Transnational Democratization: Human Rights in South Korea and US Cold War Modernization Policy

This paper explores how South Korea moved towards democratization in the framework of global human rights activism and politics in the 1970s. It argues that domestic disputes developed into transnational contestations on human rights; within this framework, pro-democracy actors, advocacy organizations, and ecumenical groups realistically challenged not only the repressive regime but also its international patrons under the US Cold War hegemony. This research conjectures that human rights served for transnational connections not only to action groups for democracy and human rights in South Korea but also counter-action groups. Thus, global and local state and non-state actors pragmatically utilized human rights to maximize their other significant objectives such as democracy, development, and security.

In highlighting indigenous actors’ constitutive roles in the shaping of transnational dialectic contestations, this research has three chronological and thematic points. First, upon interacting with global human rights initiatives led by Amnesty International and the World Council of Churches, pro-democracy actors translated social, political, and economic sufferings into global human rights issues, thereby linking local disputes with international politics. Second, when transnational human rights campaigns legally and politically challenged the mechanism of US Cold War security and modernization policy, the US administrations devised and deployed a counter-action strategy to ensure the Cold War stability in East Asia. Lastly, when South Korean workers created a transnational coalition for economic rights, the US administrations and the US labor organization (AFL-CIO) built a counter-action coalition with the Korean regime and the regime-controlled unions. This research examined expansive multi-archival sources from US/Korean government documents to Korean and international non-state organizations’ documents.