Pennsylvania Studies in Human Rights

Ingu Hwang

• Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9780812298215
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Human Rights
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Drawing on previously unused or underutilized archival sources, this book offers the first account of the historical intersection between South Korea's democratic transition and the global human rights boom in the 1970s. It shows how local pro-democracy activists pragmatically engaged with global advocacy groups, especially Amnesty International and the World Council of Churches, to maximize their socioeconomic and political struggles against the backdrop of South Korea's authoritarian industrialization and U.S. hegemony in East Asia. Ingu Hwang details how local prodemocracy protesters were able to translate their sufferings and causes into international human rights claims that highlighted how U.S. Cold War geopolitics impeded democratization in South Korea. In tracing the increasing coalitional ties between local pro-democracy protests and transnational human rights activism, the book also calls attention to the parallel development of counteraction human rights policies by the South Korean regime and US administrations. These counteractions were designed to safeguard the regime's legitimacy and to ensure the US Cold War security consensus. Thus, Hwang argues that local disputes over democratization in South Korea became transnational contestations on human rights through the development of trans-Pacific human rights politics. Human Rights and Transnational Democracy in South Korea critically engages with studies on global human rights, contemporary Korea, and U.S. Cold War policy. By presenting a bottom-up approach to the shaping of global human rights activism, it contributes to a growing body of literature that challenges European/U.S. centric accounts of human rights advocacy and moves beyond the national and mjinjung (people's) framework traditionally used to detail Korea's democratic transition.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Abbreviations
• Timeline of Major Events
• Note on Romanization and Translation
• Introduction. The Human Rights Turn: A Transnational Perspective on Democratization Movements in South Korea
• Chapter 1. Protest Language: Appropriating, Translating, and Transforming the Language of Human Rights
• Chapter 2. Transpacific Politics: Emerging Transnational Human Rights Actions and Counteractions
• Chapter 3. Washington: Emerging Epicenter for Transnational Human Rights Politics
• Chapter 4. The 1976 March 1 Incident: A Transnational Human Rights Issue and a US-ROK Diplomatic Quandary
• Chapter 5. People’s Protests: Economic Rights as Human Rights
• Chapter 6. Kwangju: Democratic Struggles and Anti-Americanism
• Chapter 7. Aftermath: Human Rights Talk, Activism, and Politics in the 1980s Democratic Transition
• Epilogue. Human Rights in the Post-Democratization and Global Justice Age
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Acknowledgments