Recycling European Narratives in South Korea’s ‘Refugee Crisis’: Islamophobia, #MeToo, and Yemeni Refugees on Jeju Island

Abstract

2018 was a politically tempestuous time for South Korea as a little over 500, mostly male, Yemeni asylum-seekers landed on Korea’s Jeju Island. Their unexpected arrival caught Korean society, already in the midst of its own #MeToo wave off guard, resulting in a wave of pro- and anti-refugee demonstrations across the country. Fueled by real and fake news about refugee illegal activities in Europe, anti-refugee backlash in Korea took an Islamophobic and feminist tone. Based on digital ethnography, this article presents observations from online voices – refugees, feminists, and media actors – expressed through Naver News and Naver Cafes to assess the ways in which Korea’s refugee crisis was represented in local and global anti-refugee and Islamophobic narratives, aimed in particular at Muslim men. This research highlights the impact of European narratives on Korean society and raises questions over how Korean society can create a wider, inclusive digital democracy.

Refugees as perceived threat: College students' attitudes towards refugees in South Korea

“…The depiction of Islam as fundamentalist, sexist and antimodern is nothing new as such opinions have been circulating in the global media space for a long time. However, this Islamophobic stigmatization attracted the Korean public's attention because of the 2018 refugee incident, with the growing MeToo movement in Korea increasing public concern regarding gender‐based violence and the reactions of far‐right Protestant groups further fueling the fire (Heo, 2021; Sheikh, 2021). Beliefs that Muslim male refugees 3 would possibly indulge in violence, would threaten Korean women's safety and would attempt an Islamization of the host country have become embedded in the Korean refugee discourse.…”

The Shape of the Asiascape: Ten Years of Digital Asia Research

“…Fahadi 2022;Kermani 2020;Seto 2020, Sharbaugh & Nguyen 2014Tapsell 2014). Throughout, the most common concerns among scholars tended to be 'political' -a term with high frequency (Farooq 2022;Hicks 2017;Hussain & Lee 2021;Schmidt 2018;Sheikh 2021;Yang & Kang 2021), for instance, with regard to questions of citizenship and community (see Schneider 2019) as well as participation and democracy (see Lee 2021). In scholarship that explored digital China, politics was of particular interest, frequently involving issues that mirrored common themes in contemporary studies on China -specifically concerning state regulation and governance, censorship and propaganda, and the potential for civic participation in authoritarian contexts (Benney 2014;Brussee 2022;Creemers 2018;Gu 2021;Huang 2018;Jin & Yang 2016;Liu 2014;Pan 2017).…”