Korea Seminar Series – Beyond Colonialism and Military Dictatorship: the Democratization Movement of the 1970s and 1980s

The self-identity South Koreans shared after the Korean War as proud citizens of a democratic state, deriving its legacy from the Independence Club movement in the late nineteenth century and formalized in the 1919 by the Provisional Government in exile in Shanghai and in 1948 by the constitution of the Republic of Korea was undermined by series of military coups in 1961, 1972, and 1980 by first General Park Chung Hee and later Chun Doo Hwan. In response, drawing on a tradition of civil protest stretching back at least to the fifteenth century, Korean university students joined by political dissidents, labor leaders, intellectuals, and ordinary citizens waged fierce battles for democratic reform that grew increasingly greater in scope and intensity, culminating in 1987 in the government decision to capitulate and reinstate direct presidential elections, leading in the 1990s to the attainment of a stable democracy.