pressures outgrew government control in the 1990s, the government’s mission shifted from control to <em>coordination </em>– the state sought to accommodate newly emerging or enlarged bargaining domains of key political-economic actors. However, the emergent post-developmental state is buffeted by the growing strength of the private sector, domestically and transnationally. While civil society strived to mobilize mass movements to further social democracy, the neoliberal evolution of capitalist class interests generated institutional configurations favouring the hegemony of finance capital.

Civil society, democracy and the state in South Korea: a critical dialogue

This review will discuss Hun Joon Kim’s important work on political dissent in the Republic of Korea, The Massacres at Mt. Halla: sixty years of truth-seeking in South Korea (Massacres at Mt. Halla). This book tells the story of the six-decade-long grassroots campaign to establish a truth commission into the events around Jeju 4.3: a series of counterinsurgency actions against armed uprisings that resulted in the large-scale massacre of civilians as well as other atrocities. Political activism looms large in South Korea’s modern political history, making a major contribution to the evolution of democracy in that country. For decades, the main game, and the focus of most academic scholarship, was the establishment of full participatory democracy in the country. Yet, behind the scenes and on the peripheries, many lower profile battles have been fought and the fate of these struggles is in some ways the real test of democracy in South Korea (Republic of Korea or ROK). Drawing together a broad range of primary documentary and interview material, Massacres at Mt. Halla makes a number of important contributions to audiences in Korean Studies, International Relations, and transitional justice. Kim brings to English speakers an unprecedented insight into the uprising, counterinsurgency operations, and activist efforts to bring this chapter of South Korean history to light. Careful archival research is supplemented with detailed personal interview data, the majority of which is in the Korean language and thus previously inaccessible to a wider audience. The value here lies with a detailed narrative that traces grassroots activism from the days of authoritarian government through the varied challenges of a newly democratic nation. In its telling, this story illuminates the ways in which local activism can be derailed or suppressed in a tight security environment. In this case, the backdrop was a political environment strictly managed by the state on the grounds of a fervent anti-communist policy. Anti-communism was in fact the only state-sanctioned ideology, one which had the backing of the ROK’s powerful US military ally. As Kim’s research demonstrates in a clear way, any activism that could be perceived to deviate from this ideology was harshly dealt with. The dawn of progressive government in South Korea in 1997 brought an end to explicit ‘red-baiting’,1 as it was known, but did not overturn altogether the rigid anti-communist structures that had accompanied the development of the modern South Korean state. In the following discussion, I first provide a brief introduction to Kim’s book before focusing my attention in on what Massacres at Mt. Halla tells us about this interaction between national security discourse and civil society activism.

Critical review and creative suggestions for the native English speaking teacher policy in South Korea

In order to invigorate communicative language teaching, until recently the South Korean government actively promoted the hiring of native English speaking teachers (NESTs) at state schools. However, mainly due to constrained budgets, many local offices of education have now started to rapidly cut the number of NESTs. This paper takes a critical approach to examine possible impacts of the recent variation in NEST policy on the disparity in learning opportunities between financially privileged and underprivileged students. We begin with a brief review of the history of NEST employment in South Korean state schools. Then, we delve into whether there are pedagogical advantages in team teaching over sole Korean English Teacher teaching. Later, the current policy's driving forces, potential beneficiaries and victims, and outcome of the policy will be discussed. On the basis of the analysis of the recent trend in NEST policy, suggestions for future policy reforms are provided.

The birth of urban modernity in Gangnam, Seoul

This study explores a formative period in the development of Gangnam, an exclusive district south of the Han River that was conceived of and shaped in the context of South Korea's militaristic and capitalist urban culture of the late 1960s. Created in imitation of what was at the time considered to be a highly modern urbanism that had been transplanted not only from the West but also from neighboring countries such as Japan, Hong Kong and Singapore, Gangnam was meant to provide an urban zone that would be secure from the threat of North Korean aggression while simultaneously proclaiming South Korea's ambitions to become a modern nation. This drive to create a new identity for Korea as a capitalist and developed nation, combined with the strong authoritarian nature of the South Korean state, meant that the implementation of modernist architecture and urbanism in Gangnam was primarily made to serve the nation-building and entrepreneurial ambitions of the state. Gangnam thus provides an example of the implementation of modernist structures and planning concepts that were originally envisioned as ways of providing meaningful public space by countering unchecked private speculation (i.e. massive apartment complexes, neighborhood units, superblocks, and automobile-oriented roadways) in the service of materialism at its most flamboyant. This perplexing condition could be said to be the result of what happens when architectural or urban forms are emptied of their publically-oriented ethical impulse, particularly in state-led large-scale urbanisation. While Gangnam can in some respects be considered to be a successful implementation of a modernist cityscape in the sense that it continues to be developed and thrive, it has become the centre of a segregated and unequal urbanity characterized by a highly materialist and extremely competitive culture that is diametrically opposed to the original intentions of those earlier modernist avant-gardes.

South Korean State Bureaucracy after Democratization and Neoliberal NPM Movements: Change and Continuity

South Korean State Bureaucracy after Democratization and Neoliberal NPM Movements: Change and Continuity

War as Business in South Korea's Manchurian Action Films

This essay examines Cold War political discourse in South Korea's Manchurian action films. It opens by questioning the interpretive parameters of South Korea's cinematic war narratives, which isolate the military conflict of the Korean War (1950–53, in its conventional periodization) as the sole focus of the war experience. This essay, by contrast, expands consideration of the “Korean War” by examining cultural representations of the proto-Korean nation-state during the 1931–45 Pacific War. This shift in focus enables an inquiry into the role of the state in its business practice of war mobilization. In particular, the essay brings close attention to the subject of money, specifically, war funds procurement, as a recurring and governing thematic preoccupation of Manchurian action films as a genre of war film. By exploring the trappings of “money,” as it is configured in such films and relating them to the state's claims of ownership, this essay examines how the genre reflects the capitalist war politics of the South Korean state. It also discerns how the state gains and furnishes its political authority by controlling and managing the business of perpetual war.

Examining Korean nationalisms, identities, and politics through sport

AbstractSouth Korea is a sport-loving country. Indeed, sport is not simply a popular physical activity but it is a symbolically significant social practice in the country. In particular, sport operates as an important cultural resource through which a specific discourse of Korean nationalism is reproduced and disseminated. In this respect, as supplementary reading to the papers contained in this special issue, this editorial introduction identifies three major types of Korean nationalism, namely post-colonial anti-imperialist nationalism, pan-Korean ethnic nationalism, and the South Korean state’s patriotic nationalism. It also looks at the way in which sport reflects and reinforces those nationalisms. The introductory essay ends with brief summaries of the six articles in this special issue.

Techno-Modeling Care: Racial Branding, Dis/embodied Labor, and “Cybraceros” in South Korea

Techno-Modeling CareRacial Branding, Dis/embodied Labor, and “Cybraceros” in South Korea Anna Romina Guevarra (bio) “It may be better to have a telepresence robot from a highly skilled teacher than to have just an average teacher in the classroom,” Balch added. —Susannah Palk, “Robot Teachers Invade South Korean Classrooms” The cyborg is a condensed image of both imagination and material reality, the two joined centers structuring any possibility of historical transformation. —Donna J. Haraway, “A Manifesto for Cyborgs” The wellspring of technological innovation is the exercise of the technological imagination. —Anne Balsamo, Designing Culture In 2010 the Korea Institute of Science and Technology announced its latest innovation: her name is Engkey (a contraction for “English jockey”)—the “English teaching robot teacher.” “She” has already been selected as one of the “50 best inventions of 2010” by Time magazine and has been heralded as the “job terminator” that will eventually replace some thirty thousand foreign nationals who teach English in South Korea. Engkey is an avatar tele-education robot that is premised on the concept of “distant-teaching” or “e-learning” and is representative of the South Korean state’s commitment to improve the English-language proficiency of its citizens. It is a device that was invented by the Center for Intelligent Robotics at the Korea Institute of Science and Technology (kist) in 2010 to provide educational assistance in elementary schools. Engkey is a robot effectively designed to be operated by a call-center worker overseas. At a height of 3.3 feet, Engkey stands as a white penguin-shaped robot, with a tv display screen as a [End Page 139] head that projects an image of a young white girl with long blonde hair (see fig. 1). She can wheel around the room to speak, sing, sense, and actively respond to children, as well as provide an emotional response by modulating her facial expressions and moving her head and arms. Engkey’s “functionality” derives from the fact that she is controlled by a remote teacher who, during the pilot tests, was located in the Philippines. Filipina teachers, working in the Philippines, circulate as disembodied yet gendered and racialized robots with avatar white faces, and interact with South Korean students using a microphone device attached to the video camera to telecast lessons and communicate in real time. Engkey was piloted between 2010 and 2011 in twenty-nine schools in South Korea and is now undergoing further technical reconfiguration and testing to improve her functionality and decrease her retail price.1 Click for larger view View full resolution Fig. 1. Engkey. Courtesy of the Korea Institute of Science and Technology. Through Engkey, this paper examines the complex relationships between neoliberal formations, the gendered geopolitics of care work, and contemporary forms of disembodied labor. It brings into conversation the literatures [End Page 140] on migration, labor studies, and feminist science and technology studies by exploring two analytics. First, it seeks to examine Engkey’s subjectivity as a visible, “live” presence in the classroom but one simultaneously rendered invisible, articulated solely as a technological innovation. Second, it explores the implications of Engkey’s dis/embodiment for “authenticity work” and what I call racial branding—the neoliberal discursive and political economic strategy for positioning Filipinos as the ideal global labor rendered operable through the dynamics of race and gender.2 Engkey as a “branded” and gendered laboring figure is also instrumental in sustaining the so-called global care chains that link the global North and South through paid and unpaid forms of care work.3 Appearing as a female avatar with a young and whitened face reifies and perpetuates the gendering of this form of care work, in this case, teaching. Engkey embodies the gendered subject presumed to be the ideal laboring subject for performing these tasks. However, in this latest configuration of commoditized labor, Engkey serves as an innovation of such care work, disrupting the ways in which this new form of care work operates through disembodiment and deracination, even as she calls into question the inherent classbased and gendered hierarchies that the global care chain presumes. That is, the “good enough” laborer in the global South, dis/embodied by...

Literature and Film in Cold War South Korea: Freedom's Frontier

Literature and Film in Cold War South Korea: Freedom's Frontier

Ties that bind us: transnational networks of North Koreans on the move

Interviews and participant observation with individuals from North Korea over the course of two years illuminated the complexity of the primarily kin-based networks that are created by, and maintained through, the migration of North Koreans from North Korea, through China and on to South Korea and beyond. This paper draws on the aggregate findings of these interviews but focuses particularly on the stories of two North Korean migrants whose experiences underline the significance of transnational migration for individuals on the margins of society, for whom maintaining transnational survival networks is an ongoing, conscious act of resilience in the face of a gendered state discourse that seeks to turn these individuals into docile pseudo-citizens. The second half critically considers concepts of hierarchical citizenship and assumptions underlying South Korean state policy towards North Korean newcomers that highlight the importance of transnational ties for the survival of those on the margins.