Unintended Consequences of Repression: Alliance Formation in South Korea's Democracy Movement (1970-1979)

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Unintended Consequences of Repression: Alliance Formation
in South Korea’s Democracy Movement (1970-1979)

Paul Y. Chang, Singapore Management University

Research regarding the impact of repression on social movements
has yielded conflicting findings; some argue that repression
decreases the total quantity of protest events while others argue
that it motivates protest. To move beyond this impasse, various
scholars have suggested exploring how repression influences
the quality of social movements. This study assesses the
impact repression had on the formation of alliances between
different social groups participating in South Korea’s democracy
movement. Results from negative binomial regression analyses
show that repression facilitated the formation of alliances
between movement actors at a time when the overall number of
protest events decreased. This study contributes to the literature
on coercion and mobilization by pointing to the possibility of
movement development during low levels of a protest cycle.

Recent studies of social movements have identified repression as one important aspect of the larger political opportunity structure that significantly shapes movement trajectories (Davenport, Johnston and Mueller 2005; Zwerman and Steinhoff 2005; Earl 2003, 2006; Goldstone and Tilly 2001; della Porta 1996). Empirical findings from past studies have revealed a "paradox" regarding the impact of repression on social movements (Brockett 2005, 1995). While some argue that repression reduces movement vitality (Olzak, Beasley and Olivier 2003) because of the added costs associated with repression (Tilly 1978), others argue that repression increases the rate of protest and collective action (White 1989; Khawaja 1993, 1994). In reviews of this literature researchers have puzzled over the fact that, "Both threats and opportunities can mobilize activism… For some challengers, increased political openness enhances the prospects for mobilization, while other movements seem to respond more to threat than opportunity." (Meyer and Staggenborg 1996:1645,1634; see also Earl 2006; Lichbach 1987).

Research and writing for this study was funded in part by the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center, Stanford University. For comments on previous drafts, I thank Gi-Wook Shin, Susan Olzak, Doug McAdam, David S. Meyer, John Meyer, Jeong-Woo Koo, Myung-Koo Kang, Ehito Kimura, Yong Suk Jang, members of Stanford University’s Workshop on Social Movements and Collective Action and anonymous reviewers for Social Forces.

Direct correspondence to Paul Y. Chang, School of Social Sciences, Singapore Management University, 90 Stamford Road, Level 4, Singapore 178903. E-mail: paulchang@smu.edu.sg.
© The University of North Carolina Press Social Forces 87(2), December 2008

For full text of the article, please visit http://socialforces.unc.edu/epub/folder.2007-02-09.8541500563/copy_of_december08

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Abstracts

Publication Date

December 1, 2008

Journal Publisher

Social Force, The University of North Carolina Press

Authors

Paul Y. Chang

SEAF scholar's book on Malaysian Islamism is published

Read more about SEAF scholar's book on Malaysian Islamism is published

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Date

Tue, 08/25/2009 - 12:00

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Fall 2007 SEAF visiting scholar Joseph Liow's study of Piety and Politics: Islamism in Contemporary Malaysia has been published by Oxford University Press. Liow is an associate professor in the Rajaratnam School of International Studies at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. He worked on completing the manuscript at Stanford. SEAF director Don Emmerson blurbed the book as "broad in coverage yet rich in detail, cautionary without being alarmist, [and] a cogent antidote to wishful thinking about religion, society, and the state, not only in Malaysia but in the wider Muslim world as well."

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Aging Asia: Economic and Social Implications of Rapid Demographic Change in China, Japan, and Korea

Wednesday, February 25, 2009 | 9:00 AM -Wednesday, February 25, 2009 | 5:30 PM

This conference, sponsored by the Asia Health Policy Program at the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center and the Global Aging Program of Stanford Center on Longevity, explored the impact of rapid aging on economic growth, labor markets, social insurance financing, long term care, and health care in China, Japan, and Korea.

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Michael H. Armacost

Former Shorenstein APARC Fellow

Michael_Armacost.jpg PhD

Michael Armacost (April 15, 1937 – March 8, 2025) was a Shorenstein APARC Fellow at the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center (Shorenstein APARC) from 2002 through 2021. In the interval between 1995 and 2002, Armacost served as president of Washington, D.C.'s Brookings Institution, the nation's oldest think tank and a leader in research on politics, government, international affairs, economics, and public policy. Previously, during his twenty-four-year government career, Armacost served, among other positions, as undersecretary of state for political affairs and as ambassador to Japan and the Philippines.

Armacost began his career in academia, as a professor of government at Pomona College. In 1969, he was awarded a White House Fellowship and was assigned to the Secretary and Deputy Secretary of State. Following a stint on the State Department's policy planning and coordination staff, he became a special assistant to the U.S. ambassador in Tokyo from 1972 to 74, his first foreign diplomatic post. Thereafter, he held senior Asian affairs and international security posts in the State Department, the Defense Department, and the National Security Council. From 1982 to 1984, he served as U.S. ambassador to the Philippines and was a key force in helping the country undergo a nonviolent transition to democracy. In 1989, President George Bush tapped him to become ambassador to Japan, considered one of the most important and sensitive U.S. diplomatic posts abroad.

Armacost authored four books, including, Friends or Rivals? The Insider's Account of U.S.–Japan Relations (1996), which draws on his tenure as ambassador, and Ballots, Bullets, and Bargains: American Foreign Policy and Presidential Elections (2015). He also co-edited, with Daniel Okimoto, the Future of America's Alliances in Northeast Asia, published in 2004 by Shorenstein APARC. Armacost served on numerous corporate and nonprofit boards, including TRW, AFLAC, Applied Materials, USEC, Inc., Cargill, Inc., and Carleton College, and he currently chairs the board of The Asia Foundation.

A native of Ohio, Armacost graduated from Carleton College and earned his master's and doctorate degrees in public law and government from Columbia University. He received the President's Distinguished Service Award, the Defense Department's Distinguished Civilian Service Award, the Secretary of State's Distinguished Services Award, and the Japanese government’s Grand Cordon of the Order of the Rising Sun.

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Obama administration will give diplomacy a chance to deal with the North Korean nuclear problem

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Date

Mon, 11/10/2008 - 12:00

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David Straub, the acting director of Korean Studies Program, argues that Obama administration will finally give diplomacy a chance to deal with the North Korean nuclear problem. He stresses that Senator Obama understands the difficulties of dealing with North Korea and will proceed carefully. If North Korea does not respond to this more nuanced American approach, he concludes, the international community is likely to be more supportive of U.S. efforts to constrain North Korean behavior.

Among conservatives in Korea and other American allied countries, there seems to be some anxiety about the election of a relatively unknown, young African-American liberal as the next American president. Typically, when a new U.S. president is elected, American diplomats seek to reassure allies by telling them that the incoming president will pursue fundamentally the same policies as the outgoing president. However, President Obama clearly will adopt a significantly different foreign policy than President Bush, including toward North Korea.

Obama’s soaring rhetoric has led to a widespread (and correct) impression of him as idealistic, but the long presidential campaign also revealed him to be a disciplined politician and a skillful manager. His foreign policy will be much closer to the prudent realpolitik of President Bush’s father than it will be to the “neo-con” approach of President Bush himself.
And while it is true that Obama does not have deep experience in foreign affairs, his youthful years spent in Indonesia and Hawaii, taken together with his successful navigation of American society as a young African-American man, have given him a genuine empathy for different peoples and cultures. He has the self-confidence and intelligence to listen with an open mind to others and then carefully to make his own decisions.

President Obama’s policy toward North Korea will defy stereotypes of the past. In some ways he will be “softer” on North Korea than President Bush; in other ways, he will be “tougher.” Like President Bush and his predecessors, President Obama will take the position that he can never accept a North Korea with nuclear weapons. On the other hand, Obama will not engage in bluster such as “all options are on the table,” which most South Koreans reject and which only plays into the DPRK’s hands.

Instead, Obama will finally give diplomacy a fighting chance. Even during the past couple of years, President Bush remained very reluctant to engage fully in negotiations with North Korea. President Obama will order that a policy review be conducted expeditiously, and he will probably appoint a very senior special envoy to take charge of negotiations with North Korea. While maintaining the framework of the Six-Party Talks and consulting very closely with the Republic of Korea and Japan, he will also authorize meaningful bilateral negotiations with North Korea. If those negotiations bear real fruit, he may even visit Pyongyang himself if he is confident that he will be able to strike a deal completely ending North Korea’s nuclear ambitions.

President Obama will probably offer North Korea a “more for more” deal. In other words, compared to President Bush he will propose a much more detailed and concrete series of steps to be taken by North Korea, the United States, and other members of the Six-Party Talks. The aim will be agreement on an early end to North Korea’s nuclear weapons programs.

The North Koreans should not think that President Obama will be “easier” than President Bush. If, as may well be the case, the North Koreans reject President Obama’s approach or drag their feet in responding to it, he, unlike President Bush, will have the international credibility to work more effectively with other members of the Six-Party Talks and the international community to limit North Korea’s options.

Moreover, as a hardheaded domestic politician, President Obama will be careful to avoid situations in which the Republican opposition could credibly criticize him as being naïve about North Korea. Indeed, Obama’s team recognizes clearly that, having declared itself a nuclear weapons state and tested a nuclear device, North Korea may not be prepared to verifiably give up its nuclear weapons ambitions.

In formulating and conducting his policy toward North Korea, President Obama will have access to many trusted experts on North Korea, beginning with Vice President Biden and his staff. Obama is also advised by a number of experienced officials from the Clinton administration, from former Defense Secretary Bill Perry to former career diplomat Jeffrey Bader.

U.S. relations with the Republic of Korea are key to any successful American policy toward North Korea. Obama and his team fully appreciate the importance of U.S.-ROK relations and the security alliance. They will coordinate very closely with the Lee Myung-bak administration and never sacrifice the interests of the Republic of Korea, which is immeasurably more important to the United States than the DPRK is or ever will be.

President Obama will support the implementation of the agreements President Bush reached with the Republic of Korea on the realignment of U.S. Forces of Korea and the transfer of wartime operational control, as befits the ROK’s military and economic might.

Under President Obama, the United States will also aim to approve, with some adjustments, the U.S.-ROK Free Trade Agreement, although it may take a year or so to do so as he perforce deals first with the global financial and economic crises and wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. President Obama must be cognizant of the viewpoint of leading congressional Democrats and the constituencies they represent. It may be counterproductive if the ROK pushes too hard, too fast for U.S. approval of the FTA.

Obama’s inauguration will also open up new possibilities for U.S.-ROK coordination and cooperation on global issues. Unlike President Bush, whose early unilateralist mindset and specific policies caused dismay among international friends and foes alike, President Obama begins with a vast reservoir of sympathy and respect throughout the world. That will make it easier, and more useful, for the Republic of Korea to cooperate globally more with the United States.

In short, South Koreans should be reassured, not that President Obama’s foreign policy will be like that of President Bush, but that it will be different. Perhaps South Koreans will even begin to feel that their alliance with the United States is not just one that they feel they must have for their country’s long-term interests – but also one of which they can feel proud.

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Global financial reformers must heed Asia's clout

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Authors

Phillip Lipscy

News Type

Commentary

Date

Tue, 11/04/2008 - 12:00

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Professor Phillip Lipscy discusses the current international financial crisis and provides insight for future reforms. "The IMF and World Bank should be reformed to better reflect the interests and concerns of rising economic powers. Voting shares need to be further redistributed to reflect underlying economic realities. Decision making rules should be modified to give greater weight or agenda-setting authority to regional actors -- the US may have a strong interest in loans to Mexico, but Japan may have a greater stake in Indonesia. Assignment of the top positions should be made truly competitive. Core functions should be decentralized -- both institutions are headquartered in Washington, impeding employment of top talent from Asia and limiting intellectual exchange."

Major international crises often produce tectonic shifts in international relations. Under pressure from key European counterparts, President Bush has agreed to a "new Bretton Woods" summit on Nov. 15.

It would be hard to overstate the potential significance of this meeting. The first Bretton Woods, in 1944, set the rules for monetary relations among nations, and it created the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank.

While European leaders are pushing for greater regulation and a major overhaul of the international financial order, US policymakers have been lukewarm, emphasizing the preservation of free-market capitalism. This transatlantic drama has obscured the more fundamental problem—how to accommodate the historic shift of economic power away from the West toward Asia.

Including India, broader East Asia encompasses more than half of the world's population. The region already accounts for about one-third of global economic output, oil consumption, and CO2 emissions, and this is only likely to grow in the future. Over the course of the 21st century, Asia's economic and geopolitical weight in the world will, in all likelihood, come to rival that of Europe in the 19th century. Asian problems will become increasingly indistinguishable from global problems.

In the face of such dramatic change, the IMF and World Bank are becoming relics of a bygone era. At the time of their creation, by US and European negotiators, the major challenge was to get capital flowing from the US to war-ravaged Europe. The days of the US as creditor state are long gone—our massive current account deficit is financed by importing nearly $1 trillion in foreign capital every year. Major US banks are being rescued by sovereign wealth funds and financial institutions from the Middle East and East Asia. China and Japan alone held over $600 billion of securities issued by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, making the bailout of those institutions a major foreign policy issue.

Despite these changed realities, both Bretton Woods institutions remain dominated by the West. By convention, the IMF is led by a European, the World Bank by a US national. The US is the only country with veto power over important decisions in either body.

My analysis of voting shares in the IMF indicates that the Allied powers of World War II have been consistently overrepresented compared to Axis powers despite the passing of more than 60 years since the end of that war. Studies show that IMF lending is biased in favor of recipients with strong economic and diplomatic ties to the US and key European states at the expense of other members.

This unbalanced representation had real consequences during the Asian Financial Crisis of 1997-98, when the IMF, as part of its rescue operation, implemented policies widely viewed as contrary to Asian interests. During the crisis, Japanese financial authorities proposed an Asian Monetary Fund as a potential alternative source of liquidity. This proposal was rejected by US officials, who feared dilution of IMF authority. However, over the past decade, East Asian states have stockpiled foreign currency reserves and developed regional cooperation that may eventually develop into a credible alternative to the IMF.

The IMF and World Bank should be reformed to better reflect the interests and concerns of rising economic powers. Voting shares need to be further redistributed to reflect underlying economic realities. Decisionmaking rules should be modified to give greater weight or agenda-setting authority to regional actors—the US may have a strong interest in loans to Mexico, but Japan may have a greater stake in Indonesia. Assignment of the top positions should be made truly competitive. Core functions should be decentralized—both institutions are headquartered in Washington, impeding employment of top talent from Asia and limiting intellectual exchange.

An international financial architecture that fragments or remains centered on the West as Asia rises will probably prove grossly ineffective. Europe attempted much the same during the turbulent period between the two World Wars, resurrecting a system based on British hegemony even as Britain was in relative decline. Those were scary times, with free riding and beggar-thy-neighbor policies feeding mutual distrust and economic catastrophe.

This will not be the last financial crisis we face. Next time, ad hoc cooperation by the US and Europe may prove insufficient. Franklin Roosevelt had the foresight to include China on the United Nations Security Council long before that nation became a geopolitical heavyweight. Similar foresight should be brought to bear as world leaders debate the future of the international financial architecture.

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Hard Choices

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Hard Choices offers a most rewarding perspective on how Southeast Asian states straddle the ongoing tensions among three rarely compatible goals—security, democracy, and regionalism. Empirically rich and topically diverse, [the book] is broad in scope and full of deep analytic insights. It will be appreciated well beyond Southeast Asia." — T. J. PEMPEL, University of California, Berkeley

Southeast Asia faces hard choices. The region’s most powerful organization, ASEAN, is being challenged to ensure security and encourage democracy while simultaneously reinventing itself as a model of Asian regionalism.

Should ASEAN’s leaders defend a member country’s citizens against state predation for the sake of justice—and risk splitting ASEAN itself? Or should regional leaders privilege state security over human security for the sake of order—and risk being known as a dictators’ club? Should ASEAN isolate or tolerate the junta in Myanmar? Is democracy a requisite to security, or is it the other way around? How can democratization become a regional project without first transforming the Association into a “people centered” organization? But how can ASEAN reinvent itself along such lines if its member states are not already democratic?

How will its new Charter affect ASEAN’s ability to make these hard choices? How is regionalism being challenged by transnational crime, infectious disease, and other border-jumping threats to human security in Southeast Asia? Why have regional leaders failed to stop the perennial regional “haze” from brush fires in democratic Indonesia? Does democracy help or hinder nuclear energy security in the region?

In this timely book—the second of a three-book series focused on Asian regionalism—ten analysts from six countries address these and other pressing questions that Southeast Asia faces in the twenty-first century.

Recent Praise for Hard Choices

“In this delightful volume, a diverse, fresh, and talented group of authors shed new light on Southeast Asia and speak engagingly to wider scholarly questions. Emmerson's introduction sets the tone for an unusually creative edited collection.”
—Andrew MacIntyre, Australian National University
“In Hard Choices, Donald Emmerson has brought together a remarkable group of leading young scholars to write on Southeast Asian regionalism from political-security, economic, and sociological perspectives. His introductory chapter defines the dimensions of regionalism on which the other contributors elaborate in a series of fine essays examining ASEAN’s past, present, and alternative futures. Hard Choices is a landmark study that will be consulted for years to come by scholars and practitioners. Highly recommended.”
—Sheldon Simon, Arizona State University

Examination copies: Desk, examination, or review copies can be requested through Stanford University Press.

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Publication Type

Books

Publication Date

November 1, 2008

Subtitle

Security, Democracy, and Regionalism in Southeast Asia

Authors

Donald K. Emmerson

Book Publisher

Shorenstein APARC

Book Publisher External URL

https://aparc.fsi.stanford.edu/publications/books-by-shorenstein-aparc

Lisa Lee

Read more about Lisa Lee

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Lisa Lee received an MA in human resources management from Hawai'i Pacific University in Honolulu and a BA in civil law (Sarjana Hukum) from Tarumanagara University in Jakarta. Prior to joining the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center, she held managerial and administrative positions at ISS International School in Singapore; Bank of Japan and Panasonic Finance America in New York City; and at Media Indonesia in Jakarta. She worked at APARC through March 2025.

Program Coordinator, Asia Health Policy Program, Southeast Asia Program, and Taiwan Program

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Fri, 08/30/2024 - 17:08

Mobilized Workers vs. Morphing Capital: Challenging Global Supply Chains in Vietnam

Monday, November 17, 2008 | 12:00 PM -Monday, November 17, 2008 | 1:30 PM

Capital in its many facets is variable. Like quicksilver, it can divide, reunite, and metamorphose seamlessly across a spectrum of ownerships by foreigners, the state, and domestic private
entrepreneurs.

What does variable capital mean in and for Vietnam? Who are the different investors? How do they respond to state efforts to attract investments from overseas Vietnamese? How do global supply chains—corporate buyers, contract factories, and subcontractors—shape the changing nature and impacts of capital in Vietnam? How does a self-described socialist state use policies on investment, employment, and the privatization of state-owned factories to control the relations between workers and owners? What roles in this mix are played by journalists who can ignore neither the party line nor the workers who protest in spite of it?

In addition to addressing these questions, Prof. Tran will argue that workers in Vietnam are not resigned to being squeezed between morphing capital and state control. They defend their interests flexibly in diverse forms of protest, overt and covert, including appeals to the state’s own socialist vision. Fresh from extensive fieldwork in labor-intensive industries such as textiles, garments, and footwear, Prof. Tran will show how Vietnamese workers use origin, class, gender, and ethnicity to mobilize collective action against morphing capital in a one-party state.

Angie Ngoc Tran is a professor of political economy at California State University, Monterey Bay. Her latest publications include articles in the Labor Studies Journal (2007) on labor media and labor-management-state relations in Vietnam. Her PhD is from the University of Southern California (1996).

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Angie Ngoc Trần

Shorenstein APARC
Stanford University
Encina Hall E301
Stanford, CA 94305-6055

(831) 582-3753 (650) 723-6530

angie_tran@csumb.edu

Lee Kong Chian NUS-Stanford Distinguished Fellow on Southeast Asia

Angie_BioPhoto_Adjusted.jpg MA, PhD

Angie Ngoc Trần is a professor in the Division of Social and Behavioral Sciences and Global Studies at California State University, Monterey Bay (CSUMB). Her plan as the 2008 Lee Kong Chian National University of Singapore-Stanford University Distinguished Fellow is to complete a book manuscript on labor-capital relations in Vietnam that highlights how different identities of investors and owners—shaped by government policies, ethnicity, characteristics of investment, and the role they played in global flexible production—affect workers’ conditions, consciousness, and collective action differently.

Tran spent May-July 2008 at Stanford and will return to campus for the second half of November 2008. She will share the results of her project in a public seminar at Stanford under SEAF auspices on November 17 2008.

Prof. Trần’s many publications include “Contesting ‘Flexibility’: Networks of Place, Gender, and Class in Vietnamese Workers’ Resistance,” in Taking Southeast Asia to Market (2008); “Alternatives to ‘Race to the Bottom’ in Vietnam: Minimum Wage Strikes and Their Aftermath,” Labor Studies Journal (December 2007); “The Third Sleeve: Emerging Labor Newspapers and the Response of Labor Unions and the State to Workers’ Resistance in Vietnam,” Labor Studies Journal (September 2007); and (as co-editor and author) Reaching for the Dream: Challenges of Sustainable Development in Vietnam (2004). She received her Ph.D. in Political Economy and Public Policy at the University of Southern California in 1996 and an M.A. in Developmental Economics at USC in 1991.

Angie Ngoc Tran 2008 Lee Kong Chian NUS-Stanford Distinguished Fellow Speaker

Lectures

Private Providers and Public-Private Partnerships in Health: Asia in Comparative Perspective

Tuesday, January 27, 2009 | 12:00 PM -Tuesday, January 27, 2009 | 1:15 PM

Dr. Forsberg will present findings from studies in China and Vietnam and put those findings into a broader comparative perspective regarding the future role of the private sector in improving health service delivery and population health.

Birger Carl Forsberg is a public health specialist and lecturer in International Health at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, Sweden from where he holds an MD and a PhD. He is also trained in economics and has health economics as one of his areas of work. Dr Forsberg has more than 20 years experience from international health from around 25 low- and middle-income countries as an adviser to bilateral donors and international organisations. Since 2002 he has been a consultant to the World Bank on public private sector collaboration in health. He is also coordinator since 2002 of a joint Harvard-Karolinska research programme called Private Sector Programme in Health (PSP). The programme has coordinated studies of the private health sector in five countries in Asia and Africa. In his talk Dr Forsberg will present findings from PSP studies in China and Vietnam and put those findings into a broader perspective on the future role of the private sector in health service delivery for increased access to health services and improved health.

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Birger Carl Forsberg, MD Private Sector Program in Health Coordinator Speaker Karolinska Institutet, Sweden

Seminars

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