From the publisher’s website: While most analyses of Korean politics have looked to elites to explain political change, this new and revised edition of Korean Society examines the role of ordinary people in this dramatic transformation. Taking the innovative theme of ‘civil society’ – voluntary organizations outside the role of the state which have participated … [Read More]
Booklist: Politics and Current Affairs (page 6)
South Korean Democracy: Legacy of the Gwangju Uprising
From the publisher’s website: This new book offers a retrospective appraisal of the Gwangju Uprising by academics, activists and artists from Gwangju, Korea. In 1980, South Koreans took to the streets to demand democracy. When the military threatened brutal suppression of the popular movement, only in Gwangju did people refuse to submit. After horrific bloodshed, … [Read More]
Korea Witness: 135 Years of War, Crisis and News in the Land of the Morning Calm
Publisher description: This book follows the long journey of correspondents who have passed through Korea. Since the first of them, photographer Felice Beato, arrived in 1871 with American troops invading Kangwha Island, foreign journalists have puzzled over this land, as complicated and fascinating now as 135 years ago. Famed author Jack London grappled with a … [Read More]
Developmental Dictatorship and the Park Chung-Hee Era: The Shaping of Modernity in the Republic of Korea
From the publisher’s website: By examining the most controversial Park Chung-hee period (1961-1979), Developmental Dictatorship and the Park Chung-hee Era helps the reader rediscover the socioeconomic origins of modern Korea. The essays in this book written by twelve noted Korean social scientists discuss the relationship between South Korea’s economic development and totalitarianism in the form … [Read More]
Militarized Modernity and Gendered Citizenship in South Korea
From the publisher’s website: This pathbreaking study presents a feminist analysis of the politics of membership in the South Korean nation over the past four decades. Seungsook Moon examines the ambitious effort by which South Korea transformed itself into a modern industrial and militarized nation. She demonstrates that the pursuit of modernity in South Korea … [Read More]
North Korea in the 21st Century: An Interpretative Guide
North Korea is not easily accessible, but boasts some of the most beautiful scenery in the Korean Peninsula, and arguably in East Asia. Travel to and in the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea is tightly controlled, while political, economic, social and cultural life is played out in terms of a not readily understood philosophy, known … [Read More]
Healthy Democracies: Welfare Politics in Taiwan and South Korea
Do the pressures of economic globalization undermine the welfare state? Contrary to the expectations of many analysts, Taiwan and South Korea have embarked on a new trajectory, toward a strengthened welfare state and universal inclusion. In Healthy Democracies, Joseph Wong offers a political explanation for health care reform in these two countries. He focuses specifically on the … [Read More]
Korea’s Development Under Park Chung Hee
From the publisher’s website: Based on personal interviews with the principal policy-makers of the 1970s, Korea’s Development under Park Chung-Hee examines how the president sought to develop South Korea into an independent, autonomous sovereign state both economically and militarily. Kim provides a new narrative in the complex task of exploring the paradoxical nature and effects of … [Read More]
Korea’s Democratization
From the publisher’s website: The Republic of Korea is regarded as a shining example of democracy in East Asia. Despite this significant achievement, Korea’s democracy in practice has been plagued by political gridlock, severe factional infighting, a lack of social capital and cooperation between civil society and political institutions, and leadership behavior that calls to … [Read More]
Contentious Kwangju: The May 18th Uprising in Korea’s Past and Present
From the publisher’s website: One of the largest political protests in contemporary Korean history, the May 1980 Kwangju Uprising still exerts a profound, often contested, influence in Korean society. Through a deft combination of personal reflections and academic analysis, Contentious Kwangju offers a comprehensive examination of the multiple, shifting meanings of this seminal event and explains how … [Read More]
Laying Claim to the Memory of May: A Look Back at the 1980 Kwangju Uprising
The Kwangju Uprising – “Korea’s Tiananmen” – is one of the most important political events in late twentieth-century Korean history. What began as a peaceful demonstration against the imposition of military rule in the southwestern city of Kwangju in May 1980 turned into a bloody people’s revolt. In the two decades since, memories of the … [Read More]
Korean Workers: The Culture and Politics of Class Formation
From the publisher’s website: Forty years of rapid industrialization have transformed millions of South Korean peasants and their sons and daughters into urban factory workers. Hagen Koo explores the experiences of this first generation of industrial workers and describes its struggles to improve working conditions in the factory and to search for justice in society. … [Read More]
Unbroken Spirits: Nineteen Years in South Korea’s Gulag
From the publisher’s website: This is the remarkable and wrenching memoir of a South Korean dissident who was unjustly accused of spying for the North Koreans and jailed for nineteen years as a political prisoner. The updated English-language edition traces Suh Sung’s experiences as a Korean citizen of Japan before his incarceration, his time in … [Read More]
Understanding Korean Politics: An Introduction
From the publisher’s website: Presents an indispensable survey of contemporary Korean politics. Essential reading for anyone interested in contemporary Korea and East Asia, this book provides a comprehensive and balanced introduction to contemporary Korean politics. It explicates the great changes in South Korea, which has gone from being one of the poorest nations to a … [Read More]
Korea On The Brink: A Memoir of Political Intrigue and Military Crisis
In October 1979, a series of potentially catastrophic events was set into motion: President Park Chung-hee was assassinated, South Korean officers staged a coup d’état, and South Korean troops brutally suppressed civilian demonstrators during the controversial Kwangju uprising. Any one of these incidents could have sparked another major conflict on the Korean Peninsula. General Wickham … [Read More]
Massive Entanglement, Marginal Influence: Carter and Korea in Crisis
From the publisher’s website: Using extensive documentation, this book examines how President Jimmy Carter’s troop withdrawal and human rights policies—conceived in abstraction from East Asian realities—contributed to the demise of Korean President Park Chung Hee. The author suggests that some lessons are relevant beyond Korea, for example, in our treatment of human rights problems in … [Read More]