This edited volume investigates various ways of rights claiming in South Korea and the development of the infrastructure needed for legal mobilization in the past few decades. Defining rights claiming broadly as “the diverse and changing ways in which people interpret and articulate grievances and engage in claims-making to remedy them” (p. 1), this book employs a bottom-up approach and offers great insights into people's mobilization of the law in and beyond the courthouse in South Korea. It contributes to the literature on social movements and legal mobilization in Asia by demonstrating the fluid and plural meanings of rights in action and advancing the understanding of the hierarchies of rights.
The book's interdisciplinary approach to rights mobilization in South Korea makes scholars of legal mobilization, law and social movements, legal consciousness, East Asian law and society, and law and politics in Korea its primary audience. Its efforts to foreground the voices of marginalized groups (i.e., women, sexual minorities, people with disabilities, aggrieved workers, new immigrants, and noncitizens) should also find an audience in scholars who are interested in feminist legal studies, human rights, law and equality, and access to justice.
With a combination of historical and contemporary analysis from interdisciplinary perspectives, Rights Claiming in South Korea includes fourteen chapters organized in four parts that discuss women's rights claiming in Korean history, institutional mechanisms needed for rights claiming, legal mobilization among and for marginalized populations in recent decades, and rights for new citizens and noncitizens.
The first three chapters adopt a postcolonial approach to defining rights and analyze the complex history of how women conceptualized and claimed rights during the Joseon, Japanese colonial, and postliberation eras in Korea. From a postcolonial perspective, part one powerfully demonstrates that despite the lack of any notion of “rights” in the indigenous vocabulary, women in Korea have a long history of mobilizing the law to address grievances using nonlegal terms such as “relieve won” (p. 25).
The second part examines the institutional mechanisms and support structures for rights claiming, introducing the readers to societal responses to the Jeju April 3 events; the establishment of the National Human Rights Commission of Korea and its relationship to Korea's desired national identity; ordinary citizens’ use of the Constitutional Court and its contribution to rights development; changes in Korea's legal opportunity structure; and public interest lawyering that serves as “the ‘supporting structures’ for rights-promoting mobilization” (p. 190). This part offers a detailed analysis of the existing infrastructure for rights claiming in South Korea, setting the stage for the discussion of rights mobilization for and by the marginalized groups in parts three and four.
Ordinary people's creative invocation of the law in their everyday lives and the active collaboration among these marginalized groups to fight for rights are two key themes running through all the chapters in parts three and four. Focusing on collective acts of legal mobilization and everyday resistance among workers, people with disabilities, LGBTI people, immigrants, foreign workers, and diaspora communities, these two parts demonstrate how activists and ordinary people invoked legal discourses in and out of the courtrooms and achieved major legislative changes to improve the social, legal, and political environments for the marginalized. These chapters take readers to risky places such as high altitudes, scenes of suicides and street protesting, and the Queer Culture Festival in Seoul to witness rights claiming on the ground in Korea. Together, the chapters demonstrate how activists and ordinary people not only fought for the rights of their own but also advocated for other marginalized groups in the process of mobilizing the law.
My main takeaway from Rights Claiming in South Korea is its attention to and emphasis on hierarchies of rights. Several chapters in this collection demonstrate the pronounced and enduring hierarchies of rights in South Korea and how state entities, political power, the media, civil society, and even social actors participate in the construction of these hierarchies by “determining whose rights matter most” (p. 322). These chapters challenge the “politics of postponement” that adopt a linear narrative of liberal progress and label rights claiming of certain minority groups as untimely and premature. The postponement of social change and rights protection of certain marginalized groups such as sexual minorities may indefinitely exclude the human rights of those who are in urgent need of it (p. 249). The danger lies in the fact that every individual, even well-intentioned human rights activists and lawyers, “may unconsciously overlook certain rights as they advocate for others” (p. 323).
Even with its many strengths, the collection would have benefited from clearer methodology sections in the chapters on rights claiming on the ground. I also would have liked to see more qualitative data and some quotes from activists, lawyers, and ordinary citizens who participated in rights claiming. Nevertheless, the editors have assembled an innovative collection of interdisciplinary research, which is a necessary read for anyone with an interest in human rights, law and politics in Korea, and legal mobilization in Asia and beyond.
