Epochal change has swept the South Korean political landscape over the past few years. The massive protests of the 2016–17 Candlelight Revolution led to the impeachment of hardline conservative President Park Geun-hye, followed by the election of center-left President Moon Jae-in. Not unrelated to this dramatic transformation was the sinking of the Sewol ferry in 2014, an avoidable disaster that took the lives of 304 people, including 250 high school students. This traumatic event, which unfolded in real time on national television, would have a lasting impact by eventually galvanizing opposition to Park for her administration's unresponsiveness, as well as revealing government corruption and incompetence. The outcome of the April 2016 parliamentary elections, when the liberal Minjoo Party won an upset victory and gained a plurality of seats over the conservative Saenuri Party, was widely interpreted as indicative of continued public anger over the poor handling of the Sewol disaster and the government's refusal to allow a thorough investigation. Though ousting Park was unimaginable at the time, this progressive victory at the polls in April 2016 would later prove decisive in enabling the National Assembly's impeachment vote in December that year.
Given the fateful political fallout from the Sewol tragedy, analyses of its causes and consequences can offer crucial insights into the widespread discontent in South Korean society that led to the candlelight street protests. Co-edited by Jae-Jung Suh and Mikyoung Kim, Challenges of Modernization and Governance in South Korea: The Sinking of the Sewol and Its Causes aims “to trace the causes of the Sewol tragedy to deeper socio-political ills of Korean society,” which the editors identify as problems endemic to the wider processes of compressed modernization. Kim's preface relays how the ten-chapter volume initially arose out of a series of conversations among colleagues struggling to make sense of the disaster. She credits one of the contributors, Taehyun Nam, for organizing a related roundtable at the International Studies Association Annual Convention in New Orleans in February 2015, where some of the volume's contributors participated in the discussion.
This volume marks a departure from earlier scholarship dealing with political corruption in South Korea within the context of economic development and compressed modernization. Most prior studies were published in the late 1990s and focused primarily on the role of corruption in the 1997 financial crisis. Challenges of Modernization and Governance in South Korea recalibrates such lines of inquiry regarding government corruption and public-private collusion while connecting them to the sizable body of research on neoliberalism's implications in South Korea. Regarding the latter theme, recent research addresses the inequality and social insecurity stemming from deregulation and the expanded privatization of the economy, as well as the state's punitive responses to dissent.
The excellent introductory chapter by Suh lays out a detailed timeline of the disaster as well as an engagement with theorizations of risk society by Ulrich Beck and Anthony Giddens. The chapter's most notable contribution is a measured analysis of documentary and circumstantial evidence related to whether the National Intelligence Service (NIS) may have been the true owner of the ferry (pp. 10–13), a highly sensitive issue. Such evidence significantly raises the stakes of questions surrounding the government's ineffective rescue efforts, particularly the repeated instances of a failure to respond during the first few hours, when lives could have been saved.
The volume's remaining chapters are organized around the broad themes of “society,” “governance,” and “subjectivities.” Yoonkyung Lee provides a compelling analysis of the failings of a South Korean state that had become diminished in regulatory capacity due to neoliberal policies since the 1990s, while labor-market deregulation created conditions for increased public safety risks at a time when old practices of state collusion with private business interests still remained pervasive. Jong-Sung You and Youn Min Park, in their joint chapter, likewise focus on how the government and regulatory agencies were compromised by conflicts of interest due to public-private collusion, which the authors frame as “regulatory capture.” Su-Dol Kang analyzes dysfunctional aspects of government and civil society from the perspective of addictive organization theory, while Taehyun Nam considers how the disaster revealed the shortcomings of South Korea's democracy, honing in on unchecked presidential authority as among the most serious impediments to achieving democratic consolidation more fully. K. S. Park and Seungsook Moon, in separate chapters, both address why the Sewol passengers were told to remain onboard and why they complied, which Park traces to the influence of censorship and paternalism on society, while Moon considers disciplinary paradigms in high school education.
The last two chapters shift attention to the bereaved families. Drawing on a year of fieldwork at sites related to the bereaved families’ evolving activism—particularly in Ansan, the hometown of most of the victims—Hyeon Jung Lee recounts the harsh challenges they faced in their struggle to find justice for their loved ones. And in addressing a notable transnational dimension to the tragedy, Hyunok Lee considers the case of a Korean-Vietnamese family among the victims, as she explores the tensions between differing concepts of solidarity based on either national identity or shared moral values.
Challenges of Modernization and Governance in South Korea will be of value to anyone interested in contemporary Korea as well as to those exploring the myriad hazards caused by neoliberal governance. Non-Koreanists might find it helpful to begin with John Lie's epilogue, an interpretive discussion that seeks to answer why the tragic accident became “a transformative cultural phenomenon, a moment of national reckoning” (p. 210) by positing that the disaster revealed the wreck of the larger South Korean body politic.
For the book as a whole, it would have been helpful to include a more explicit discussion of the relationship between the Sewol catastrophe and the context of national division and the national security state; such an analysis could have weighed the questions surrounding the NIS against the history of intelligence-related controversies. I also would like to have seen an in-depth engagement with the issue of blacklisted artists—such as the controversial removal of Hong Seong-dam's satirical painting from the Gwangju Biennale in 2014—as an inquiry into how the fatal contradictions explored in the volume also shaped state suppression of cultural responses to the disaster, among other government efforts to quash post-Sewol dissent. That said, the book makes a very valuable contribution by critically examining multiple causes of the Sewol tragedy and in the process advances our understanding of contemporary South Korea through a multifaceted investigation into a wider sense of crisis on the cusp of thorough political change.
