Policing Protests in Post-Authoritarian South Korea, 1990-1991

Hyun Woo Kim (김현우)

Policing Protests in Post-Authoritarian South Korea, 1990-1991

Korean Social Science Journal
Abbr : KSSJ
2017, 44(1), pp.13-32
Publisher : Korean Social Science Research Council
Research Area : Social Science > Social Science in general
Published : June 1, 2017

Hyun Woo Kim ¹

¹Pennsylvania State Univ.

Accredited

ABSTRACT

Social movement scholars have extensively discussed how protest policing has developed in mature democratic countries. Meanwhile, there exists little systematic effort to empirically examine the development of protest policing in young democracies. To address this gap, this paper explores how protest policing in South Korea has developed and operated in the early 1990s in a broader context of a democratic transition. In post-authoritarian South Korea, the escalated force style of policing suddenly collapsed with the political liberalization of 1987. But the country’s protest policing has not shifted to negotiated management as observed in the U.S. and elsewhere. Instead, selective incapacitation has emerged, as police use a limited amount of organizational resources to repress threatening, but weaker protest groups that are isolated from a wider movement environment. Based upon statistical analysis, it is claimed that police’s use of arrest is particularly better explained with the combination of the threat model and the weakness model in post-authoritarian South Korea.

KEYWORDS

Protest Policing․Public Order Policing․Protest Events․Social Movements․ South Korea

Citation status

* References for papers published after 2023 are currently being built.

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