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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 their socioeconomic and political struggles against the backdrop of South Korea's authoritarian industrialization and U.S. hegemony in East Asia. Ingu Hwang details how local prodemocracy protesters were able to translate their sufferings and causes into international human rights claims that highlighted...
Moral Authoritarianism offers a new perspective on the three modern Korean states—the Japanese colonial state, South Korea, and North Korea—by studying neighborhood associations during the four war decades (1930s–1960s). The existing historiography perceives the three states in relation to imperialism and to the Cold War, thus emphasizing their differences by political changes. By shifting the focus from national policy to local society, this book instead reveals their deep similarities. Neighborhood associations dated back to the premodern Chosŏn period (1392–1910), when they were used to assist local governance. They faded in significance until the colonial government established ...
This book uncovers how human rights gained meaning and power for Americans in the 1940s, the 1970s and today.
Cornerstone of the Nation is the first historical account of the complex alliance of military and civilian forces that catapulted South Korea’s conjoined militarization and industrialization under Park Chung Hee (1961–1979). Kwon reveals how Park’s secret program to build an independent defense industry spurred a total mobilization of business, science, labor, and citizenry, all of which converged in military-civilian forces that propelled an unprecedented model of modernization in Korea. Drawing on largely untapped declassified materials from Korea and personal interviews with contemporaneous participants in the nascent defense industry, as well as declassified US documents and other ...
When do we see social movements mobilize against the American military overseas, and what explains their varying intensity? Despite increasing interest in the vast network of U.S. military bases on foreign soil, it is still not well understood why some host communities resist the bases in their backyards, while others remain compliant. In Base Towns, Claudia Junghyun Kim addresses this puzzle by investigating the contentious politics surrounding twenty U.S. military bases across Korea and Japan. In particular, she looks at municipalities hosting these bases and differing levels of community acceptance and resistance over time. Drawing on fieldwork interviews, participant observation, and pro...
Since the adoption of the 1947 Constitution of Japan, the document has become a contested symbol of contrasting visions of Japan. Japanese Constitutional Revisionism and Civic Activism is a volume which examines the history of Japan’s constitutional debates, key legal decisions and interpretations, the history and variety of activism, and activists’ ties to party politics and to fellow activists overseas.
In Strangers in the Family, Guo-Quan Seng provides a gendered history of settler Chinese community formation in Indonesia during the Dutch colonial period (1816–1942). At the heart of this story lies the creolization of patrilineal Confucian marital and familial norms to the colonial legal, moral, and sexual conditions of urban Java. Departing from male-centered narratives of Ooverseas Chinese communities, Strangers in the Family tells the history of community- formation from the perspective of women who were subordinate to, and alienated from, full Chinese selfhood. From native concubines and mothers, creole Chinese daughters, and wives and matriarchs, to the first generation of colonial-educated feminists, Seng showcases women's moral agency as they negotiated, manipulated, and debated men in positions of authority over their rights in marriage formation and dissolution. In dialogue with critical studies of colonial Eurasian intimacies, this book explores Asian-centered inter-ethnic patterns of intimate encounters. It shows how contestations over women's place in marriage and in society were formative of a Chinese racial identity in colonial Indonesia.