Theorizing a 'Civic Politics' Model with Special Reference to the 2016-17 Candlelight Protest in South Korea: An Instruction

서지정보

· 발행기관 : 한국NGO학회
· 수록지 정보 : NGO연구 / 13권 / 3호 / 195 ~ 231페이지
· 저자명 : 서유경

초록

The phenomenal Korean Candlelight Protest, the winner of the 2017 Human Rights Award of Friedrich Ebert Stiftung, started on October 29, 2016 and ended on April 29, 2017. During those 6 months, 23 all-out civic rallies were peacefully held in the hope of bringing the rule of law and democracy back in place. The grassroots Koreans pressed hard for the impeachment of the then incumbent president Park Geun-hye when her closest friend cum informal political aide was reported to involve in a few economic scams on top of her own mismanagement of the Sewol Ferry Disaster which occurred on April 16, 2014 and killed 304 lives out of 476 passengers. The most successful series of 23 candlelight rallies were attended by almost 17 million people in accumulated total, which amounts to a third of its entire population of over 50 million people enough to astonish the entire world. It is indeed a unique kind of 'civic politics' that has gradually evolved by the Koreans into the present form ever since the very first students' anti-government protest took place in April 19, 1960. By the civic politics I mean here a politics that is practiced by ordinary citizens acting in concert with their fellow citizens in pursuit of their common good such as making their polity a better place to live in and/or making their voices heard by governments and politicians. And I would argue that such civic politics as exemplified by the Koreans may very well be an ideal-typical model for less developed democracies and their citizens to take into account for their future prospects. With this in mind, I shall begin by explaining what the theoretical model of civic politics should look like; next give account of the processes of democratic evolution in S. Korea in terms of both civil empowerment and civic engagement; and then argue that the civic politics model can have some important theoretical implications for the general process of democratic evolution in different democratic nation-states.

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