Between the Streets and the Assembly: Social Movements, Political Parties, and Democracy in South Korea

Description

Abstract:
In this talk, I present the core findings and arguments of my upcoming book, Between the Streets and the Assembly: Social Movements, Political Parties, and Democracy in South Korea (University of Hawaii Press 2022). This research traces how Korean citizens have become “participatory democrats” who experience greater political efficacy when they engage in direct action than in institutional politics. In comparing the coordinating capacity of three groups of democracy activists between 1987-2017 – i.e., activists in social movement organizations (SMOs), activists turned politicians in centrist parties, and activists-cum-politicians in progressive parties – I center my explanation on the concept of national solidarity infrastructure. I maintain that activists in Korean SMOs, compared to their counterparts in formal party politics, have developed a remarkable infrastructure to address a broad spectrum of national public policy areas, to organize nationwide popular demonstrations, and thus to nurture the political dynamics of participatory democrats. These findings not only suggest a rethinking of the interconnection between and mutual constitution of social movements and political parties, but further revise the definitional characteristics of social movement actors when the scholarship has conventionally approached SMOs as focused on a narrow scope of social issues or as provisional organizations compared to political parties and institutional politics.

Speaker’s Bio:
Yoonkyung Lee is an associate professor in the Department of Sociology and the director of the Center for the Study of Korea at the University of Toronto. She is a political sociologist specializing in labor politics, social movements, political representation, and the political economy of neoliberalism with a regional focus on East Asia. She is the author of Militants or Partisans: Labor Unions and Democratic Politics in Korea and Taiwan (Stanford University Press 2011), Between the Streets and the Assembly: Social Movements, Political Parties, and Democracy in South Korea (University of Hawaii Press 2022), and numerous journal articles that appeared in Politics and Society, Globalizations, Studies in Comparative International Development, Asian Survey, Journal of Contemporary Asia, and Critical Asian Studies. She regularly teaches courses on Theories of Social Movements (graduate), Research Practicum (graduate), Comparative Political Sociology (undergraduate), Social Movements (undergraduate), and Transnational Asia (undergraduate).

Discussant’s Bio:
Joan Cho is an Assistant Professor of East Asian Studies and Government at Wesleyan University. Authoritarianism, democratization, social movements, and authoritarian legacies in Korea and East Asia are her primary research and teaching focus. She is also a non-resident adjunct fellow at CSIS Korea Chair and an associate-in-research of the Council of East Asian Studies at Yale University. She received her Ph.D. in Political Science from the Department of Government at Harvard University in 2016.