Paul Y. Chang's Protest Dialectics zeroes in on the complex relationship between repression and social movement mobilization, examining the turbulent trajectory of the democracy movement in South Korea during the 1970s. The establishment of the authoritarian Yusin Constitution and the intensification of state terror against dissidents have earned the 1970s a disgraceful name, the “dark age for democracy.” Chang cogently argues against this one-sided characterization, demonstrating how “the repressive capacity of the Yusin regime and the movement for democracy developed in tandem” (p. 6), as “the increasing severity of state repression … in turn influenced the mobilizing strategies of antigovernment dissidents” (p. 9).
Chang is not the first—as he himself readily admits—that has recognized the dialectical relationship between “strong state and contentious society” in South Korea.Footnote 16 The book's distinctive contribution lies in giving a concrete shape to this observation by examining how the escalation of state repression (chapters 1 and 2)—while decreasing the aggregate counts of protest events (chapter 3)—diversified movement participants (with Christians, lawyers, and journalists joining students: chapters 4 and 5), stimulated innovations in their tactical repertoires (spanning an assortment of disruptive and undisruptive tactics: chapter 6), spawned new movement ideologies (especially the rise of human rights discourse: chapter 6), and fostered solidarity formation (ranging from solidarity statements to formal coalitions: chapter 7).
The use of massive quantitative and qualitative data enables Chang to analyze these disaggregate components of mobilization in a systematic manner. The main argument in chapters 6 and 7 in particular—how the diversification of movement participants fostered tactical innovations, brought new issues to the public's attention, and encouraged alliance formation—would not be as effective without the Stanford Korea Democracy Project (KDP) Events Dataset that Chang constructed himself and utilizes masterfully. The KDP Events Dataset, which includes records of nearly 3,000 protests and repression events from 1970 to 1979, specifies the substantive links between protest events, and between protest and repression events. This characteristic makes it possible for Chang to vividly visualize protest cycles and thoroughly analyze movement-countermovement interactions over the course of the 1970s. Social movement scholars familiar with the problems of relying on cross-sectional data and newspaper accounts will certainly appreciate the value of this dataset and find inspiration from the ways in which Chang utilizes it.
Chang's approach to interview data, however, reveals a few problems. One example is his analysis of the emergence of Christian activism (chapter 4), which relies heavily on interview data collected decades afterward. He tends to take interviewees' words more or less at face value. What is missing is an appreciation for what people do with words, in particular, what these words reveal about his interviewees' positioning in the broader field of contentious politics, both in the past and in the present. While Chang invokes such terms as “symbolic power” and “symbolic capital” (p. 93), presumably derived from Pierre Bourdieu's theory, the usage of these terms is more rhetorical than analytical. A deeper engagement with Bourdieu's theory would have helped Chang avoid taking Christians' moral authority as a self-evident point of departure as he does in a statement like this: “[B]ecause of their religious identity, Christians maintained moral distinction in South Korean society” (p. 90). Instead, he might have been able to analyze this moral authority as an effect of constantly evolving struggles for symbolic capital, of the struggles to represent universality and perform disinterestedness. This analytic shift would have encouraged Chang to pay attention not only to Christian activists' contentious relationship to the state and conservative Christians (pp. 104–5), but also to the competitive dynamics within the social movement field, which would become more recognizable in the later period (p. 205). In several places, the book falls back on the much-criticized assumption that identity/belief/value produces a coherent set of actions. The analysis would have benefited from a more careful approach to the process of group-making, to the evolving positional struggles through which various “socio-vocational” categories (p. 135), including “Christians,” have emerged as the legitimate organizing categories of collective action in South Korea.
Social movement scholars interested in the “multiple, and sometimes divergent, consequences” (p. 9) of repression for mobilization will find the book's rich empirical analysis a valuable source for further theoretical development. Koreanists will come to have a renewed appreciation of the profound, yet hitherto neglected, legacy of the 1970s for shaping the “co-evolutionary relationship” (p. 201) between state and society in South Korea in the long term. While Chang largely refrains from offering bold comparative implications, those studying contentious politics in a highly repressive context in other times and places will be able to build their arguments on or against this carefully researched book—a work that is convincing in its arguments and abundant in its data.
