Pursuing Post-democratisation: The Resilience of Politics by Public Security in Contemporary South Korea

Abstract

This article analyses the disputed election of President Park Geunhye and her administration's confrontation of left-nationalist politicians and other social movements during her first year in office. We argue that the Park administration's policies resonate with contemporary discussions of "post-democratisation," a process whereby social rights are increasingly subordinated to market logics and state power insulated from popular challenges. Under the conservative governments of Lee Myung-bak and Park Geunhye, this process has been animated by a mode of confrontation known in South Korea as "politics by public security." This politics targets social conflict and political dissent as threats to national security and has involved both illegal interventions by state institutions -such as the 2012 electoral interference by state agencies including the National Intelligence Service -and a cultural politics that affirms but revises the narrative of Korean democratisation by obfuscating the nature of the democracy movement and by attempting to restore the honour of conservative forces associated with former dictatorships. In order to better understand this conjuncture, we explore its origin within a tacit alliance between both former public security prosecutors-cum-conservative politicians and a movement of conservative intellectuals known as the New Right.

Ronan Paddison on public space and the post-political

“…Indeed, similar modes of enquiry can be discerned in work that has sought to unpack the different modes and tactics of de-politicization at play in different geographical contexts (Van Puymbroeck and Oosterlynck, 2014) or to trace the actually existing geographies of post-politicization (Raco and Lin, 2012) by exploring the situated and contingent armature of tactics that are mobilized to silence political disagreement (see, for example, Baeten, 2009;Thomas, 2017). And the same goes for accounts that have sought to document and analyze the always contingent and contested unfolding of processes of post-democratization and the uneven geographies in and through which these operate (see, for example, Doucette and Koo, 2016;Karaliotas, 2019).…”

Geographies of politics and the police: Post-democratization, SYRIZA, and the politics of the “Greek debt crisis”

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Lineages of the Authoritarian State in Thailand: Military Dictatorship, Lazy Capitalism and the Cold War Past as Post-Cold War Prologue

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