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This paper traces the role that US played in the development of Korean democracy and maintaining peace and security in the Korean peninsula. First, it looks back into the US role in the Korean political transformation from 1950s through 1980s. It examines why the US introduced American style democracy in the divided country and what was the role of the US in the critical junctures of regime changes and transformations. The United States had two contradictory objectives in South Korea: to build up South Korea as ‘a showcase for democracy’ and as an anti-communist buffer state. The two objectives set ‘the American boundary’ to South Korean democracy. The first objective acted upon as an enabling condition for incipient democracy, while the second acted upon as a confining condition to development of democracy in South Korea. Second, it investigates the role that the US played in the outbreak of financial crisis in 1987 and in the ensuing comprehensive neoliberal restructuring of the economy by the Kim Dae Jung government after the crisis. Third, it analyzes three events that put US–Korean relations under stress since the inauguration of Bush administration: Anti-Americanism, perception gap on North Korea, and the new military transformation initiative of US. Finally, it draws policy rationales for stronger Korea–US alliance in the future from the Korean perspective: Korea–US alliance as leverages against China and Japan, means of pursuing an effective engagement policy toward North Korea, a cornerstone to lift South Korea to a hub state in Northeast Asia, and geopolitical balancer and stabilizer in Northeast Asia after the unification of Korea. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the current wave of global democratization, South Korea (Korea hereinafter) is widely regarded as one of the most successful examples. Unlike new democracies in Latin America and other regions, Korea has fully restored civilian rule by extricating the military from the political process. A remaining question is whether it has also fully oriented and reoriented ordinary citizens toward democratic politics and away from authoritarianism. This paper attempts to address this question in order to ascertain the cultural dimension of democratic consolidation. The analyses of data culled from a recent survey of the Korean electorate reveal that more than a decade of democratic rule has made the mass citizenry highly capable of recognizing democracy as a normative and empirical phenomenon. Nonetheless, it has failed to create a citizenry that is fully detached from authoritarianism and fully attached to democracy. On the basis of this finding, we conclude that the consolidation of democratic rule in Korea is likely to be an intergenerational phenomenon. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study offers a critical analysis of refugee policy in the Republic of Korea (South Korea) since the national government in 2013 enacted a law intended to improve its treatment of refugees and asylum seekers and align itself more closely with the principles of the 1951 Refugee Convention. The article begins by focusing on a major controversy that arose in 2018, following the arrival of more than 500 asylum seekers from Yemen, an episode that revealed how considerable public antipathy toward refugees presents a social and cultural problem for South Korea as it charts a course for improvement of its treatment of refugees. The analysis then turns to numerous problems at the nexus of law and society that continue to plague the refugee status determination process and, in many instances, to deny basic rights to a rapidly growing number of asylum seekers in South Korea. The article concludes by showing how, despite these problems, South Korea is better positioned than many of the world's more affluent constitutional democracies to harmonize its national interests with its responsibilities to make a meaningful contribution to ongoing global efforts to protect and accommodate refugees. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although the concept of protest cycles has received much attention in the collective action literature, its empirical operationalization remains relatively crude compared to the rich theoretical discussion. Reimagining social movements as populations of interlinked protests, we demonstrate the advantages of analyzing protest event networks with a novel dataset related to South Korea's democracy movement. In our conceptualization, protest events play the role of network nodes and links were identified based on protesters citing prior events as sources of inspiration for mobilizing. Appropriating strategies for network analysis, we assess the types of events that were more likely to be cited as sources of inspiration and bridge otherwise disconnected events. Our analysis shows that protests that raised systemic versus local issues and events that were repressed by the state were more likely to occupy central positions in the democracy movement. By identifying the characteristics of events that contribute to movement inspiration and bridging, our novel approach to analyzing protest events sheds new light on dominant themes in social movement research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the aspects of human rights and protest over U.S. President Jimmy Carter's South Korean foreign policy, focusing on the withdrawal of American troops from South Korea, during his term in 1977-1981. It states that Carter linked the questions about the morality of South Korean President Park Chunghee's leadership with the withdrawal plan. It adds that Carter's policy was empowered by the rising concern over Park Chunghee's inhumane punishment of his opponents and a bribery scandal involving U.S. congressmen in 1976. It also mentions that Carter emphasized strategic mobility and flexibility to meet public demand and maintain the U.S. commitment in northeast Asia.

This article investigates the influence and limitations of American democracy promotion in South Korea by analyzing various texts produced by different ideological groups during the 1950s. Americans promoted diverse concepts of democracy, including anti-Communist, institutional, individualistic, nation-centered, and life-centered notions. The diversified programs and channels of the U.S. information service, while contributing to the wide dissemination of democracy, allowed greater room for Koreans to interpret and use them for their own agendas. Exploring various texts produced by different groups, I find that, while “American” ideas were crucial sources of reference, they were often transformed or used only in part. Different Korean groups developed their own democratic ideas by referring to various “American” democratic concepts. Furthermore, Koreans not only used democratic ideas, but also drew from post-colonial nationalist discourses and their own sense of patriotism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article assesses the extent of normative commitment to democracy among the public in East Asia. The authors discuss to what extent do citizens in Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Mongolia, the Philippines, Thailand and Hong Kong support democracy as a system of government as measured by overtly favorable orientations toward democracy. It indicates that except for South Korea and Japan most East Asian democratic countries do not enjoy a deep legitimization. The authors observed that authoritarianism remains a rough competitor to democracy in the region.