Description

In his seminal study of contentious politics, Sidney Tarrow conceptualized social movements as constituting a series of protest cycles. While the concept of protest cycles has received much attention in the social movements literature, its empirical operationalization remains relatively crude compared to the rich theoretical discussion. Most studies operationalize protest cycles as the total number of protest events in a given period. Drawing on recent work on event structures, this paper attempts to further develop the application of the protest cycle concept by conceptualizing social movements as a population of interlinked events and identifying events that play critical roles in historical outcomes. We demonstrate the usefulness of considering protest cycles as protest event networks with a novel dataset on South Korea’s democracy movement. In our conceptualization the nodes of the network are protest events and links are coded as present if protestors cited a specific prior event as a source of inspiration for mobilizing. Appropriating strategies developed for network analysis we ascertain which events in Korea’s democracy movement were more likely to solicit direct responses and which linked disparate event clusters. By identifying the characteristics of events that contribute to the probability of protest contagion and movement cohesion, we hope to show the usefulness of identifying direct links between events when analyzing protest events data, while providing a better understanding of the structure of protest cycles in South Korea’s democracy movement.

Paul Y. Chang is Assistant Professor of Sociology and serves on the Executive Committee of the Korea Institute at Harvard University. His primary research interest is in South Korean social and political change. He is the author of Protest Dialectics: State Repression and South Korea’s Democracy Movement (Stanford University Press 2015), and co-editor of South Korean Social Movements: From Democracy to Civil Society (Routledge 2011).

Description

In explaining the economic success of the East Asian countries, the developmental state thesis highlights the positive role of the state intervention in markets. In particular, it sees as an essential condition for the East Asian economic mira¬cle the capacity of the autonomous national bureaucrats, which are assumed to be independent of particular economic and social interests, to lead the policy-making process on behalf of the nation as a whole. More specifically, the state’s industrial policies have been seen as a crucial means through which the national bureaucrats have been able to guide and discipline firms to play a role in national industrialization. This kind of explanations, however, lacks serious under¬standings of the spatial aspects of industrial development due to its limited focus on aspatial elements of industrial governance. Industrial activities actually take place at certain locations, and necessarily require the infrastructures fa¬cilitating the spatial flows and movements of materials, information, money, and so on. Indeed, constructing industrial complexes was an essential spatial technology that the Korean state deployed to promote national industrialization in the 1960s and the 1970s. Without paying sufficient attention to the spatiality of industrialization, the developmental state thesis may pro¬vide a biased view on the Korean industrial development. In particular, its emphasis on the leadership role of the state in national industrialization may not be easily justified, once the complicated socio-spatial processes through which the industrial complexes had been constructed are carefully examined.

With this problem orientation, this paper aims to explore the ways in which the Masan Free Export Zone was developed in the late 1960s. In contrast to the developmental state thesis, which relies on the neo-Weberian assumption of the state-society separation and the methodological nationalism, this research borrows the strategic-relational view to the state, which sees the state actions as an outcome of complex interactions among social forces acting in and through the state, as well as the multi-scalar approach to the political economic processes, in order to better grasp the spatiality of Korean industrialization. In particular, this paper will examine the ways in which the construction of Masan Free Export Zone was planned, implemented and materialized through complex and contested interactions among social forces at various geographical scales act¬ing in and through the state.

Bae-Gyoon Park is a Professor of Geography in the College of Education at Seoul National University in Korea, and also serves as the Head of International Relations at Seoul National University Asia Center. He received his PhD in Geography at Ohio State University in the USA after doing his BA and MA in Geography at Seoul National University. He had also taught in National University of Singapore as an assistant professor of Geography. He is now a Co-editor of Territory, Politics, Governance, and a member of the editorial boards of Political Geography, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, and Geography Compass. His recent research is focused on multi-scalar understandings of East Asian developmental states and developmental urbanism in East Asia. He has recently edited an English-written book, entitled “Locating Neoliberalism in East Asia”, and several Korean-written books, including “Gukkawa Jiyeok(State and Localities)”, “Saneok Gyeongkwanui Tansaeng(The Birth of Industrial Landscapes)”, and so on. He has also published papers in International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, Political Geography, Economic Geography and Critical Asian Studies.

Description

The unification of North and South Korea is widely considered an unresolved and volatile matter for the global order, but this book argues capital has already unified Korea in a transnational form. As Hyun Ok Park demonstrates, rather than territorial integration and family union, the capitalist unconscious drives the current unification, imagining the capitalist integration of the Korean peninsula and the Korean diaspora as a new democratic moment.

Based on extensive archival and ethnographic research in South Korea and China, The Capitalist Unconscious shows how the hegemonic democratic politics of the post-Cold War era—reparation, peace, and human rights—have consigned the rights of migrant laborers—protagonists of transnational Korea—to identity politics, constitutionalism, and cosmopolitanism. Park reveals the riveting capitalist logic of these politics, which underpins legal and policy debates, social activism, and media spectacle.

While rethinking the historical trajectory of Cold War industrialism and its subsequent liberal path, this book also probes memories of such key events as the North Korean and Chinese revolutions, which are integral to migrants’ reckoning with capitalist allures and communal possibilities. Casting capitalist democracy within an innovative framework of historical repetition, Park elucidates the form and content of the capitalist unconscious at different historical moments and dissolves the modern opposition among socialism, democracy, and dictatorship. The Capitalist Unconscious astutely explores the neoliberal present’s past and introduces a compelling approach to the question of history and contemporaneity.

Hyun Ok Park teaches sociology at York University. She writes about global capitalism, transnational migration, empire, postcolonialism, and the issues of comparison and comparability. She is the author of Two Dreams in One Bed: Empire, Social Life, and the Origins of the North Korean Revolution in Manchuria (Duke University Press, 2005).

Description

The Canadian Centre for the Responsibility to Protect will be hosting a round-table discussion on “Canadian Foreign Policy & Mainstreaming Responsibility to Protect” which will take place at the Munk School of Global Affairs (Room 108N, 1 Devonshire Place, Toronto) on Oct 22, 2015 at 12-2pm.

In the post-election climate, we hope to bring together key thinkers and practitioners of Canadian foreign policy to generate a discussion on how we can turn the R2P from promise to practice, as we witness on-going crises in Syria, Yemen, South Sudan and North Korea.

Please join us for an engaging discussion with Dr. Jennifer Welsh (UN Secretary-General’s Special Advisor on R2P), Ambassador Marius Grinius, Master Hugh Segal of Massey College and Dr. Stephen Toope of the Munk School of Global Affairs. Following presentations, there will be an opportunity for Q&A with the audience. Light lunch will be served.

To register, please click here. Please contact recruiting@ccr2p.org if you have any questions.

Description

Day 1 – Film Screenings
Monday, October 26 | 7:00 PM | Innis Town Hall, 2 Sussex Avenue

Screening of Albert Shin’s critically acclaimed feature, In Her Place, preceded by
Gloria Kim’s short film The Auction.

In Her Place | 115 min.| 2014| directed by Albert Shin
Inspired by Korean culture’s strong stigma against adoption In Her Place stars Kil Hae-Yeon and Ahn Ji-Hye as a mother and daughter living on a farm in Korea. When the teenage daughter becomes pregnant, a woman (Yoon Da-Kyung) arrives from Seoul to propose a secret adoption, conditional on her staying with them for the duration of the pregnancy so that she can hide the adoption when she returns to Seoul after the baby’s birth. The film premiered at the 2014 Toronto International Film Festival, garnered five nominations at the 3rd Canadian Screen Awards and won the Scotiabank Jay Scott Prize for an Emerging Artist at the 2014 Toronto Film Critic Association Award.

The Auction | 17 min. | 2010 | directed by Gloria Kim
It’s Christmas in Toronto, 1978. Eight-year-old Meehee Park longs for two things: to make her mother happy and to get a Cindy doll from Santa. While selling her toys at a shop, she comes across an auction that will pit her two greatest desires, leaving Meehee to make a difficult choice. A semi-autobiographical tale of immigrant dreams, The Auction is a poignant blend of narrative and director Gloria Ui Young Kim’s found family footage. The film screened in film festivals around North America and won the Lift & Fuji Award for Best Film at the 2010 Toronto Reel Asian Film Festival.

Day 2 – Panel Discussion
Wednesday, October 28 | 6:30 PM | Innis Town Hall, 2 Sussex Avenue

Influenced by their upbringings as first or second-generation immigrants, Asian Canadian filmmakers and artists have foregrounded identity and belonging as a recurring theme in their work. In this panel and discussion, Korean Canadian filmmakers Albert Shin and Gloria Kim will share their experience of living and working in different cultural settings, and discuss how that has impacted their artistic vision and cinematic practice. As they extrapolate the identities of fictional characters on screen, what have they learned about their own?

Moderator: Jane Kim, Filmmaker and Programmer
Panelists: Albert Shin, Director of In Her Place & Gloria Ui Young Kim, Writer and Director of The Auction