Seeds of Mobilization: The Authoritarian Roots of South Korea's Democracy (University of Michigan Press, 2024) explores the nonlinear nature of South Korea’s democratization. Drawing on oral interviews, original protest datasets, and publications by student and labor activists, the book shows how industrial complexes and the expansion of tertiary education initially bolstered authoritarian rule before creating conditions that facilitated student and labor mobilization that ultimately succeeded in bringing about the country’s democratization. Seeds of Mobilization also reveals how the nonlinear path from economic development to democracy produced enduring differences in political attitudes and behavior across generations in the democratic period.
Joan Cho is an associate professor of East Asian Studies and Government at Wesleyan University. Her research and teaching focus on authoritarianism, democracy, and social movements in Korea and East Asia. Her research has been published in Electoral Studies, Journal of Democracy, Journal of East Asian Studies, Studies in Comparative International Development, and Routledge Handbook of Korean Culture and Society. Her first book, Seeds of Mobilization: The Authoritarian Roots of South Korea’s Democracy (University of Michigan Press, 2024), examines the roles of industrialization and tertiary education in South Korea’s nonlinear path to democracy. Her current book project explores partisan polarization in East Asia’s Third Wave democracies.
This lecture is sponsored by the Liu Institute's Korea Working Group.