New York: Columbia University Press, 2024. US$35.00, paper. ISBN 9780231211499.
Civic Activism in South Korea: The Intertwining of Democracy and Neoliberalism presents a richly textured, theoretically robust analysis of how South Korean civic organizations have adapted to, resisted, and been reshaped by neoliberal governance. Drawing on over fifteen years (2004 to 2020) of fieldwork, interviews, and participant observation, the author offers a comparative case study of three types of entities: the People’s Solidarity for Participatory Democracy (PSPD), two branches of the feminist Democratic Friends Society (DFS), and Friends of Asia (FOA), a group working with undocumented migrants. Through these, the book interrogates the complex fusion of democratic activism and neoliberal rule.
The book opens with a conceptually sophisticated challenge to the prevalent dichotomization of neoliberalism and democracy. This framing resists normative assumptions that treat neoliberalism as antithetical to democratization, proposing instead that it can both enable and delimit civic activism, depending on context, scale, and organizational form. To parse this ambivalent dynamic, the author introduces two core mechanisms of neoliberal rule—namely, the market, which reconfigures communal engagement through commodified logics of participation, and governance, which absorbs civil society into state-led agendas via outsourcing, partnership, and managerialism.
Building on this analytical groundwork, chapter 2 outlines the normative foundations of South Korean popular activism by identifying four key moral codes: (1) independence from the state, (2) diversity in organizational form and strategy, (3) commitment to institutional and social change, and (4) grassroots participation by ordinary citizens (25). These principles not only guide how civic entities define their identities but also inform the way in which they navigate the pressures of neoliberal governance. While many advocacy groups share these ethical commitments, they interpret and operationalize them differently depending on their goals, resources, and political context.
Chapter 3 explores the ways in which these moral codes function as both aspirational ideals and contested terrains, especially when local actors are drawn into state-led partnerships or market-based logics. While all four collectives publicly oppose the commodification of social relations and maintain formal distance from business interests, the chapter reveals that they nonetheless incorporate transactional forms of engagement into their daily operations. These include fee-based membership systems, the use of promotional language to recruit participants, and the framing of civic activism in terms of personal growth or instrumental value. Particularly illustrative is the way these organizations accept individualized participation patterns, often characterized by low-intensity involvement such as paying dues or attending occasional events, which reflects the pervasive influence of neoliberal subjectivity.
This tension between moral ideals and pragmatic adaptations sets the stage for the following chapters, which turn to empirical case studies of three grassroots organizations. Chapter 4 examines the PSPD, offering a nuanced account of how neoliberal governance has conditioned the entity’s evolution and internal dynamics. It emerged as a prominent national advocacy group committed to institutional reform and policy change, particularly in areas related to social welfare and economic justice. As the chapter shows, the PSPD leveraged new political openings, especially under progressive administrations, to gain access to policymaking spaces and exert influence on legal reforms. However, this formal inclusion came with clear limits, as its policy proposals were taken seriously only insofar as they did not fundamentally disrupt the structural modalities of the neoliberal paradigm. Over time, the PSPD’s increasing specialization and institutional access led to a deepening division between professional staff activists and rank-and-file members.
Chapter 5 shifts to the NE and GY branches of the DFS, feminist organizations that initially sought to empower women through food cooperatives, childcare programs, and political education. The chapter traces their gradual incorporation into the state’s project-based governance apparatus, particularly following the codification of gender equality and welfare policies. While government funding allowed these branches to expand services and professionalize, it also led to bureaucratization, mission drift, and dependence on external metrics of success. The NE branch, in particular, became a contractor of public services, running outsourced programs such as family centres and women’s shelters. The GY branch, although less entangled, faced declining membership and funding after its food co-op separated from the main body. Both cases illustrate how neoliberal governance blurs the line between bottom-up participation and administration, transforming feminist groups into quasi-state actors tasked with managing risk and reproducing social order.
Chapter 6 offers a stark contrast with its ethnographic portrait of the FOA’s prefigurative activism. The FOA works with undocumented migrant workers who face structural vulnerability, detention, and deportation under South Korea’s immigration regime. Its signature practice, “majung” (face-to-face visits to detention centres), embodies a radical ethic of solidarity in which activists visit migrants as equals and refuse to treat them as passive recipients of charity. The chapter also examines the FOA’s Korean language classes and cultural exchange programs, which aim to foster mutual recognition between migrants and native Koreans. Significantly, many volunteers join the organization for self-interested reasons such as college admissions and job preparation, but over time, they undergo an ethical transformation through their relationships with migrants. This community-based space thus becomes a site where neoliberal self-investment collides with, and is reoriented by, the experience of solidarity. Yet the FOA’s refusal to partner with the state also means financial precarity, reliance on volunteer labour, and limited scalability. Its radicalism is simultaneously its strength and its constraint.
The conclusion synthesizes these cases to argue that neoliberalism does not merely repress democracy but reshapes and domesticates it. Local actors are welcomed into policy processes, provided they do not challenge the established “grammar” of contemporary capitalist governance. Professionalization and managerialism become the price of legitimacy, often displacing participatory ideals. The result is a civic sphere increasingly driven by expertise, efficiency, and bureaucratic accountability, rather than collective mobilization, grassroots empowerment, or transformative democratic imagination. The book’s central contribution lies in its relational framework. It avoids simplistic portrayals of neoliberalism as a monolithic threat or communal action as pure resistance. Instead, it highlights how civic organizations navigate overlapping pressures, negotiate moral tensions, and often remain implicated in the systems they seek to critique. Neoliberalism operates not just through coercion but through subtle, everyday practices that recast the boundaries and meanings of public involvement.
Despite its strengths, the book could be sharpened with a more comparative perspective. People-centred activism under neoliberal governance is a global phenomenon, and further reflection on similar cases in other post-authoritarian or post-developmental societies would have strengthened the analysis. Nonetheless, Civic Activism in South Korea is a landmark contribution to scholarship on civil society, neoliberalism, and democratic governance. It provides a nuanced theoretical framework and detailed empirical analysis that reveal how neoliberalism and democracy are co-constructed, contested, and lived through popular grassroots struggles. At a time when democratic spaces are increasingly technocratized, commodified, and hollowed out, this book offers a sobering yet hopeful reminder that fragile alternatives are still being (re)imagined and enacted in the interstices of neoliberal rule.
Wondong Lee
Inha University, Incheon