Extreme Protests

This study focuses on the question of changing protest repertoires and asks what explains the emergence of extreme repertoires (a protest form that is lone in nature, accompanied by a high level of self-imposed danger and pain, and staged for a collective cause) in labor movements in times of institutionalized democracy and capitalist affluence in South Korea. Social movement scholarship has emphasized that massive structural transformations, such as nation-state building, industrialization, and regime types, give birth to renovated protest forms. This study moves beneath these nation-state oriented, structural arguments for protest repertoire change, and explicates how the varied positions of the sectoral movement within power relations vis-a-vis state institutions, corporations, and civil society inform activists to choose alternative protest methods. The arguments are based on protest repertoires data collected and coded from newspaper reports in 1999-2019 as well as interviews with labor activists and their published writings in 2017-2022

Civil society · Democracy · Newspaper · Repertoire · Scholarship · Social movement · Asian Culture and Media Studies · Asian Industrial and Economic Development · Korean Peninsula Historical and Political Studies