KJCKorea
Journal Central

This paper examines the causes of the crisis of the Korean women’s peace movement from a theoretical and practical perspective and seeks a direction for development from the perspective of local peace. To this end, it critically reviews the positive peace discourse adopted by the Korean women’s peace movement and proposes the ideas of ‘just peace’ and ‘local peace’ as alternative peace discourses. It also critically examines the practical limitations of the elite-centered, top-down women’s peace movement approach and the lack of inclusion of diverse women and peace voices, and argues for the necessity of inclusive solidarity politics through dialogue with locals and the inclusion of local subjects. It proposes a ‘democratic perspective’ and ‘democratization of peace movement’ that actively embraces locals and diversity in the process of creating peace, rather than a ‘philosopher’s perspective.’

My research examines why East Asian developmental states were able to achieve long-term low inequality as well as economic development during the postwar state-building and rapid industrialization periods despite being governed by growth-oriented and labor-repressive regimes. Developmental states’ economic nationalism led to both land reform and export-oriented industrialization (EOI). These two policies contributed to the nation state’s dual goals of economic development and low inequality, and hence exemplified plan rationality. Under economic nationalism, developmental states initiated progressive land reforms without violence during state building and effectively promoted EOI. EOI is an industrialization policy, not a redistribution policy. But during the industrialization period, EOI indirectly helped developmental states promote distribution and redistribution through employment and educational improvement. My mixed methods approach between quantitative and qualitative research examines how causation from egalitarianism under economic nationalism to developmentalism can be generalizable to world cases beyond developmental states. As a policy implication, while equality in land assets has been a favorable foundation in economic development, polarization in real assets weakens a potential of economic growth in the long term. In Korean society, Seoul-centered land development and polarization in real estates are major causes of low birth rate and local extinction, so it is necessary to expand the public concept of land (土地公槪念).

This paper aims to derive the current status of the description of Article 1 (Democratic Republic) of the Constitution in the ‘Politics and Law’ and ‘Integrated Social Studies’ textbooks of social studies and to identify tasks for improvement. As a result, several important characteristics and limitations were discovered. First, all five ‘Politics and Law’ textbooks include Article 1 of the Constitution in the text. However, just like the introduction to constitutional studies, they emphasize its meaning only in terms of the state form, and are passive or negative about the necessity of an ideological and normative approach called republicanism. Second, all five current textbooks explain the core principle of the democratic republic as ‘national sovereignty.’ However, the current textbooks’ explanation method has the problem of being immersed in the simple logic that democracy = national sovereignty, republic = national sovereignty, and ultimately democratic republic = national sovereignty. Third, except for ‘Ethics and Ideology’, which adopted republicanism as an independent unit through the revised moral education curriculum in 2015, neither ‘Politics and Law’ nor ‘Integrated Social Studies’ textbooks in social studies explained the meaning of a democratic republic in relation to republicanism. Meanwhile, this paper proposed the application of republican theory as a new direction for improving the writing of textbooks on democratic republics. Specifically, it is necessary to explain the meaning of a democratic republic in Article 1 of the Constitution not only as a non-monarchical state form, but also as the five principles that run through republicanism: citizen participation, pursuit of the common good, and freedom as non-domination in terms of values, and mixed constitution or rule of law in terms of institutions.