Delegating violence in democracies: embedded developmentalism and persistence of labor repression in South Korea

Abstract

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.

Analyzing “Jayu” in South Korean presidential rhetoric: a comprehensive study from 1948–2023 with a focus on the Yoon Suk Yeol administration

“…The prolonged prevalence of military regimes characterized by growth-oriented ideologies suppressed conventional conflicts inherent within capitalist industrialization processes (Im, 2020b;McAllister, 2016;Porteux and Kim, 2023). During this period, Korean politics evolved distinctly, characterized by a dichotomy between authoritarian conservative governance advocating Jayu and civil society's democratization movements promoting Minju (Im, 2020b;Lee, 2009;McAllister, 2016).…”