The 2024 strike at Samsung Electronics in South Korea was the first in the company’s fifty-five-year history. It sought to disrupt production first on less-automated foundry lines producing legacy semiconductors and then on highly automated lines producing high-bandwidth memory, stacked memory for artificial intelligence (AI) accelerators. Production effects remained contested, and stoppages yielded no clear bargaining gain. This article argues that capital investment and automation distribute labor power unevenly within a firm: differences in production systems’ age and degree of automation can separate sites of greater potential labor leverage from those of greater strategic value. I call this relationship among fixed-capital age, automation, and labor dependence “capital vintage.” At Samsung, newer capacity producing its most valuable chips was more automated, while older lines remained more labor-dependent but less strategically valuable. Capital vintage anchors the analysis of leverage, legibility, and legitimacy. The strike showed that potential production leverage did not automatically make wage demands publicly legible, especially when strikers were portrayed as among the country’s top earners. The union therefore gave greater weight to an existing occupational-health strategy, drawing on decades of civil-legal conflicts that made injured workers’ bodily harm a recognizable basis for claims against Samsung. Yet its 2025 internal crisis showed that public legibility could not substitute for representative legitimacy, which depended on union members’ support. The article brings workers who manufacture AI’s material foundations into scholarship on worker power and automation. It draws on Korean- and English-language daily, union and company documents, statutory instruments, and civil-society materials.

Scholars have examined how legal mobilization unifies or divides social movement organizations, largely treating it as a singular process. Yet, social movement organizations united in litigation may diverge in legislative reform. Drawing on the case of South Korea’s statutory rape law, I show how organizational identities rooted in distinct ideological orientations and commitments to different victim populations remained implicit during collaborative litigation. When a legislative opening emerged from changing political opportunities, some organizations advanced age-based protections while others resisted, interpreting age-raising as undermining transformative reforms of rape law toward a consent-based definition of rape. The findings demonstrate that legal institutions mediate how organizational identity shapes responses to political opportunities: litigation enables bracketing differences, while legislation exposes divergent interpretations. This paper contributes to an understanding of how legal mobilization and movement factions are structured and operate.

What drives campaign finance reform in emerging democracies: politicians protecting their own interests, or organized civic pressure from below? This paper argues that South Korea’s landmark 2004 campaign finance reforms resulted from civic accountability, not cartel party logic. Case study analysis of four reform episodes from 1991 to 2004 shows that civic groups consistently drove reform, while ruling and opposition party politicians alike resisted to protect clientelist networks. Civic groups prevailed by building organizational capacity and strategic sophistication, most critically deploying blacklists in 2000 and 2004 to defeat corrupt incumbents and secure institutionalized seats in the reform process. Survey evidence confirms the reforms genuinely reduced illicit spending. Regression analysis reveals that reform-backing legislators shared the same emancipatory modernization values that civic groups mobilized in their blacklisting campaigns, while cartel party proxies yielded null or negative coefficients across all specifications. Longitudinal analysis reinforces this: the most dramatic gains in legislator emancipatory values coincided with blacklist campaigns that displaced the legislature’s most clientelist members. That civic accountability dismantled entrenched electoral clientelism in a case as challenging as Korea, with its chaebol-dominated economy, Confucian deference, and conservative democratic transition, offers genuine hope to other emerging democracies facing corruption and elite resistance.

Japan and South Korea have expanded marriage-related housing policies amid dwindling marriages and childbirths. To examine the extent to which these policies are arranged to support marriage, this article adopts the capabilities approach and identifies key dimensions of housing policy that affect individuals’ capabilities to marry. Despite some merits, the cross-national comparison reveals that they fall short of enhancing individuals’ marriage capabilities. This article highlights that these policies have limited accessibility due to a strict age limit in Japan and more complex legal marital, parental, and economic requirements in South Korea. Regarding direct housing provision, this article finds that stocks in Japan are old – far beyond the average lifespan of residential buildings – and those in South Korea are small and offer inadequate living conditions. Regarding financial assistance, this article underlines the unreliability of direct cash transfers in Japan and low mortgage limits relative to actual housing prices in South Korea.

Why do citizens with similar partisan attachments differ in how sharply they affectively differentiate between their party and its rival? This study examines whether right-wing authoritarianism (RWA) and social dominance orientation (SDO) help explain variation in affective polarization in South Korea. Building on political science research on partisan identity and ideological conflict, it argues that these orientations condition how citizens experience partisan competition across group lines. Using survey data from South Korea’s 2022 presidential election and 2024 legislative election, the analysis shows that higher RWA is associated with greater affective polarization among conservative partisans, whereas higher SDO is associated with lower affective polarization among liberal partisans. These relationships persist after accounting for partisan identity and ideological distance. The findings suggest that affective polarization is shaped not only by partisan alignment but also by individual-level orientations towards authority, threat, and hierarchy.

This essay examines the outbreak and suppression of a self-coup in South Korea in 2024. It focuses on the critical period between the declaration of martial law on the night of December 3 and its termination in the early hours of December 4, explaining the background, outbreak, and suppression of the self-coup through the strategic actions of actors and the historical legacies. The self-coup emerged in the context of a narrowing political base of the presidency, deteriorating everyday economic conditions, and changes in presidential control over the military. Following electoral defeat and growing political pressure, the president declared martial law by mobilizing military forces. Its suppression resulted from a cumulative interaction between coup-initiating and opposing actors. Opposition politicians and citizens rapidly gathered at the National Assembly, enabling the vote that legally and institutionally terminated martial law. The coup initiators chose a time and date that facilitated resistance, while military units showed limited compliance when confronted with unarmed civilians. The abolition of the garrison decree after the 2016 impeachment left an institutional legacy, while the historical legacy of the 1980 Gwangju Democratic Uprising provided politicians and citizens with an interpretive and normative resource for understanding the situation and acting despite risks.

This paper examines how information about individuals’ income position and national inequality shape preferences for redistribution, addressing the puzzle of rising inequality alongside stagnant redistribution. Using a survey experiment in South Korea, we find that individuals systematically misperceive their place in the income distribution, and that correcting these misperceptions significantly alters their policy preferences. Specifically, respondents who overestimate (underestimate) their income position become more supportive of (opposed to) redistribution when given accurate information, compared to those who remain uninformed. By contrast, providing information about national-level inequality has no impact on redistribution preferences, even among those previously unaware of the extent of inequality. This null effect persists across subgroups defined by income, trust in government, and belief in meritocracy. Our findings suggest that egocentric, rather than sociotropic, considerations drive support for redistribution.

This article examines how ethnonationalism functions as a structural condition shaping migrant labour governance in Israel and South Korea. Drawing on these two countries as comparative case studies, selected for their shared feature of ethnically defined statehood enshrined in foundational law and their parallel trajectories of state-led industrial development and dependence on migrant labour, the article traces how ethnonational logics are institutionally operationalised across three dimensions: visa and recruitment systems, family and naturalisation policies and organised labour. The analysis demonstrates that ethnonationalism operates not merely as a logic of exclusion towards ‘foreign’ workers, but as a dual logic of selective inclusion and exclusion, and that these two movements are mutually constitutive, together reproducing an aspired ethnonational state. The article further argues that this multi-layered stratification weakens the power of the entire labour force and produces systemic human rights risks that existing business and human rights (BHR) frameworks have not fully addressed. The findings challenge the BHR field to move beyond firm-level conduct and engage more with the political economy of law and policies as a generator of business-related human rights risks and propose labour citizenship and meaningful stakeholder engagement (MSE) as complementary pathways for reform.

As Russia accelerated Arctic hydrocarbon development, year-round marine transport in ice-covered waters became a binding constraint. This article explores how South Korean shipbuilders – particularly Daewoo Shipbuilding & Marine Engineering (DSME; now Hanwha Ocean) – became pivotal suppliers of icebreaking LNG carriers and ice-class tankers for Russian Arctic projects, especially the Yamal LNG Arc7 carrier program. Using a qualitative case-study design that combines document analysis with semi-structured interviews and secondary literature, it engages debates in Arctic political economy concerning the role of state–chaebol coordination in shaping industrial outcomes. The argument is made that Korea’s major commercial breakthroughs in Russian Arctic shipping were driven largely by firm-level technological innovation and industrial partnerships among multinational stakeholders – with particular analytical focus on Japanese and Chinese actors – which together enabled Russian Arctic projects to proceed despite sanctions, technical complexity, and environmental constraints. Throughout this process, state involvement remained limited in scope and largely followed, rather than preceded, these technological and commercial developments. The article thus highlights the limits of state-centric explanations and underscores the importance of firm-level agency and transnational industrial collaboration in Arctic energy development.

This article examines the recent dissolution of H-Coop, South Korea’s first feminist-oriented consumer cooperative, founded in 1989 by a women’s organization. Initially established to promote gender equality and civic participation through daily practices such as consumption, H-Coop played a symbolic and pioneering role in the Korean cooperative movement. However, despite its ideological significance, the cooperative experienced long-standing business stagnation, mounting financial deficits, and management challenges, ultimately leading to its closure in 2025. Drawing on qualitative research methods, this study explores H-Coop’s collapse within the broader discourse on cooperative failure. This article critically engages with existing theoretical frameworks, mainly developed in the Western European context, while also considering the unique historical and socio-cultural context of the cooperative movement in South Korea. This study has two implications. First, through the case of H-Coop, the study assesses the applicability of existing theoretical explanations and considers new insights into the failure of cooperatives in the contemporary Korean context. Second, analyzing the challenges and eventual failure that H-Coop has experienced over the years offers valuable and meaningful insights not only for practitioners within Korea’s cooperative sector but also for cooperative stakeholders globally.

As Korean cultural genres circulate globally, they acquire local meanings that may travel back to Korea, generating additional connotations. Drawing upon semiotic theory from linguistic anthropology, this article examines the resemiotization of morpheme “K-”, tracing how it detached from a few lexical items to become a productive morpheme and index of Koreanness in global cultural production. K-’s entextualized iterations take on new meanings across contexts, disrupting straightforward notions of transnational circulation. Global circulation in turn shapes domestic usage, reflecting the iterative relationship between consumers and Korean industry. While terms like K-drama and K-beauty remain relatively stable, newer ones like K-culture and K-wave are more open to negotiation. Ethnographically following K- across online and offline spaces, this study argues the morpheme emerges as a domestic index of outward-facing possibility—a locally global orientation—underscoring language’s pivotal role in shaping and advancing Korea’s national brand.

In the 1960s and 1970s, the South Korean government, scientists, and farmers fostered the promotion of a domestic dairy and grassland agriculture. With the technical and financial cooperation of the Australian, Canadian, Danish, Japanese, New Zealand, and West German governments, the Korean actors imported livestock, established model farms, and conducted research projects on grassland and forage. Dairy production played a crucial role, as it combined agriculture with modern technology. While researchers have pointed out the ‘civilizing force’ of cattle in colonialism, this article extends the role played by dairy agriculture in post-colonial societies. In the wake of the Cold War developmentalist framework, both domestic and transnational actors shaped not only dairy agriculture, but also Korea’s environment and diet long term. Aside from American-backed efforts around the ‘green revolution’, multiple other actors cooperated in rural development and represented a different understanding of dairy and agriculture. They actively transferred new cow breeds, grass seeds, and milking technology to the South Korean countryside; their efforts were partly welcomed and partly rejected by Korean locals. The article focuses especially on two Korean-German projects—the bilateral model dairy farm in Anseong and the grassland research project—and locates them in the context of this transnational cooperation.

Hallyu, or the “Korean Wave,” has evolved from a regional phenomenon into a global force shaping media, consumption, and international perceptions of South Korea. As Korean cultural products circulate worldwide, they operate as instruments of soft power while being reinterpreted through local histories of race, gender, class, and nation. Moving beyond media and cultural studies approaches, this special issue foregrounds language and semiotics as central to processes of circulation, advancing a sociolinguistic and linguistic anthropological perspective on how Korean popular culture is localized, resemiotized, and negotiated across transnational digital networks. The contributions examine how mediatized discourse and diverse engagements with Korean genres shape the global circulation of Korean popular culture across linguistic, cultural, and ideological boundaries. Rather than treating hallyu as a homogenous export, the issue conceptualizes it as an ongoing set of projects in which various actors negotiate authenticity, modernity, and belonging, underscoring how language mediates global cultural flows.

To what extent are procedural evaluations among migrants associated with democratic institutional exposure? This study examines ethnic Korean Chinese migrants (Joseonjok) in South Korea who were raised under China’s authoritarian system yet participate in Korean local elections. Using an original survey with an embedded vignette experiment, the analysis draws on naturally occurring variation in cumulative electoral participation to evaluate its association with procedural evaluations. Individuals reporting higher levels of participation assign more favourable evaluations to participatory and representative decision rules and impose larger penalties on non-participatory procedures. These patterns are observed consistently across measures of legitimacy, fairness, trust, and acceptance. The findings suggest that electoral participation is associated with sharper procedural differentiation among migrants exposed to contrasting institutional contexts, providing insight into how political attitudes may vary across regime environments.

The Korean Peninsula is often neglected in investigations on Islam in East Asia. The region already occupies the conceptual peripheries of studies on Muslim societies. During the two decades after the Korean War (1950–1953), however, Seoul hosted a small yet active community of Korean Muslim converts and visitors from places such as Malaysia/Singapore, Pakistan, Turkey, and Saudi Arabia. The early Korean Muslim leaders, some of whom first encountered Islam in Japanese-occupied Manchuria, attempted to plug themselves into transnational Islamic networks and politics in the transformed context of the Cold War. Internally, Korean Muslim leaders advocated for the utility of Islam as a diplomatic resource for the South Korean government in the struggle against communism, thereby reformulating pre-war articulations of Islam policy that had circulated across China and Japan, as well as narratives on unified Islamic civilization with an inherent cultural essence. Externally, they forged educational and philanthropic networks by connecting with Muslim diasporic figures in the East and Southeast Asian sphere, such as Ibrahim Omar al-Saqqāf, the Hadrami Arab consul of the Saudi consulate in Singapore and an agent of the World Muslim League in Mecca. By situating the emergent Korean Muslim community in Seoul within a regional and trans-regional religio-political nexus, this article repositions it as having formed through encounters with modern state(s) and power, and through interactions with Muslim diasporic agents who (re-)directed post-war mobility channels.