No abstract

This study explores collaboration between state actors and non-state specialists in the market for coercion. We focus on the case of forced evictions in South Korea, where violence carried out by private companies has occurred with the implicit, and at times explicit, sanctioning of the state. This level of government–private security cooperation has traditionally been explained by various hypotheses, including arguments about the weak capacity of a state to enforce compliance, trends in the neo-liberal marketization of state power, or as the outcome of a state being captured by the capitalist classes. Documenting the history of urban redevelopment projects and changes in government responses to major protest incidents in Korea, we instead argue that this niche market for private force is an observable implication of a shift in state–society relations in the wake of democratization. This phenomenon is, in effect, a very undemocratic response to democratization, by state elites.

If one looks up "sports diplomacy" and Korea, the immediate results returned are overwhelmingly about T'aegwŏndo and inter-Korean relations. What is more difficult to find however, despite being demonstrably more politically consequential, is Korea`s strategic utilization and spread of Korean or Koreanesque martial arts such as T'aegwŏndo, hapkido, and kumdo, in targeted countries beyond the East Asian region. Similar to the diffusion of Japanese martial arts to the West, Korean martial arts from the 1960s and 70s have acted as a cultural ambassador from Eurasia to the Americas and elsewhere. In particular, with the advent of T'aegwŏndo as a demonstration sport in the 1988 Olympics, and as an official event since the Sydney Olympiad in 2000, the sport`s popularity has expanded. This study argues and provides evidence to the fact, that the spread of specifically T'aegwŏndo has been carried out as part of a larger government sponsored soft-power program and has proven especially politically profitable in terms of increasing the profile of the Republic of Korea.

We address how democracy has influenced the ways in which the Korean state has managed the issue of labor-based collective action and suppression thereof. During the authoritarian period, the state, through specialized riot police, frequently, and violently, cracked down on protest movements and other forms of collective action. During democratization and post-democratic consolidation, private specialists in violence, operating with the consent of the state, began to replace public forces on the front lines, while working in concert out of the view of the public. Although such state/non-state collaboration in the market for oftentimes illegal violence has been addressed in scholarship elsewhere, we demonstrate through detailed evaluation that the extant explanations are largely incomplete, as they fail to capture the effects of changing relative levels of state-based autonomy from societal and corporatist influence.

We argue that the 2014 Sewol ferry disaster in South Korea, in which 304 passengers perished, was a result of the mode and process of privatization of South Korea's maritime police and rescue services. Through the development of a nuanced theory of privatization and use of a novel conceptualization of corruption, coupled with empirical analysis, our study shows that the outcome was symptomatic of a wider trend of systematic bureaucratic rent-seeking. A pro-active private sector ready to capitalize on the opportunity, in conjunction with a permissive political environment, resulted in a reduction of state capacity, with devastating consequences.