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Full-Text Articles in Asian Studies
Ideas, Interests And Practical Authority In Reform Politics: Decentralization Reform In South Korea In The 2000s, Yooil Bae
Research Collection School of Social Sciences
This paper explains the reason why the hitherto statist country, Korea, has carried out significant decentralization since the 2000s. In explaining the motivation for decentralization, extant literature has focused on the role of parties, bureaucratic politics, democratization, or territorial interests. Yet there is still limited explanation of how the decentralization laws in Korea could be successfully passed in the 2000s, while cental stakeholders still persisted. By tracing the process of decentralization reform in the 2000s, this article demonstrates how structural factors created favourable circumstances and discursive background for institutional change, and how the idea of decentralization, through the idea diffusion …
Five Phases Of Brokered International Marriages In South Korea: A Complexity Perspective, Jiyoung Song
Five Phases Of Brokered International Marriages In South Korea: A Complexity Perspective, Jiyoung Song
Research Collection School of Social Sciences
The paper examines the evolution in international commercial marriage migration from Southeast Asia to South Korea from a Complexity Theory (CT) framework, originally from natural sciences but vastly entering the field of social sciences. CT stresses the non-linear nature of complex systems that are composed of a large number of individual components operating within a conditioned boundary whose interactions lead emergent properties in an unpredictable way. The study is based on the author’s fieldwork interviews and participatory observations of marriage migrants, government officers, and social workers in South Korea in 2010-2013, which establishes five phases of brokered marriages, namely, (1) …
Decentralization And Collaborative Disaster Governance, Yooil Bae, Yu-Min Joo, Soh-Yeon Won
Decentralization And Collaborative Disaster Governance, Yooil Bae, Yu-Min Joo, Soh-Yeon Won
Research Collection School of Social Sciences
Decentralized disaster governance has been gaining much attention with the rising global urbanization rate and the complex nature of the disasters occurring in densely urbanized areas today. This paper studies the case of South Korea, a highly urbanized country with relatively recent decentralization reforms, in order to analyze the evolution of its disaster management system and to draw out implications from its experience. Specifically, it traces the national-level institutional changes in its disaster management, and then closely examines a hydrofluoric gas leakage in the industrial city of Gumi. The finding is that South Korea simultaneously carried out both centralization and …
Civil Society And Local Activism In South Korea's Local Democratization, Yooil Bae, Sunhyuk Kim
Civil Society And Local Activism In South Korea's Local Democratization, Yooil Bae, Sunhyuk Kim
Research Collection School of Social Sciences
Recent studies on causes of intergovernmental transformation in old and new democracies have found that decentralization is often the outcome of negotiations between national and local political interests. South Korea is commonly believed to be an exception because local elections and institutions introduced in the early 1990s were, by and large, the product of negotiations among political elites at the centre, without significant inclusion of local actors. However, this article attempts to explicate a hitherto ignored aspect of decentralization reform in Korea: the role of civil society and local activism in the politics of decentralization. In the 2000s, several ‘triggering …
Unintended Consequences Of Repression: Alliance Formation In South Korea's Democracy Movement (1970-1979), Paul Y. Chang
Unintended Consequences Of Repression: Alliance Formation In South Korea's Democracy Movement (1970-1979), Paul Y. Chang
Research Collection School of Social Sciences
Research regarding the impact of repression on social movements has yielded conflicting findings; some argue that repression decreases the total quantity of protest events while others argue that it motivates protest. To move beyond this impasse, various scholars have suggested exploring how repression influences the quality of social movements. This study assesses the impact repression had on the information of alliances between different social groups participating in South Korea's democracy movement. Results from negative binomial regression analyses show that repression facilitated the formation of alliances between movement actors at a time when the overall number of protest events decreased. This …