In what ways can or should art engage with its social context? Authors, readers, and critics have been preoccupied with this question since the dawn of modern literature in Korea. Advocates of social engagement have typically focused on realist texts, seeing such works as best suited to represent injustices and inequalities by describing them as … [Read More]
Booklist: Human Rights and Social Justice
Flowers of Fire: The Inside Story of South Korea’s Feminist Movement and What It Means for Women’ s Rights Worldwide
An eye-opening firsthand account of the ongoing and trailblazing feminist movement in South Korea—one that the world should be watching. Since the beginning of the #MeToo movement, tens of thousands of people in South Korea have taken to the street, and many more brave individuals took a stand, to end a decades-long abortion ban and … [Read More]
Human Rights and Transnational Democracy in South Korea
Drawing on previously unused or underutilized archival sources, this book offers the first account of the historical intersection between South Korea’s democratic transition and the global human rights boom in the 1970s. It shows how local pro-democracy activists pragmatically engaged with global advocacy groups, especially Amnesty International and the World Council of Churches, to maximize … [Read More]
The North Korean Conundrum: Balancing Human Rights and Nuclear Security
North Korea is consistently identified as one of the world’s worst human rights abusers. However, the issue of human rights in North Korea is a complex one, intertwined with issues like life in the North Korean police state, inter-Korean relations, denuclearization, access to information in the North, and international cooperation, to name a few. There … [Read More]
A Long Road to Justice: Stories from the Frontlines in Asia
A constant stream of impoverished women and girls have been, and are being, enslaved and abused in the Asia Pacific region. Slavery is not a historical issue – it’s happening today. History is repeating itself. Through Sylvia Yu Friedman’s work in journalism, counter-trafficking and philanthropy, she has had rare and incredible access to victims of … [Read More]
Movie Minorities: Transnational Rights Advocacy and South Korean Cinema
From the publisher’s website: Rights advocacy has become a prominent facet of South Korea’s increasingly transnational motion picture output, especially following the 1998 presidential inauguration of Kim Dae-jung, a former political prisoner and victim of human rights abuses who received the Nobel Peace Prize in 2000. Today it is not unusual to see a big-budget … [Read More]
Patterns of Impunity: Human Rights in North Korea and the Role of the U.S. Special Envoy
As the U.S. special envoy for North Korean human rights from 2009 to 2017, Ambassador Robert R. King led efforts to ensure that human rights were an integral part of U.S. policy with North Korea. In this book, he traces U.S. involvement and interest in North Korean human rights, from the adoption of the North … [Read More]
Dying for Rights: Putting North Korea’s Human Rights Abuses on the Record
North Korea’s human rights violations are unparalleled in the contemporary world. In Dying for Rights, Sandra Fahy provides the definitive account of the abuses committed by the North Korean state, domestically and internationally, from its founding to the present. Dying for Rights scrutinizes North Korea’s treatment of its own people as well as foreign nationals, … [Read More]
North Korean Human Rights: Activists and Networks
From the publisher’s website: The evidentiary weight of North Korean defectors’ testimony depicting crimes against humanity has drawn considerable attention from the international community in recent years. Despite the attention to North Korean human rights, what remains unexamined is the rise of the transnational advocacy network, which drew attention to the issue in the first … [Read More]
Accidental Activists: Victim Movements and Government Accountability in Japan and South Korea
Government wrongdoing or negligence harms people worldwide, but not all victims are equally effective at obtaining redress. In Accidental Activists, Celeste L. Arrington examines the interactive dynamics of the politics of redress to understand why not. Relatively powerless groups like redress claimants depend on support from political elites, active groups in society, the media, experts, lawyers, … [Read More]
Making and Faking Kinship: Marriage and Labor Migration between China and South Korea
In the years leading up to and directly following rapprochement with China in 1992, the South Korean government looked to ethnic Korean (Chosǒnjok) brides and laborers from northeastern China to restore productivity to its industries and countryside. South Korean officials and the media celebrated these overtures not only as a pragmatic solution to population problems … [Read More]
Haunting the Korean Diaspora: Shame, Secrecy, and the Forgotten War
Since the Korean War—the forgotten war—more than a million Korean women have acted as sex workers for U.S. servicemen. More than 100,000 women married GIs and moved to the United States. Through intellectual vigor and personal recollection, Haunting the Korean Diaspora explores the repressed history of emotional and physical violence between the United States and … [Read More]