Danielle L. Chubb. CONTENTIOUS ACTIVISM & INTER-KOREAN RELATIONS.

[한국의 정치사회][남북관계][서평] 

CONTENTIOUS ACTIVISM & INTER-KOREAN RELATIONS.
By Danielle L. Chubb. New York: Columbia
University Press, 2014. 

Review


In this meticulously researched book, Danielle L. Chubb reveals that South Korean policies toward the North are about far more than strategic considerations. Reaching beyond prevailing state-centric foreign policy accounts, she convincingly argues that inter-Korean relations have been significantly shaped by the legacy that several decades of contentious political activism have left on South Korean society and politics. (Roland Bleiker, University of Queensland)

A comprehensive and penetrating analysis of the dynamic interplay of democracy, unification, and inter-Korean relations. The book is original and innovative in theory and methodology, rigorous in empirical investigation, and rich in policy implications. A must read for students of Korean politics and East Asia studies. (Chung-in Moon, Yonsei University)

About the Author
Danielle L. Chubb is lecturer in international relations at Deakin University in Melbourne, Australia. She earned her Ph.D. at the Australian National University and has been a research fellow with Pacific Forum CSIS. Her main research interests are the political dynamics of the Korean peninsula, the role of nontraditional actors in security arenas, and Australian foreign policy in the Asia-Pacific.


Product details

Series: Contemporary Asia in the World

Hardcover: 296 pages

- 뉴지렌드 목사님과 페친이 되었는데, 그분 페북에서 이 책에 대해 알게 되었다. 이분은 왜 그런지 북한에 관심에 관심을 가지고 있다. 이분만이 아니라 뉴지렌드에는 북한을 친구로서 개방하는데 도우려는 사람들이 꽤 있다. 아직 그 역사적인 사연의 충분히 알지는 못하나, 뉴지렌드나 호주 사람들이 하는 것 처럼 민족주의(+ 반일감정)를 뺀, 친선관계로 북한을 접근하는 방법을 추구해 보려고 한다.
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- 이 책은 한국사회에 시민단체의 대북관계에 관한 운동을 분석한다.
- 각 단체들의 관계적이며, 진화론적 이해가 필요하다는 것이 키 포인트인 듯하다.
- 호주에서의 박사학위 논문을 책으로 한 것.
- 외국인 연구자에세는 도움이 될 것 같은데, 국내 연구자에게는 어떨지.
- 최근 책인데, 왠일인지 무료 전차책이 온라인으로 있다.
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Introduction 1
Understanding Inter-Korean Relations 1
Political Activism and Inter-Korean Relations 6

1. Political Activism, Discursive Power, and Norm Negotiation 9
Traditional Approach 10
Alternative Accounts of Inter-Korean Relations 12
Inter-Korean Relations and North Korean Human Rights 16
Political Activism and Inter-Korean Relations 18
Conceptual Framework 20
Historical Case Studies 41

2. Political Activism Under Yushin and the Kwangju Uprising,
May 1980 47
First Republic: Rhee Syngman 48
Second Republic: Chang Myŏn 50
Third Republic: Park Chung Hee 53
Yushin: The Fourth Republic 57
viii contents
Anticommunism and Nationalism Under Park Chung Hee 62
Political Activism Under Yushin 66
The End of Yushin 76

3. From Kwangju to Democracy, 1980–1987 79
Dominant Discourses of the Fift h Republic 81
Political Activism in the Fift h Republic 90
Democratic Transition 114

4. South Korea in Transition, 1987–1997 119
Roh Tae Woo, 1987–1992 122
Kim Young Sam, 1992–1997 125
Post-1987 Political Activism 132
The North Korean Famine 148

5. A New Era of Inter-Korean Relations, 1998–2007 153
Kim Dae Jung, 1998–2002 156
Roh Moo Hyun, 2003–2007 160
Political Activism Under the Sunshine Policy 165
Transnational Advocacy and South Korean Discourses 188

Conclusion:
Inter-Korean Relations from a South Korean Perspective 197
A New Age of Conservative Politics: Inter-Korean Relations Under Lee Myung Bak, 2008–2012 200
Future Prospects 205

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This book discusses how sets of beliefs, which the author specifies as “arguments” or ‘‘discourses” (19) around the political priority of “unification, human rights, and democracy” have, according to the author, provided a focus for three “distinct activist ovements” in South Korea. These distinct sets of beliefs, the author argues, “continue to influence debate around
inter-Korean relations” (19) as the political activists of yesterday have become the politicians, diplomats, and officials of today. The aim of the book is to understand better inter-Korean relations through “examining the nature of South Korean domestic political debate” (5).

Chapter 1 reviews various theoretical perspectives to conclude that “an agency-driven conceptualization of discursive power” provides a helpful explanatory device that is best employed via “a wider, historical view of politics” (30). 

To this end, chapters 2, 3, 4 and 5, provide a historical summary of the relations between South Korean governments and political activists from the years of the Park Chung Hee military dictatorship (1961 to 1979) through to and including the period of democratization from the late 1980s, and the “decade of progressive rule” (195) of the late 1990s and early 2000s that concluded with the election in 2007 of the conservative president, Lee Myung Bak. 

The fairly short concluding chapter summarizes the contribution of the book as demonstrating that political activism is not spontaneous but has ‘deep-seated social, cultural, and political roots’ and that “the relationship between dominant (state) and dissident (political activist) discourses is multifaceted” (98).

Critical analysis, in the scholarly sense, of human rights movements is very sparse, given the fear of analysts of being portrayed as sympathetic
to human rights abuses and the understandable reluctance of scholars to have their work isinterpreted by one side or another in politically charged debates. 

In South Korea, those fears are compounded by the continued existence of the National Security Law that is used to penalize those judged to be sympathetic to North Korea with sanctions that include mprisonment.

This book, therefore, addresses a number of potentially productive debates.

Chapter 5 provides interesting new empirical material in the short section on the “new right” and the “new left” of the human rights movement in South Korea, in terms of the division between them as to how much to involve United States regime change advocates in domestic human rights campaigns (168–195). The author also touches on the story of how some South Korean activists saw North Korea as a society to be emulated, how most were disillusioned but some remained faithful to what for most observers
is at best an outdated society ruled over by a repressive government and at worst a vision of hell in which crimes of humanity are committed against
the entire population on an everyday basis; this is another untold story that would bear further investigation.

Overall, however, the book is handicapped by insufficient specification of the research question such that the narrative is forced into an over-high
level of generality. The consequent lack of a defined central thesis results in the absence of cohesive analytical structure that makes it hard to identify the key points that the author wants to make. 

In the absence of a clear analytical framework, the historical chapters end up with a lot of descriptive material that the book struggles to integrate into narrative cohesion. That is not to say that the book does not abound with ideas and possibilities but the trick here would have been to develop these ideas so as to provide the foundations for a disciplined framing of the historical material.

The book clearly started as a doctoral thesis and there is nothing intrinsically wrong in that. It does, however, suffer from the absence of a really
good editing job that could have eradicated what read as quite descriptive summaries between chapters, repetition, odd locutions, and references to
theoretical work that are not integrated or developed as part of the analytical frame for the book. 

More substantively, there is a “levels-of-analysis” issue that need to be resolved. The author is centrally concerned with the issue of “norm negotiation” and this is a potentially important way of thinking about who or what achieves hegemonic dominance in any society; the issue in this book is that there is an elision between the level of individual, nonstate actor, society, government and state. 

In the context of a book that is intending to explain inter-Korean (state and society?) relations by evaluating the activities of individuals and non-state actors, we need, at minimum, to have these different levels analytically specified so that the questions of who is negotiating, how, why and what are the outcomes, in terms of the relationships between these different analytical levels, can be asked in the first place.

Nevertheless, at the heart of this book is a commendable approach to scholarship. It is committed to the idea of explaining important things—in this case what political activists do and how we understand what they do—and it also tries hard to avoid naïve empirical exposition as a substitute for
careful analytical investigation.
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Review by Hazel Smith
University of Central Lancashire, Preston, United Kingdom
Pacific Affairs: Volume 88, No. 3 – September 2015
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