Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021. xvii, 342 pp. (Tables, graphs, B&W photos.) US$115.36, cloth. ISBN 9781108841337.
Anyone who has studied or, better yet, lived in South Korea over the last three decades will have noticed the contentious nature of its post-authoritarian society. Heteropatriarchal oppression, Japanese imperialism, American and Soviet occupations, national division, capitalist exploitation, and other turbulent histories have created the conditions in which a variety of disgruntled individuals and groups have articulated ideas and programs for ameliorative change. Comprised of 14 research chapters in addition to an introduction and conclusion, this expansive volume, the first of its kind, traces a variety of rights-claiming agents, issues, and processes. It offers sociological, political, and historical studies on how and why different languages of grievance (only recent ones are based in the liberal language of human rights) came into being at particular moments. The volume also investigates the institutional experiences of rights advocates and their detractors in a variety of sectors, including women’s social status, victims of state violence, underclass labourers, foreign migrants, North Korean refugees, citizens with disabilities, “sexual minorities,” and more.
As one might imagine, holding these disparate groups and their distinctive struggles together as a coherent narrative presents any editor with considerable challenges. Celeste L. Arrington and Patricia Goedde offer a cogent introduction to guide readers through this wide-ranging and ambitious volume. Throughout, they emphasize the interrelated processes of enacting, constructing, and contesting human rights. As such, they are mostly interested in claims-making as a politicized process, rather than on the wider social implications and/or lived realities of such engagements with institutional power. Especially welcome is the volume’s unique “bottom-up” approach which, rather than accept laws as they may appear on the books, follows the contentious process of rights claiming in such disparate spheres as litigation, protest, lobbying, media campaigns, and more. The editors also point to new ways in which activist movements of late have worked to institutionalize, albeit only partially, legal remedies.
Having established the larger framework, subsequent chapters cover “rights in historical perspectives” (chapters 1 to 3), “institutional mechanisms for rights claiming” (chapters 4 to 8), “mobilizing rights for the marginalized” (chapters 9 to 12), and “shaping rights for new citizens and noncitizens” (chapters 13 and 14). The first part mainly focuses on the grievances of women from the Chosŏn dynasty (1392–1910) into the colonial era (1910–1945), showing how these marginalized actors used empowering words and male-dominated institutions to seek remedies to their legal disenfranchisement. Unfortunately, other agents and issues are not covered in the history section, which could have benefitted from a wider variety of actors and topics. Nevertheless, this section prepares readers to examine the main focus of the book—namely, contemporary South Korea—especially how organizational structures enabled and constrained claimants from enacting social change. It also reveals the complex relationship that national institutions, such as the National Human Rights Commission of Korea (est. 2001), for example, maintain with overseas groups and leaders, thereby highlighting the inherent transnationality of human rights discourses and related practices. The third section tackles the position of socially and culturally marginalized citizens. It examines how worker grievances led to rights consciousness, disabled peoples’ activism pressed for equal treatment (rather than state paternalism), and the ongoing struggles of LGBTI citizens to enact an anti-discrimination law. The final section, which deals with new and noncitizens, rightly points to the current hierarchy of rights as an unequal structure that determines who can become included in the South Korean nation. Of note here is how race, ethnicity, and international status bear on the processes of legal and cultural incorporation. An overwhelming focus on structures and institutions, however, has its limits in terms of the analysis and conclusions of this and several other sections. One does wonder what a more agent- and subjectivity-oriented analysis would uncover in terms of how individuals consider their relative place in an increasingly multi-ethnic and multi-cultural order, but one that continues to privilege (and marginalize) particular kinds of Koreans in a highly stratified order of relative racial homogeneity.
In the conclusion, the editors return to consider their primary research question: that is, “why and how communities and individuals in Korea have mobilized the law and rights language to express grievances and claim entitlements” (15). They reiterate their processual focus on rights-in-action and the diversity of tactics that various claimants have used to achieve their goals, with some groups more successful than others. While these frameworks allow readers to understand the contested nature of human rights in South Korea, they do not adequately consider some of the unintended consequences of citizens so actively and aggressively embracing liberal notions of rights, especially regarding individual privacy, in an advanced capitalist, post-authoritarian society. Indeed, even as an increasingly large number of interest groups today share a common language of grievance, their (ab)use of this mode of resolving conflict is causing a number of infelicitous problems. These include growing social fragmentation and animosity among marginalized groups, an inability to create cross-group alliances in the promotion of common goals, and a paranoid-like defensiveness toward real and/or imagined outsiders. These exhausting byproducts of several intense decades of rights claiming have left some contemporary critics wondering just how microscopic and scattered human rights issues will become. With this new volume in hand, we have a useful guide through which to observe and perhaps even stymie this troubling trajectory of extreme fragmentation and individualization, which are other facets of rights-claiming in South Korea that deserve our attention.
Todd A. Henry
University of California, San Diego