South Korea is betting extraordinary sums on artificial intelligence. President Lee Jae-myung has backed an 800 trillion won semiconductor expansion involving Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix, promoted a new chip hub in the country’s southwest and joined Korean and U.S. technology companies in AI initiatives valued at hundreds of billions of dollars. Korea has good reasons to move quickly. Its strengths in high-bandwidth memory, advanced manufacturing, robotics and digital infrastructure give it a leading place in the global AI economy.

But investment headlines obscure economic vulnerability. China has a much larger domestic market, a vast engineering workforce and increasingly capable low-cost models. Chinese AI models have recently won foreign users at prices as low as one-twentieth of leading U.S. alternatives. South Korea has neither China’s scale nor its cost structure. It therefore needs a different comparative advantage. Korea cannot compete with China by becoming a smaller, more expensive version of a closed system. Its advantage must include greater openness.

AI development depends on people who challenge assumptions, report failures upward, test unpopular hypotheses and move information across institutional boundaries. Engineers must tell managers when a model is unreliable. Workers must point out where automation fails. Researchers must revise conventional explanations when new evidence appears. A society in which people first infer the socially acceptable answer and only then decide what to say trains exactly the wrong habits.

The recent controversy surrounding actress Ha Young (legal name Ahn Ha-young) illustrates the power of conformity. On an Aug. 7 television program, she proudly described a family of four generations of doctors. Her great-grandfather, physician Ahn Sang-ho, studied Western medicine in Japan, became the first Korean to obtain a Japanese medical license, served members of the royal family and helped organize Korean physicians.

Online scrutiny then uncovered a more controversial side. Ahn’s name appeared on the 1916 council roster of the Daejeong Friendship Association, an organization associated with cooperation with Japanese colonial rule, and other records suggested considerable assimilation into Japanese colonial society. Ha Young’s agency first called the allegations groundless, then acknowledged the record. Within days, Ha Young issued a handwritten apology “as a descendant,” while broadcast and advertising material featuring her was made private.

Ahn Sang-ho’s association with colonial institutions deserves historical scrutiny. Nor is Ha Young exempt from criticism for speaking confidently about a family history she had not fully investigated. The revealing part is the structure of the sanction: a great-granddaughter expressed pride in an ancestor’s medical achievements, learned of compromising political associations from a century earlier, apologized for her pride and quickly lost commercial visibility. Individual responsibility blurred into inherited stigma.

Samsung Electronics, the center of Korea’s AI investment drive, quickly made all six Samsung Art TV advertisements featuring Ha Young private, while other companies and broadcasters removed public material featuring Ha Young. The reaction illustrates the dominant pull of public conformity: even a technology leader investing heavily in an economy built on open experimentation chose immediate distance rather than waiting for fuller historical discussion.

Korea’s colonial past is difficult, and serious scholarship does not yield a single story. The controversial 2019 bestseller Anti-Japan Tribalism, written by Lee Young-hoon and several other scholars, challenged influential accounts of colonial economic development, forced labor and the comfort-women system, and provoked extensive scholarly rebuttal. One need not accept its arguments to recognize the value of the resulting debate. A liberal democracy answers provocative claims with evidence, counterarguments and better scholarship rather than treating disagreement itself as evidence of moral contamination.

The purpose of open discussion is not to declare every interpretation equally valid. It is to make errors visible and correctable. When institutions punish heterodox claims before they are publicly tested, disagreement does not disappear. It simply exits to partisan channels, anonymous forums and ideologically homogeneous communities, where correction becomes harder.

China demonstrates that political closure does not prevent technological achievement. Chinese engineers and firms have produced formidable AI systems despite censorship and information controls. But China offsets those constraints with scale, capital, lower costs, a vast technical workforce and a Party-led labor system without competing independent unions. Korea does not possess those advantages. If it reproduces some of China’s information closure while carrying higher wages and a smaller market, it sacrifices the central advantage of a liberal society: the denser circulation of criticism, information and unconventional ideas.

The United States is hardly free from ostracism or ideological conformity. Its strength is greater institutional pluralism. When actress Gina Carano lost a major entertainment role after controversial political posts, she quickly found another production partner and later obtained outside financial support for litigation that ended in a settlement and the possibility of future work with her former studio. Likewise, unpopular religious minorities such as the Unification Church find specialized institutions willing to defend freedom of religion or belief and liberal procedural rights. The point is not that Americans suffer no exclusion, but that exclusion from one institution is less likely to mean exclusion from public life altogether.

This institutional pluralism has an economic function. It keeps dissenters, contrarians and socially unpopular people connected to professional networks where their information and talent remain available. It also gives organizations incentives to compete over ideas and people rather than merely enforce a common social line. For AI, that matters as much as formal regulation. Korea’s AI Basic Act addresses transparency and high-impact uses. But trust will not come from rules alone. It also requires a public culture in which citizens, researchers and workers expect that disagreement will not permanently close doors.

South Korea may remain first-tier in the hardware of AI with globally leading Samsung and SK Hynix. The harder question is whether Korea becomes first-tier in models, software, applications and forms of organization that depend more on intellectual experimentation, criticism and the correction of mistakes.

The choice is not between historical memory and forgetting, or between AI safety and an unregulated market. Korea should discuss past injustices, and not just during the colonial period; regulate demonstrable harms and argue vigorously over controversial claims. Korea should also protect the space in which evidence, dissent and revision remain possible. Openness is not a Western moral luxury added after economic development. For a smaller, high-cost country facing China in the AI era, openness is central to industrial strategy.

Joseph Yi is associate professor of political science at Hanyang University in Seoul, and the recipient of Heterodox Academy’s 2025 Open Inquiry Award for Courage. Born in Gwangju, Yi writes on democracy, civil society, polarization, and open inquiry.

A strong presidency was assembling national champions, foreign technology firms and vast pools of capital around an economic transformation presented as a national mission.

Lee is building the South Korean left’s version of the Park Chung-hee’s coalition (1962-1979).

Park understood that South Korea could not remain a backward exporter of labor-intensive goods. His government directed credit and state capacity toward heavy and chemical industries, exploiting existing comparative advantages and creating new ones. His methods were often wasteful and politically selective. Yet the economy grew an average of 8.4% a year from 1962 to 1982, while growth during Chun Doo-hwan’s 1981-87 presidency averaged 8.7%.

Park and Chun led South Korea to unprecedented economic prosperity while restricting workers, journalists and opponents. Economic transformation benefited the nation, but repression burdened the institutions that later had to manage its consequences.

Lee sees another structural moment. His government has announced more than $576 billion for chips, physical AI and data centers, aspiring to become one of the world’s top three AI powers. The San Francisco agreements extend from high-bandwidth memory to AI accelerators, data centers and humanoid robotics.

AI is a general-purpose technology to reshape design, production, logistics, maintenance and management across the economy. This diffusion matters because South Korea has world-class islands of AI-linked enterprise amid a sea of industrial stagnation.

According to the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, small and midsize enterprises employ more than 80% of South Korean workers, but their productivity is only one-third that of large companies. AI adoption stands at 63.3% among firms with more than 250 employees but only 27.4% among firms with 50 to 249 employees. More than 1,000 SMEs in South Korea’s AI Voucher Program recorded productivity gains of 37.6% in 2020 and 45% in 2023. AI could help address the “industrial rot” affecting Japan, South Korea and Taiwan, as semiconductor profits conceal deterioration in other industries exposed to surging Chinese competition.

Economic transformation, however, is only half of the Park comparison. Park coupled modernization with ideological closure. Under the Yushin system, emergency measures criminalized criticism, dissidents were imprisoned and tortured, and independent labor organization was suppressed.

Lee is a democratically elected president, and contemporary South Korea is not a militarist regime. The comparison concerns a governing instinct: Economic experimentation is encouraged, while disfavored political expression is treated as a threat to be excluded rather than an argument to be contested.

For Park’s coalition, the dangerous categories were communism and pro-North Korea expressions. For Lee’s coalition, they are fascism, insurrection, disinformation and hate speech. Expansive moral categories become politically dangerous when they erase the distinction between constitutional violation, unlawful harassment and nonviolent dissent.

In May, Lee proposed punishment, punitive damages and possible closure of online communities that promote mockery and hatred. A separate ruling-party law created heavy financial liability for false or fabricated information. The stated targets are hate and disinformation, but the democratic risk is that those in power decide which hostile or mistaken claims remain politically legitimate.

An incident in the national high school baseball championship demonstrates growing cultural closure. Several players from Paichai High School baseball directed crude chants at a team from Gwangju that many interpreted as mocking the May 18, 1980, democratization movement. The players apologized. The national baseball association nevertheless imposed a six-month ban on the entire team -- later reduced to one month on appeal -- threatening seniors’ college and professional prospects before individual responsibility was separately established.

Nobel laureate Han Kang called the episode a signal from an “age of hatred” that society should not let pass. She did not demand criminal punishment. Yet her response reflects a broader tendency to treat unpopular expression as a social danger and an impatience with the procedurally liberal principle that offensive speech should be answered through criticism, evidence and individual accountability rather than collective punishment.

That impatience has an economic cost. Park and Chun denied workers a meaningful institutional voice while demanding sacrifice for national development. After democratization in 1987, suppressed grievances erupted through militant enterprise unionism and resentment toward conglomerates known as chaebol that were perceived as allied with authoritarian governments.

That legacy now collides with artificial intelligence. Hyundai Motor’s union has warned that not a single humanoid robot should enter the workplace without labor-management agreement. The Korean Metal Workers’ Union called a strike demanding employment guarantees as companies deploy AI and robotics. South Korean unions strike far more frequently than their counterparts in neighboring Japan.

A union veto obstructs technological change. But unilateral automation also fails. AI integration requires changing tasks, sharing production data, retraining employees and sometimes eliminating positions. Outcomes improve when employers consult workers about AI and provide training. South Korea’s problem is not simply militant unions, but low mutual trust. Some unions demand veto power over each robot; managers view consultation as an intolerable constraint.

Political repression deepens the problem. When progressive-dominated institutions punish conservative expression, conservatives exit shared institutions for partisan YouTube channels and alternative media, where weaker factual standards harden grievances. Conservative YouTube is particularly hostile to China and alleged Chinese influence. Its growing political power therefore threatens South Korea’s future ties with its largest goods-trading partner, the world’s second-largest economy and one of the two AI superpowers.

This creates a cycle of repression and political revenge, as each side’s illiberalism justifies the other’s. The trust needed for workplace adaptation, factual correction, and democratic succession deteriorates together.

Park’s economic transformation benefited South Korea as a whole. His repression left institutional distrust that obstructed future adjustments. Lee’s AI drive could likewise create national wealth while his coalition erodes social trust.

The South Korean left’s “Park Chung-hee coalition” will succeed only if it breaks with Park-style illiberalism. South Korea needs the developmental ambition to transform its economy and the procedural liberalism to keep workers and dissenters inside shared institutions. Without both, South Korea may temporarily lead the world in AI chips yet fail to build an AI-adaptive society that protects individual freedom and creativity.

(Asia Nikkei. August 20, 2026 05:05) Joseph Yi is an associate professor of political science at Hanyang University in Seoul.

Military Sexual Exploitation in British Colonial India, the Japanese Military’s ‘Comfort Women’ System, and the U.S. Military Camptown System in South Korea

ABSTRACT

Systemic sexual exploitation, far from being an incidental aberration of colonial and military enterprises, frequently functions as an integral, if deliberately obscured, mechanism of domination and control. This article undertakes a combined analysis of three historically and geographically distinct yet structurally convergent systems of militarised sexual exploitation: the British cantonment prostitution apparatus in colonial India (mid-19th to mid-20th century); the Imperial Japanese military’s ‘Comfort Women’ system during the Second World War (1932–1945); and the United States military’s kijichʼon (camptown) prostitution system in South Korea (1950s–2000s). Drawing on postcolonial theoretical frameworks, feminist scholarship on ‘militarised masculinity,’ intersectional analysis, and state-violence theory, the article argues that in each case the sexual exploitation of women was not incidental to imperial or military power but constitutive of it: organised, regulated, economically enabled, and ideologically justified. The synthesis identifies five convergent structural features across all three systems- state architectural complicity, engineered economic vulnerability, militarised masculine ideology, racialised and caste-based hierarchy, and the systematic erasure of survivors. The article emphasises that the accumulated silence is not the absence of visible harm but its continuation through indirect means.

Keywords: militarised sexual labour; British colonial India; comfort women; kijichʼon; state-regulated prostitution; postcolonial justice; intersectionality

1. INTRODUCTION

What does it mean when the bodies of subjugated women become instruments of governance? This is not just another metaphorical question but a structural one, and it is among the more under-theorised questions in the study of empires, colonialism, and militarism. Existing scholarship on wartime and militarised sexual violence in South and East Asia has, with notable exceptions, treated these governing systems as discrete national histories: the comfort-women scholarship has developed largely within Japanese and Korean studies; the British Indian cantonment system has been addressed within colonial history; and the U.S. military camptown system in Korea has been examined within Cold War and U.S.–Korea relations scholarship. While that respects the historical conditions and the era of that system, the present article brings these three bodies of literature into sustained but distinct dialogue, each retaining its own history and specificity and arguing that their structural convergences reveal a durable logic of militarised sexual exploitation of women that transcends any single colonial formation.

It is interesting to note that, the Japanese comfort-women system has received the most extensive scholarly and public attention, in part because survivors, beginning with Kim Hak-sun’s landmark testimony on 14 August 1991, organised an internationally visible movement for recognition and redress (Yoshimi, 2000). Whereas, the U.S.–Korea camptown system gained belated legal recognition when South Korea’s Supreme Court ruled in September 2022 that the state had actively administered camptown brothels in violation of its own laws; a further lawsuit seeking to hold the U.S. military directly accountable followed in 2025 (Library of Congress, 2023; Malay Mail, 2025). Independent India, by contrast, has been noting its past trajectory, with much attention on the independence from the colonial rule (1947) and the beginning of new constitution with the implementation of just laws and abolition of previously inhumane practices (1950).

2. THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK

Four theoretical frameworks, employed intersectionally, structure this analysis:

2.1 Postcolonial Theories

Postcolonial scholarship has established that colonial power operated not only through economic extraction and political subjugation but through the intimate regulation of sexuality and the body. Ann Laura Stoler’s foundational work demonstrated that colonial regimes deployed sexuality as a site for the production of racial difference and the maintenance of hierarchical social order: the governance of intimacy was integral to the governance of empire (Stoler, 2002). Within the Indian context, Philippa Levine’s research showed that venereal-disease legislation across the British Empire served a dual function, maintaining the martial fitness of troops while simultaneously encoding Indian women’s bodies as sites of contamination and racial danger (Levine, 1994; 2003). More recently, Jung-Sil Lee has argued that colonial frameworks of bodily governance have traceable continuities in the intersectional feminist activism of Korean and Korean-diaspora women today, whose redress movements link wartime sexual slavery to broader claims of gender justice and diasporic solidarity (Lee, 2025).

2.2 Feminist Theories: Militarised Masculinity

Cynthia Enloe’s concept usage of ‘militarised masculinity’ (2000), provides a central analytical tool here. Militarised masculinity denotes a cluster of institutional presumptions: that male soldiers have sexual “needs” which constitute an operational concern; that the management of those needs is a legitimate function of military logistics; and that the bodies of women from racially or economically subordinate populations constitute an appropriate resource for their satisfaction. As Enloe demonstrates, these presumptions are not merely attitudinal but are encoded in policy, legislation, and administrative practice.

2.3 Intersectional Analysis

An intersectional approach is indispensable for understanding how these systems targeted specific women rather than women in general. Rahbari, Roggeband, and Kolbe (2025), argued that race, class, caste, colonial status, and nationality converge in ways that compound vulnerability, and that analyses treating gender as a single axis of oppression obscure the mechanisms through which particular groups of women became disproportionately susceptible to particular forms of exploitation. This is borne out across all three cases: the cantonment system disproportionately affected women from lower castes and classes; the comfort-women system was structured by colonial-nationality and politico-economic hierarchies; and the camptown system operated through the intersection of Korean poverty and U.S. military racial hierarchies.

2.4 State-Violence

The third analytical move is to situate all three systems within a framework of state violence, specifically, violence enacted through routine regulatory and administrative practice rather than through exceptional acts. Katharine Moon’s study of U.S.–Korea camptown relations (1997) demonstrated that the state is not merely a passive permitter of sexual exploitation but an active architect of it, deploying women’s sexual labour as an instrument of foreign policy and military management.

3. THE BRITISH COLONIAL INDIA’S SANCTIONED EXPLOITATION (Mid-19^th to Mid-20^th Century)

3.1 The Cantonment System and Its Legal Framework

The institutionalisation of military/policing prostitution in British India proceeded through a sequence of legislation whose candour is remarkable even by the standards of colonial governance. The Cantonment Act of 1864 (Act XXII of 1864), enacted against the background of anxieties about troop health raised by the Royal Commission on the Sanitary State of the Army in India (1863), formalised the allocation of a fixed number of Indian women, commonly cited as roughly twelve to fifteen per regiment of approximately one thousand soldiers, to dedicated brothels called chaklas located within or immediately adjacent to military garrisons (Ballhatchet, 1980; Mondal, 2022). Registered women were issued a ticket of authorisation and subjected to periodic (typically fortnightly) medical examination; those found to be infected could be confined in lock hospitals, in some accounts for extended periods of up to three months (Levine, 2003).

The Indian Contagious Diseases Act of 1868 (Act XIV of 1868) extended this logic to major cities and seaports beyond formal cantonment boundaries, requiring registration and inspection in brothels and authorising spatial segregation of sex workers. The framing of both instruments was explicitly biopolitical: the animating concern was not the wellbeing of the women subjected to these measures but the martial fitness of British soldiers. As Levine’s archival research shows, the colonial authorities justified the system in terms simultaneously moralistic and racial: regulated prostitution was held to prevent soldiers from “unnatural practices” deemed incompatible with British racial character, to maintain discipline, and to direct soldiers’ energies away from potential disorder (Levine, 1994).

It is also possible to identify seven identifiable categories, including ‘high caste’ and ‘low caste’ Hindu women, Muslim women and Christian and European prostitutes. The underlying assumption here indicated that prostitution hierarchies were racially and ethnically arranged, and prostitutes were predominantly female (Chatterjee, 2021).

The international abolitionist campaign against this system, driven by Josephine Butler’s Ladies’ National Association and allied bodies within the movement for the abolition of state regulation of vice, secured the repeal of the Indian Contagious Diseases Act in 1888. That repeal, however, proved substantially cosmetic. When the American temperance investigators Elizabeth Andrew and Katharine Bushnell, working under the World’s Woman’s Christian Temperance Union, toured ten military cantonments in 1891–1892 and gathered testimony from registered women, they documented that compulsory registration, inspection, and de facto licensed prostitution had continued under cantonment regulations after the statutory repeal, findings later placed before a departmental committee of inquiry in 1893 (Andrew & Bushnell, 1898). Cantonment magistrates retained discretionary powers to designate segregated “bazaar zones” and to evict women identified as health risks, measures enforced through surveillance rather than statutory compulsion, but no less coercive in practice (Mondal, 2022). It was only the Cantonments Act of 1895 that explicitly prohibited the licensing of prostitution, and even then, the chakla system persisted informally, and openly, well into the twentieth century.

Women subjected to the system were stigmatised, that was attached not only to the women but to their families and communities, and that long outlasted the colonial state (Levine, 2003; Kolsky, 2010).

3.2 Economic Coercion as the Structural Engine

The cantonment system operated by manufacturing the conditions under which large numbers of women had no viable alternative to sexual labour within the colonial military economy. British land-revenue systems imposed heavy fiscal demands on Indian cultivators with limited regard to crop yield. The consequences included spiralling debt bondage, the commodification of land subject to sale for revenue default, and the erosion of pre-colonial artisanal and textile industries through deindustrialisation (Davis, 2001). On the widely cited estimates, India’s share of world manufacturing output fell from roughly a quarter around 1750 to about two per cent by 1900 (Clingingsmith & Williamson, 2008).

The resulting mass impoverishment had documented consequences for women’s economic vulnerability. Historical accounts of the Bengal Famine of 1943, whose excess mortality is estimated across a wide range, from under one million to nearly four million, with a frequently cited scholarly consensus of roughly 2.1 million and higher estimates approaching three million, record that some women and girls entered transactional sexual encounters (the material conditions of wartime colonial famine) with military and other personnel as a survival strategy under conditions of extreme destitution (Ó Gráda, 2007; Sen, 1983).

3.3 The Devadasi System: Colonial Reform and Its Contradictions

A further dimension of colonial sexual governance concerns the transformation of the Devadasi system, an established practice of dedicating young women, predominantly from lower castes, to the service of Hindu temples, where they functioned as ritual performers with a recognised social and artistic standing. Devadasi institution operated within an intimate patronage network sustained by local rulers and landholders; colonial policies that stripped temples of land endowments and undermined the wealth and authority of indigenous patrons simultaneously eroded the economic foundation of the practice (Srinivasan, 1985).

The consequences were structurally predictable: women whose social position and economic security had been embedded in the temple economy found themselves without patrons, without recognised status, and without alternative livelihoods. Colonial and reformist “anti-nautch” campaigns that sought to “rescue” Devadasi women by criminalising their performances simultaneously removed the last remnants of their socially recognised professional identity, in many cases pushing them toward the commercial sex economy that reformers claimed to deplore (Srinivasan, 1985; Lodha, 2015). This is a characteristic paradox of colonial moral reform: its stated objectives were undercut by the structural conditions its own economic policies created.

The intersection of caste and sexual vulnerability is not incidental too. 93% of Devadasi were from Scheduled Castes (Dalits) and 7% from Scheduled Tribes (Black, 2007). The Devadasi system thus concentrated sexual vulnerability at the precise intersection of caste subordination and economic destitution, an intersection that colonial policy deepened rather than ameliorated.

4. THE IMPERIAL JAPANESE MILITARY’S ‘COMFORT WOMEN’ SYSTEM: (1932–1945)

The Imperial Japanese military’s comfort-women system represents the most overt and bureaucratically comprehensive instance of state-organised sexual slavery in the modern historical record. Yoshiaki Yoshimi’s documentary research (2000), drawing on military archives whose significance he brought to public attention in 1992, established that the system began in the early 1930s in occupied China and expanded across Japanese-controlled territories in Asia and the Pacific during the Second World War. Estimates of the total number of women subjected to the system vary widely and remain contested, ranging from tens of thousands to as many as 200,000; the majority were from Korea and China, though women from the Philippines, Indonesia, the Dutch East Indies, and other occupied territories were also coerced into the system.

Military authorities were involved at every operational level: policy formulation; the management of recruitment networks (exercised either directly by military units or through closely supervised civilian brokers); the logistics of transport; and the establishment, regulation, and medical administration of comfort stations (Yoshimi, 2000; Tanaka, 2002). The system was rationalised in terms structurally identical to those deployed in the British cantonment and U.S. camptown systems: the management of soldier morale, the reduction of venereal disease among troops, and with grim irony given its catastrophic failure on this dimension- the prevention of the rape and poverty-sation of civilian women in occupied territories.

Recruitment systematically exploited the intersection of colonial subjugation and economic destitution. False promises of factory work, domestic service, or nursing were characteristic tactics documented in survivor testimony (Yoshimi, 2000; Hicks, 1995). Women from rural backgrounds, with limited formal education and from families facing acute hardship, were disproportionately targeted; in some documented cases families under severe economic pressure were deceived or coerced into releasing daughters to military-affiliated recruiters.

Conditions within the comfort stations were marked by extreme physical violence, including systematic rape, survivor testimonies record demands of many clients per day alongside beatings, punishment for non-compliance, forced abortions, and the near-total absence of adequate medical care despite the system’s ostensible disease-prevention rationale (Hicks, 1995; Yoshimi, 2000). Mortality was substantial, and survivors who returned home frequently found themselves unable to reintegrate into communities that treated them as irredeemably dishonoured.

The trajectory of acknowledgement and redress has been protracted and incomplete. Japan’s 1993 Kōno Statement acknowledged that military authorities had been involved in the establishment and management of comfort stations and that recruitment had not always been voluntary; subsequent governmental positions have oscillated between acknowledgement and partial retraction. Kim Hak-sun’s public testimony in August 1991, the first by a survivor, catalysed a movement of survivors, scholars, and advocates that has secured partial diplomatic acknowledgements, established memorial sites, and sustained international pressure for comprehensive reparations, without, as of this writing, achieving full legal resolution (Yoshimi, 2000; Lee, 2025).

5. THE U.S. MILITARY CAMPTOWN SYSTEM IN SOUTH KOREA (1950s–2000s)

The third case extends the comparative frame from colonial and wartime contexts into the Cold War era, demonstrating that the structural logic of militarised sexual exploitation is not a historical relic but a durable feature of masculinised state power across diverse geopolitical formations. Katharine Moon’s Sex Among Allies (1997), based on archival research and interviews with former camptown women and officials, established that kijichʼon prostitution in South Korea was actively co-administered by the South Korean government and the United States Forces Korea (USFK) as an instrument of bilateral security policy.

Moon’s central finding was that during the “Camptown Clean-Up” (purification) Campaign of 1971, a joint U.S.–ROK (Republic of Korea) apparatus regulated the bodies and conduct of camptown sex workers, imposing twice-weekly venereal-disease examinations, issuing registration cards, and conducting round-ups of women suspected of being disease “reservoirs.”

The South Korean government’s motivation has been noted to be of explicitly geopolitical: the Nixon Doctrine’s proposed reduction of U.S. troop levels had alarmed the Park Chung-hee government, which reconceived camptown sex work as a means of retaining the American alliance. Moon documents that camptown women were officially reframed as quasi-patriotic “personal ambassadors” whose labour served Korean national security, a rhetorical move that simultaneously elevated and instrumentalised their subjugation (Moon, 1997).

Economic coercion was again structural rather than incidental. Moon documents that the overwhelming majority of camptown women in the 1950s and 1960s entered the system from backgrounds of extreme rural poverty and wartime displacement, many were war widows or the daughters of families destroyed by the Korean War. As the Korean economy developed and domestic alternatives expanded, Korean women’s withdrawal from camptown work led club owners to recruit Filipina and Eastern European women under “entertainment visa” programmes. Sealing Cheng’s related ethnography (2010) traced this transnational migration in the late 1990s and early 2000s, finding that the migrant workers who replaced Korean camptown women faced conditions that international NGOs characterised as sex trafficking, a substitution of one vulnerable population for another that is itself structurally diagnostic.

The racialised hierarchies within the camptown system add further comparative weight. Katharine Moon documents that camptown clubs and the women within them were stratified according to the racial identity of their U.S. military clientele: “black” and “white” clubs were effectively segregated and that joint USFK–ROK management sought to deploy this arrangement to manage racial tensions within the U.S. armed forces, a dynamic that reproduced American racial hierarchy on Korean soil (Moon, 1997).

Legal recognition of the camptown system has been belated, contested, and significant. A first-instance ruling of the Seoul Central District Court in January 2017 found the state partly responsible; a 2018 appellate ruling expanded that liability. The landmark decision came on 29 September 2022, when South Korea’s Supreme Court found that the state had established and operated camptown “comfort” facilities in violation of its own laws, characterised the system as state-led violence and a violation of the women’s human dignity, and upheld damages to 95 surviving plaintiffs (of the 120-plus who had filed in 2014) (Library of Congress, 2023). In 2025, more than one hundred former camptown women filed a further suit seeking to hold the U.S. military directly accountable for its co-administrative role (Malay Mail, 2025). Lee and Chi’s 2025 analysis in Geopolitics examines the continuing entanglement of camptown sites with the security–development nexus of South Korean state-building (Lee & Chi, 2025).

6. SYNTHESIS: STRUCTURAL CONVERGENCES

The above analyses reveal a durable, cross-cultural template of state-sanctioned sexual governance. Rather than treating these as isolated anomalies of specific national histories, an intersectional mapping exposes five convergent structural features:

In none of the systems did military prostitution noted to emerge purely from laissez-faire market forces; the state was in each case its primary administrative architect. The British colonial state codified the system through the Cantonment Acts, erecting chaklas and lock hospitals. The Imperial Japanese military issued command-wide directives and provided logistics and transport for comfort-station networks. In South Korea, joint U.S.–ROK bodies executed the 1971 Purification Campaign, administering registration cards and clinical inspection. Across all three, the state functioned as an active manager, not a passive observer, of sexual exploitation.

Recruitment and retention were noted to be rested on structural destitution generated or aggravated by state macro-policy. In British India, land-revenue extraction and deindustrialisation decimated rural economies, driving subaltern women into survival exchange. In colonial Korea and occupied territories, Japanese economic exploitation and wartime disruption left populations impoverished and susceptible to deceptive labour recruitment. In Cold War South Korea, the devastation of the Korean War produced a large cohort of displaced women, war widows and orphaned daughters, with minimal alternative means of subsistence.

Each structure was anchored in the institutional ideology of “militarised masculinity” (Enloe, 2000): the premise that male soldiers possess an operational requirement for sexual “release” that must be managed to sustain morale and readiness. Military commands accordingly treated the regulation of women’s bodies as a routine administrative function, rationalised as disease control or as the prevention of unauthorised sexual violence against the wider civilian population, thereby institutionalising one form of violence in the name of managing another.

The deployment and internal governance of women’s bodies were organised along lines of race, caste, and colonial nationality. In colonial India, cantonment frameworks constructed Indian women’s bodies as racially subordinate and pathologically “dangerous” relative to British masculinity. The Japanese system imposed a nationality hierarchy in which colonised subjects were treated far more harshly than Japanese nationals. In the U.S. camptowns, internal hierarchies mirrored the racial dynamics of the U.S. armed forces, stratifying women by the racial identity of their clientele and instrumentalising them to manage intra-military racial friction (Moon, 1997).

The final convergence is the colonial state-directed erasure of these histories. Following political transitions or shifts in alliance, states purged records, demolished physical traces, and enforced silence to protect legitimacy and strategic relationships. Survivors were left to bear physical and psychological trauma in isolation, confronting social stigma and familial and communal ostracism if they came forward.

9. CONCLUSION

This analysis has argued that militarised sexual exploitation is neither an accidental breakdown of individual discipline nor a marginal by-product of warfare, but an organised, bureaucratic, and structurally convergent technique of statecraft deployed by imperial, wartime, and Cold War states alike. Juxtaposing the British cantonment system, the Imperial Japanese comfort stations, and the U.S. camptowns in South Korea reveals a shared operational blueprint: state administrative architecture, engineered economic destitution, and institutionalised militarised-masculine ideology mobilised to exploit subaltern women.

It is worth to note that, for the Indian sociological and legal context, excavating these continuities is an urgent task. The common, enduring amnesia around the colonial cantonment system reveals how much subaltern gendered trauma remains occluded in South Asian public memory. The recent modifications in the adopted colonial regulatory logics in the previous legal frameworks suggests that decolonial justice is finally progressing, after having eagerly awaited being excavated, confronted, and dismantled.

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South Korea swings from political paralysis to punitive power

On July 7, South Korea began enforcing a sweeping law against false and manipulated information. The law authorizes punitive damages of up to five times proven losses against news organizations and large online channels that knowingly distribute prohibited content to cause harm or gain profit. Repeat distribution after a final determination of falsehood can bring administrative fines of up to 1 billion won.

The law captures a larger political shift. Under former President Yoon Suk-yeol, South Korean politics was defined by paralysis. Under President Lee Jae-myung, paralysis has given way to governing power. The democratic question is whether that power will be used mainly to solve problems or punish those judged to have acted in bad faith.

Yoon governed throughout his presidency without control of the National Assembly. Before his December 2024 martial-law declaration, opposition lawmakers had filed 22 impeachment motions against administration officials, cut 4.1 trillion won from the proposed 2025 budget and pressed for investigations of Yoon’s wife and senior officials.

Yoon came to treat obstruction as subversion. He embraced an alternative information ecosystem that amplified election-manipulation claims, then sent troops to the National Election Commission during martial law. Political weakness culminated in constitutional overreach.

Lee inherited the opposite configuration. His Democratic Party controls the National Assembly and, after June’s local elections, 12 of the 16 major mayoral and provincial governments.

Unlike his predecessor, Lee can act. Political stability has helped South Korea capitalize on the AI-memory boom. In June, the government and major firms announced a roughly $576 billion investment strategy centered on semiconductors, physical AI and data centers. A government-mediated agreement also averted a planned 18-day Samsung strike involving roughly 48,000 workers. Lee has eased access to North Korea’s official media (Rodong Sinmun) as well.

These are real gains. Democratic government requires governing capacity as well as restraint. The concern is not that strong government is inherently undemocratic. It is that political dominance makes punishment easier and restraint less rewarding.

The new fake-news law, passed by the National Assembly in December 2025 and effective July 7, illustrates the problem. Reducing deliberate disinformation is a legitimate aim, but the law leaves crucial boundaries unclear. Critics warned that minor factual errors or broad claims could be swept into prohibited false or fabricated information. Critics also call its public-interest safeguard vague. Intent, harmful purpose and public interest are therefore judged after publication, while the threat of fivefold damages shapes behavior beforehand.

Platforms face a related incentive. Services with more than 1 million daily users must respond to reports through measures including removal or account suspension. The government says private operators, not officials, will decide what qualifies; critics warn that platforms will predictably err on the side of deletion. Ordinary users may not face the largest damages claims, but they still fear that disputed posts will disappear or accounts will be restricted before contested facts are settled.

The law is formally viewpoint-neutral, but its political genealogy arouses conservative fears. The Democratic Party passed the measure after Lee repeatedly criticized the post-martial-law information environment, in which Yoon and pro-Yoon YouTube channels circulated election-fraud claims that helped mobilize conservative supporters. The democratic danger is a system in which a partisan majority, regulators, litigants and platforms share incentives to decide which political narratives are too false to circulate.

The problem becomes clearer when formal penalties interact with social and administrative sanctions.

On May 18, the anniversary of the 1980 Gwangju uprising, Starbucks Korea launched a “Tank Day” promotion that many interpreted as evoking the military suppression of Gwangju. The backlash included boycotts, the dismissal of Starbucks Korea’s chief executive and the Interior Ministry’s decision to stop using Starbucks products and vouchers. Shinsegae’s internal investigation later found failures in review procedures, but no evidence of intentional wrongdoing.

The political arbitrariness is easier to see in comparison. On March 26, the anniversary of the Cheonan sinking, Starbucks launched its “Dear20” program for Rewards members in their twenties. The promotion generated no comparable controversy or claim that it concealed an insult to the 46 sailors killed in the sinking. Political context, not a consistent rule, shaped which coincidence became punishable.

During a June 29 baseball game against Gwangju Jeil High School, some Paichai High School players shouted “Let’s go to Starbucks!” and “Tank Day!” toward the opposing dugout. The Korea Baseball Softball Association banned the entire Paichai team from national competition for six months. Paichai separately referred two students identified as leading the chants for individual disciplinary review, while the team-wide ban threatened the draft and college prospects of players, even those not identified as instigators.

Ban supporters emphasized education and deterrence against hatred and historical distortion. Critics called the sanction disproportionate collective punishment on a contested historical issue. When Lee Byung-tae, vice chairman of the Presidential Committee on Regulatory Rationalization, criticized the punishment and later defended a broad conception of expressive freedom, ruling-party lawmakers demanded his resignation. On July 6, the presidential office recommended that he step down, and he resigned later that day.

No single institution directed this sequence. Consumers boycott, companies dismiss executives, associations ban teams, ministries make administrative choices, legislators demand resignations and the presidential office intervenes. Each action can be defended separately. Together they create a political environment in which punishment accumulates across institutions.

Punitive power is not the same as dictatorship. It is governance through escalating consequences: damages, fines, bans, dismissals and administrative sanctions that reinforce one another. One penalty raises the political cost of leniency for the next institution. The risk is greatest when political actors and institutions share assumptions about which groups are dangerous, dishonest or undeserving of ordinary tolerance.

South Korea has seen this danger before. Conservative governments historically used anticommunism to restrict allegedly pro-North Korean speech and association. Lee’s recent relaxation of access to North Korean media is therefore welcome. It trusts citizens to encounter foreign propaganda and judge for themselves.

That same presumption should extend to domestic media and speech. A democracy should punish unlawful conduct on clear evidence, distinguish individual wrongdoing from group guilt and make penalties proportionate to demonstrated harm. It should not rely on ambiguous categories that invite institutions to compete in restricting individuals’ freedom of speech and expression.

South Korea has escaped political paralysis. Lee’s democratic test is whether restored governing power resists the temptation to punish.

Joseph Yi is an associate professor of political science at Hanyang University in Seoul. Born in Gwangju, Yi writes on democracy, civil society and open inquiry.

From speech to election controversies, assumptions about hidden motives increasingly shape politics and public life

Author: Joseph Yi

When President Lee Jae Myung took office on June 4, 2025, South Korea needed democratic repair. Former President Yoon Suk Yeol’s martial law attempt shocked the country and convinced many voters that democracy had to be defended.

But democratic repair requires more than impeachment. It requires rebuilding a presumption of civic good faith — that citizens are not malicious actors unless proven otherwise.

South Korea’s democratic development has long combined liberal constitutional principles with a preventive understanding of democracy. Liberal citizenship has coexisted uneasily with the idea that some groups, parties or movements are not merely mistaken political opponents, but bad-faith actors whose hidden purposes threaten the constitutional order.

The 1948 National Security Act targeted alleged pro-North Korean activity, while Article 8 of the ROK Constitution permits the dissolution of political parties whose purposes or activities are found to violate the fundamental democratic order.

These provisions reflect South Korea’s long-standing embrace of a militant-democracy model, developed in response to the peninsula’s unique security environment.

The danger is not that unlawful conduct is punished. It is that political identity, association or dissenting speech becomes evidence that some actors deserve a weaker presumption of rights, loyalty and good faith.

This logic helped justify restrictions under Syngman Rhee, emergency rule and the Yushin system under Park Chung-hee, and martial law under Chun Doo-hwan, culminating tragically in the violent suppression of the Gwangju Democratization Movement.

PREVENTIVE LOGIC

The same preventive logic persisted after democratization. In 2014, the conservative Park Geun-hye administration secured the dissolution of the Unified Progressive Party (UPP) after alleging that lawmaker Lee Seok-ki and his associates had plotted a rebellion if war broke out with North Korea.

Lee denied the allegations, while UPP leader Lee Jung-hee argued that the “guns in Busan” remark cited by prosecutors was a joke rather than an operational plan. They may have been lying. But the legal question was whether the state could prove criminal intent, agreement and a concrete threat, rather than infer them from radical speech or political association.

The courts partly recognized that distinction. The Seoul High Court acquitted Lee of conspiracy to commit insurrection while upholding convictions for incitement and National Security Act violations, a ruling later upheld by the Supreme Court.

One can believe Lee’s rhetoric was inflammatory and still worry about the preventive logic at work. The state intervened before violence occurred, relying on its assessment of future danger. Whether justified or not, that approach illustrates the broader tension between preventing threats and preserving the presumption of civic good faith.

Today, similar preventive instincts appear under a different vocabulary: anti-insurrection, anti-hate speech, anti-disinformation and anti-cult. Yesterday’s concern was whether leftists were secretly pro-North Korean. Today’s question increasingly becomes whether conservatives, churches, companies or dissenting media are secretly anti-democratic.

PRESUMING MALICE

The Starbucks controversy illustrates how negligence can quickly become conspiracy. Starbucks Korea launched a “Tank Day” promotion on May 18, the anniversary of the 1980 Gwangju uprising. The timing was historically insensitive: tanks evoke the military crackdown, while “tak” recalls student activist Park Jong-chul, who was tortured to death by the police in 1987.

Progressive activists and politicians, including President Lee, treated the episode less as historically ignorant marketing than as a deliberate insult to Gwangju protesters.

The company canceled the campaign, Starbucks Korea’s chief executive was dismissed, Shinsegae chairman Chung Yong-jin apologized and stores nationwide closed early for mandatory history and social-sensitivity training.

Chung is both a prominent business leader and an outspoken conservative, and that identity inevitably shaped public interpretation. Notably, Shinsegae executives said they found no conclusive evidence that employees intended to mock the democratization movement, and the employees involved reportedly denied doing so.

Those denials should be tested. But a liberal society distinguishes between insult and intent, and between intent and identity. When leaders treat error as evidence of hidden malice, every mistake risks becoming proof of ideological betrayal.

On March 26, the anniversary of the sinking of the ROKS Cheonan, Starbucks launched its Dear20 promotion for Rewards members in their twenties. Few interpreted that campaign as a concealed insult to the sailors killed in the attack. The difference illustrates how assumptions about the actor can shape interpretations of the act.

REGULATING TRUTH

The same logic increasingly appears in debates over speech and historical memory. South Korea already criminalizes certain false claims about the May 18 Gwangju Democratization Movement, and conservative commentator Jee Man-won received a prison sentence for defamatory claims that North Korean soldiers participated in the uprising.

A revised Information and Communications Network Act, passed by the National Assembly in December, is scheduled to take effect this month and will allow punitive damages against media outlets and large online channels found to have disseminated false or fabricated information.

A separate revised law now criminalizes false information concerning “comfort women” while exempting legitimate artistic, academic, research and news reporting activities.

Supporters argue that these measures protect victims and democratic institutions. But they also assume that some speakers are acting not in pursuit of truth, however poorly, but with the deliberate intent to inflict harm or undermine society.

Once governments acquire greater authority to define falsehood, enforcement can become selective. The result is memory governance through political power.

GUILT BY ASSOCIATION

The Unification Church controversy raises a related question about association. Investigators have examined allegations that church figures sought political influence through gifts, donations and mass enrollment in the main opposition People Power Party (PPP).

The church’s co-founder, Hak Ja Han, was later charged over allegations involving luxury gifts, political favors and dealings with conservative politicians. She and the church have denied institutional wrongdoing, arguing that any misconduct was carried out independently by a former official rather than directed by church leadership.

That defense may ultimately prove false. But it should be tested through evidence rather than replaced by collective suspicion.

The more troubling development was investigators’ decision to compare a PPP membership database with a Unification Church membership roster, identifying roughly 110,000 suspected overlaps.

Such analysis may help uncover unlawful coordination. But it also risks treating religious affiliation itself as evidence of political guilt. A presumption of bad faith begins when membership in a community becomes a proxy for criminal intent.

BREAKING THE CYCLE

That same presumption can ultimately rebound against those who employ it.

The June local elections were marred by ballot shortages after the National Election Commission (NEC) reported disruptions at 91 polling stations, forcing voting to halt temporarily at 26 locations. The NEC chief resigned, President Lee called for sweeping reforms of election management and protesters demanded accountability.

The shortages likely reflected poor preparation, unexpectedly high turnout or administrative failures. But in a low-trust society, bureaucratic mistakes rarely remain merely bureaucratic. They become fertile ground for citizens already inclined to suspect hidden motives behind public failures.

The democratic response is transparency rather than contempt. Election officials should explain what failed, who was responsible and how similar problems will be prevented. Conservatives should pursue election administration reform without treating every failure as proof of a stolen election. Progressives should resist dismissing every concern as conspiracy.

But once politics becomes an exercise in moral classification, every side eventually interprets events through the same lens.

The common thread is not that Starbucks, the Unification Church, election officials or Lee Seok-ki were innocent. The common thread is the democratic danger of skipping the evidentiary middle.

A liberal order asks what happened, who acted, what intent can be proven, what law applies and what remedy is proportionate. A politics of presumed bad faith starts with identity and works backward toward guilt.

South Korea does not need a weaker central government. It needs a liberal democratic state — one that is strong enough to prevent constitutional violations and punish corruption, but restrained enough to investigate wrongdoing without presuming guilt, protect offensive speech within narrow legal limits and rebuild election trust through transparency rather than contempt.

Democracy is restored not by presuming virtue or vice, but by protecting every citizen from arbitrary power and preserving a presumption of good faith unless proven otherwise.

Joseph Yi is an associate professor of political science at Hanyang University in Seoul. He received his PhD from the University of Chicago, and studies individual liberty, communication, and cooperation across social groups. He is the author of God and Karate on the Southside (2009) and more than 34 academic journal articles. His commentary has appeared in Nikkei Asia, Asia Times, The Diplomat, Japan Forward, The Korea Herald, The Korea Times, The New York Times, South China Morning Post, The Hill, and The UnPopulist. His publications are available on Academia, Google Scholar, Substack, and personal publication list.

Joseph Yi is an associate professor of political science at Hanyang University in Seoul.

South Korea’s June 3 local elections look at first like a simple progressive victory. Held exactly one year after President Lee Jae Myung took office, the vote gave his Democratic Party broad control across the country and confirmed that the conservative bloc still lives under the shadow of former President Yoon Suk Yeol’s failed martial law bid. Yet the results also told a more complicated story. People Power Party (PPP) incumbent and current Seoul Mayor Oh Se-hoon narrowly won re-election, and former PPP leader Han Dong-hoon returned to parliament as an independent conservative in Busan. In the parliamentary by-elections, the PPP and Han captured four formerly Democratic-held seats, narrowing the ruling party’s majority.

These results suggest that South Korean voters are not simply endorsing progressive dominance. Many are punishing the constitutional recklessness of Yoon while still looking for institutional conservative counterweights to Lee’s ruling coalition.

Yoon’s presidency left two sharply different legacies. One was his strategic rapprochement with Japan. The other was his emergency declaration of martial law. The first has proved surprisingly durable. The second has become politically toxic.

Yoon was often distrustful of mainstream media, bureaucratic caution and conventional elite opinion. He drew from an alternative conservative media ecosystem that challenged South Korea’s progressive historical consensus, including its framing of Japan as an unrepentant former colonizer. That ecosystem contained arguments of uneven quality. Some claims about colonial history, forced labor, comfort women and strategic normalization with Japan were radical but more empirically grounded. Other claims about election fraud, communist infiltration, Chinese influence and North Korean cyber operations were far weaker.

Japan policy represented the more verifiable side of that alternative ecosystem. In 2023, Yoon’s administration adopted a South Korea-funded compensation plan for Koreans mobilized for wartime labor, avoided liquidation of Japanese corporate assets and prioritized future-oriented security cooperation with Tokyo. Progressives denounced the move as a retreat from historical justice. But the strategic logic became harder to dismiss as South Korea and Japan faced North Korea’s nuclear weapons, China’s assertiveness, supply-chain disruption, and energy insecurity.

Lee entered national politics as a strong critic of Japan. As president, however, he has largely accepted Yoon’s strategic pivot. His government has pursued a two-track approach, separating historical disputes from practical cooperation. The May 19 Andong summit with Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi made that continuity visible. Lee hosted Takaichi in his hometown, after having visited her hometown of Nara earlier this year. The symbolism was clear: rapprochement with Japan had moved from a conservative project into South Korea’s strategic mainstream.

It is now less plausible for a South Korean president to organize foreign policy around demonizing Japan while treating North Korea, China or Russia as preferred alternatives. Lee has not become a conservative. But he has confirmed that Yoon shifted the range of acceptable policy toward Tokyo.

Yoon’s other radical departure followed the opposite path. On Dec. 3, 2024, he declared emergency martial law, denouncing anti-state forces and obstruction of government administration by the Democratic Party. Troops surrounded the National Assembly and entered National Election Commission offices amid claims about election vulnerabilities and foreign hacking. The legislature quickly voted to rescind the decree, and Yoon lifted martial law within hours. He later described the move as a political warning, but courts and voters treated it as something far more serious.

That decision shattered the conservative camp’s claim to constitutional responsibility. It turned Yoon from a polarizing reformer into a symbol of democratic irresponsibility. The local elections therefore became partly a referendum on whether conservatives could be trusted after martial law.

Oh’s Seoul victory and Han’s Busan comeback suggest conservative reconfiguration rather than simple conservative collapse. Both figures publicly rejected Yoon’s martial law logic. Oh further presented himself as a competent administrator. Han, a former justice minister, projected a legalist and institutionally oriented conservatism, distinct from regional loyalties and YouTube-driven populism.

Their appeal reflects a broader public instinct for democratic balance. South Korean voters often punish one side without granting the other an unlimited mandate. In this election, many seemed to hold two views at once: the conservative establishment deserved punishment for Yoon’s martial law crisis, but unchecked Democratic dominance under Lee also raises concerns about polarization, prosecutorial politics and majoritarian overreach.

That concern is growing because Lee’s domestic politics look less restrained than his foreign policy. Accountability for martial law is legitimate. But accountability becomes illiberal when it becomes a broader campaign against conservatives. Lee has paired pragmatic rapprochement with Japan abroad with punitive historical politics at home, including orders to reclaim the assets of colonial-era collaborators and renewed denunciations of their alleged political heirs. His recent proposal to ban or heavily sanction Ilbe, a controversial right-wing online community, reinforces conservative complaints that progressive leaders treat dissident spaces as illegitimate rather than contestable.

It would also misread the lesson of the Yoon era. Alternative media is not homogeneous. It can produce radical claims that later survive institutional scrutiny, as Yoon’s Japan policy partly did. It can also amplify conspiracies that collapse under constitutional and empirical testing, as Yoon’s election fraud and infiltration claims did. The democratic task is case-by-case legal judgment, not blanket suppression: enforce existing laws against explicit threats, defamation, privacy violations, incitement and coordinated harassment, but do not close oppositional spaces because they offend the governing majority.

For progressives, the lesson is clear. Lee’s strongest achievement may be preserving Yoon’s Japan shift while rejecting Yoon’s constitutional recklessness. If Lee uses electoral strength to entrench partisan dominance or close disfavored media spaces, he risks creating the very resentment and epistemic exit that radicalized parts of the right.

For conservatives, the lesson is equally direct. Recovery requires more than anti-Lee opposition. It requires accepting the illegitimacy of martial-law politics and rebuilding around procedural restraint, administrative competence and democratic credibility.

Yoon’s legacy is therefore contradictory but not incoherent. He made friendship with Japan politically safer for future Korean presidents. He also made anti-constitutional adventurism politically toxic for future conservatives. South Korea’s local elections did not mark the end of conservatism. They revealed the search for a conservatism that can survive Yoon by preserving his strategic realism and repudiating his constitutional rupture.

The Korean term meongseokmari literally means “rolling someone in a straw mat.” A meongseok is a traditional straw mat used mainly for drying grain and, on special household occasions, as a floor covering for guests (Google Arts & Culture, n.d., https://artsandculture.google.com/asset/straw-mat-unknown/8wEgEfNHT9ty_w?hl=en). In some cases, powerful households used a rolled-up straw mat to bind and beat an innocent person in a form of private punishment called meongseokmari (Academy of Korean Studies, n.d., https://encykorea.aks.ac.kr/Article/E0018113), often carried out after an informal public trial by village or interest-group leaders (Yonhap News Agency, June 14, 2025, https://www.yna.co.kr/view/AKR20250613104400546).

That old village image has returned in digital and political form. Starbucks Korea’s “Tank Day” promotion was not an isolated one-day campaign but part of a sequence of tumbler promotions that Starbucks began on May 15. The events were named by product model and date: “Dante Day” on May 15, “Tank Day” on May 18, and “Nasu Day” on May 20. The promotional images included the tumbler model name, the date, and short product phrases such as “Perfect for One Hand!,” “Tak on the table!,” and “Fits Right in Your Bag!” Starbucks had also previously run a “Mini Tank Day” promotion on April 16.

Progressive activists, however, declared the May 18 “Tank Day” event to be insensitive because May 18 is the anniversary of the 1980 Gwangju Democratic Uprising. Activists associated the combination of “5/18,” “Tank Day,” and “Tak on the table!” with state violence and the Park Jong-chul torture-death case. Quickly responding to the public uproar, Starbucks Korea withdrew the campaign, Shinsegae issued apologies, and the local Starbucks Korea chief was fired (https://asia.nikkei.com/business/food-beverage/starbucks-korea-faces-boycott-after-tank-day-mug-promotion-backfires).

A free society allows criticism. The question is whether criticism becomes punishment without proportion, evidence of intent, or any semblance of due process, and whether the government, which retains a monopoly on legitimate coercive power, should get involved.

The symbolic controversy itself requires disaggregation. The Gwangju Democratic Uprising occurred on May 18, 1980. The Park Jong-chul torture-death case occurred on January 14, 1987, when police falsely claimed that the student activist died after a desk was struck with a “tak” sound. The Starbucks controversy therefore did not rest on a single direct historical correspondence. It fused separate memories of authoritarian violence: tanks and military repression associated with Gwangju, and the “tak” phrase associated with Park Jong-chul. That distinction matters. It does not excuse the marketing failure. It strengthens the case for asking how meaning was constructed, whether offense was intentional, and whether public outrage merged distinct historical memories into a single moral accusation.

President Lee Jae-myung publicly denounced the company, and the Interior Ministry announced that it would stop offering Starbucks products or vouchers at official events. The controversy therefore moved from consumer criticism to state-amplified punishment (Reuters, May 22, 2026, https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-pacific/south-korean-ministry-shun-starbucks-vouchers-tank-day-campaign-backlash-2026-05-22/). The pattern recalls the 2019–2020 anti-Japan boycott under the previous progressive Moon Jae-in administration, when a consumer movement that began after Japan’s July 2019 export controls expanded into a nationwide “No Japan” campaign against Japanese goods, travel, and brands, while the government’s confrontational rhetoric toward Tokyo gave the boycott a quasi-official endorsement (Yonhap, December 22, 2020, https://en.yna.co.kr/view/AEN20201222007600315; Korea.net, August 2, 2019, https://www.korea.net/Government/Briefing-Room/Presidential-Speeches/view?articleId=173815).

The punishment also spread beyond Starbucks itself. Actor Jeong Min-chan, who had posted photos from a Starbucks visit on social media, stepped down from the musical Diaghilev after the controversy expanded. The production company Showplay did not disclose a precise reason, but apologized for “the matter related to actor Jeong Min-chan.” Jeong later apologized, saying that he had been too busy with daily life to keep up with current affairs, and that ignorance was also a mistake. In a free society, consumers may criticize an actor for public behavior they regard as insensitive. But the case shows how quickly moral punishment can spread from a corporation to people tangentially associated with it, even when the alleged offense is not participation in the original marketing campaign but a later act of consumption or social-media expression (Chosun Daily, May 23, 2026, https://www.chosun.com/english/national-en/2026/05/23/HUYOHB75UZA4HHFIHKDSXBTD6I/).

A key question remains largely unexamined: intent. Did Starbucks Korea, or its CEO, deliberately mock the victims of Gwangju, or did an ordinary corporate marketing calendar produce an offensive coincidence through historical blindness and inadequate review? Both would be blameworthy, but they are not the same offense. Liberal societies punish intentional cruelty more severely than negligent stupidity because culpability matters. Meongseokmari collapses that distinction. It does not ask what happened, who knew what, who approved what, or what remedy fits the injury. It asks only whether the crowd has found a morally satisfying target.

The arbitrariness becomes clearer when one compares March 26. On March 26, 2010, the South Korean naval corvette Cheonan sank near Baengnyeong Island, killing 46 sailors. South Korean authorities later concluded that a North Korean torpedo caused the sinking, although North Korea denied responsibility (KBS World, March 26, 2025, https://world.kbs.co.kr/service/news_view.htm?Seq_Code=191917&lang=e; Korea Herald, March 26, 2026, https://www.koreaherald.com/article/10702616).

Yet Starbucks Korea launched “Dear20” on March 26, 2026, a program for Starbucks Rewards members in their twenties. Starbucks Korea’s official promotion page lists Dear20 as beginning on March 26, 2026 (Starbucks Korea, 2026, https://www.starbucks.co.kr/whats_new/campaign_view.do?menu_cd=&pro_seq=3305). Shinsegae Group’s newsroom also announced Starbucks Landers Shopping Festa promotions on March 26, including benefits that began on March 27 and April 1 (Shinsegae Group Newsroom, March 26, 2026, https://www.shinsegaegroupnewsroom.com/starbucks-landers-shopping-festa-promotion/).

If one applies the most punitive logic, a promotion aimed at people in their twenties on the anniversary of Cheonan might be called offensive because many of the dead sailors were young men. Yet Korea’s political class did not mobilize against Starbucks on March 26. There was no comparable state-led boycott, no ideological sorting of Starbucks customers, and no demand that associated actors be socially punished in the name of honoring the victims of March 26.

This does not mean Cheonan and Gwangju are identical. Gwangju carries a distinct democratic memory, and the Starbucks “Tank Day” name had more direct symbolic overlap with military repression. The point is narrower and stronger: public punishment in Korea often depends less on consistent principles than on which memory is politically activated, which faction controls the state and media, and which target is socially safe to punish.

That is the danger. Once the ruling government party joins a boycott against a private firm, the line between civic criticism and political intimidation narrows. Consumers have every right to boycott. Victims’ groups have every right to protest. Journalists have every right to criticize. But presidents and ministers hold coercive authority. Their words signal which private actors deserve exclusion from public life. The Jeong Min-chan case shows how that signal can travel beyond the original corporate actor to celebrities, employees, customers, and others whose connection to the controversy is indirect. When public authority is used without careful attention to intent, process, and proportionality, democratic memory becomes a weapon rather than a moral standard.

The same pattern appears in other cases of symbolic outrage. The American streamer known as Johnny Somali behaved disgracefully in South Korea, including kissing and hugging a statue commemorating Japanese military “comfort women” and repeated public disruptions elsewhere. He was convicted on multiple charges, including obstruction of business and distributing fabricated sexually explicit content, and sentenced to six months in prison (https://apnews.com/article/9491a8f50244798c27fa794a8f2b07e4).

That detail matters. A liberal argument against excessive punishment should not minimize real offenses, especially sexual-image crimes. Still, the broader principle remains: criminal law should punish specific proven acts, not satisfy public anger. Deportation, fines, restitution, and targeted penalties often serve justice better than symbolic imprisonment designed to reassure an offended public that the state has defended national honor. Even contemptible defendants retain rights because rights are not rewards for sympathetic behavior.

South Korea’s democratic achievement is real. The country overthrew military rule, built competitive elections, and developed a vibrant civil society. Yet its public culture retains an illiberal, historical temptation: to treat collective denunciation as civic virtue. This temptation is not confined to the left. Conservatives have their own versions, especially around anti-communism, national security, gender conflict, and anti-China sentiment. The danger grows when the ruling party, whichever party it is, dresses communal punishment in the language of justice.

Writers, academics, and public intellectuals should reject double standards. It is easy to criticize illiberalism when caused by right-wing governments in the United States, Hungary, or India. It is harder, but more necessary, to criticize illiberalism when one’s own preferred political camp uses moral memory to discipline companies, citizens, celebrities, or dissidents. The test of liberal principle is not whether one defends virtuous persons from crude mobs. The test is whether one defends due process, proportionality, and viewpoint freedom when the target itself is crude and unpopular.

The Starbucks marketing campaign may have deserved criticism. It certainly did not justify a ritual of ever-expanding punishment from the company to its customers, public partners, and associated celebrities. Democratic memory should teach restraint as well as indignation. If Gwangju means anything politically, it should mean resistance to arbitrary power, not its reproduction through state-amplified meongseokmari.

Joseph Yi is an associate professor of political science at Hanyang University (Seoul), co-moderator of Heterodox East Asia Community, and the recipient of Heterodox Academy’s 2025 Open Inquiry Award for Courage. Born in Gwangju, South Korea, Yi writes on democracy, civil society, and open inquiry. Wondong Lee is a research professor at the Center for International Studies, Inha University.

Joseph Yi, with Daeseob Kim, Wonjun Yun, and Gerald Han

The 2026 Iran–United States war—and the fragile ceasefire that followed—has clarified a central strategic question facing Tehran: how to secure sovereignty without sacrificing long-term national development. The outcome of the conflict suggests a counterintuitive but important conclusion. Iran may not need nuclear weapons to deter the United States. It may instead follow a path closer to Vietnam’s—relying on conventional and asymmetric deterrence while pursuing economic development and global reintegration.

The war itself ended not in decisive victory, but in stalemate. After weeks of escalation, including U.S. strikes on Iranian military infrastructure and Iranian retaliation through missile and drone attacks, both sides accepted a temporary ceasefire brokered through third parties. The agreement remains fragile, with continued mistrust and unresolved disputes over sanctions, nuclear policy, and regional influence. Yet the key point is that the United States, despite overwhelming military superiority, did not achieve regime change or strategic capitulation. Iran, despite suffering significant damage, maintained its political position and forced a negotiated pause.

This is what deterrence looks like in practice. It is not victory in the conventional sense, but the ability to impose sufficient costs to make continued conflict unattractive. Iran demonstrated that it can do so without nuclear weapons. Its deterrent capacity lay in a combination of conventional and asymmetric tools: missile forces, regional networks, and, most importantly, its ability to threaten the Strait of Hormuz—a chokepoint through which a fifth of global energy supplies flows. By raising the economic and geopolitical costs of escalation, Iran created conditions under which even a stronger adversary had incentives to de-escalate.

This logic is not new. It closely parallels the experience of Vietnam. During the Vietnam War, the United States possessed overwhelming military superiority, yet failed to achieve its strategic objectives. Vietnam’s success did not lie in defeating the United States militarily, but in outlasting it. By sustaining resistance and steadily increasing the political and economic costs of war, Vietnam transformed U.S. superiority into strategic fatigue. The result was withdrawal and eventual normalization—not because the United States was defeated in battle, but because the costs of continued warfare exceeded its willingness to bear them.

U.S. public opinion places clear limits on further escalation with Iran: a clear majority opposes military action against Iran, with roughly 53–58% disapproving of strikes. Support for a ground war is negligible—just 7% favor deploying U.S. troops—while an overwhelming 92% say it is important to end the conflict quickly.

The lesson is clear: deterrence does not require parity; it requires endurance. A state can deter a stronger adversary—especially an electoral democracy like the U.S.--by making conflict protracted, costly, and politically unsustainable. This is a conventional logic of deterrence, grounded in time and resilience rather than technological escalation.

The alternative model is represented by North Korea. Faced with external security pressures, North Korea chose nuclearization and strategic isolation. This approach has succeeded in a narrow sense: it has deterred external intervention and ensured regime survival. But it has done so at enormous cost. International sanctions, economic isolation, and restricted access to global markets have produced long-term stagnation. The regime’s legitimacy rests heavily on military capability, reinforcing a cycle in which resources are diverted from development to security. Moreover, North Korea’s strategic autonomy is constrained by structural dependence on China for trade and energy.

In short, the North Korean model delivers deterrence without development. It secures the regime but weakens the nation’s long-term capacity.

Vietnam offers a different trajectory. After decades of war—including conflicts with both the United States and China—Vietnam did not pursue nuclear weapons. Instead, it built a strategy combining credible conventional deterrence with economic openness and diplomatic diversification. Over time, Vietnam normalized relations with former adversaries, joined regional and global trade institutions such as ASEAN and WTO, and integrated into international supply chains. Its legitimacy shifted from resistance to performance, measured in growth, industrialization, and rising living standards.

The result is a state that maintains sovereignty while achieving sustained economic expansion. Vietnam’s military posture remains credible, but it does not define the state’s identity. Instead, development does. This shift has allowed Vietnam to balance relations among major powers while avoiding the isolation that constrains North Korea.

Iran now stands at a similar crossroads. The 2026 war demonstrates that it possesses the capacity for conventional deterrence. It can impose costs, sustain resistance, and avoid decisive defeat even against a stronger adversary. This suggests that nuclear weapons are not a necessary condition for deterrence. Indeed, pursuing a nuclear path may be strategically counterproductive, triggering intensified sanctions, deeper isolation, and reduced access to global markets and technology.

The real choice is not between security and vulnerability, but between two different forms of security. The North Korean path offers static security: protection through deterrence, but at the cost of economic stagnation and international isolation. The Vietnamese path offers dynamic security: protection combined with growth, integration, and increasing national capacity over time.

Crucially, this is also a choice about legitimacy. A state that relies primarily on strategic-military legitimacy must continually reinforce perceptions of external threat, often at the expense of domestic development. A state that derives legitimacy from economic performance, by contrast, has strong incentives to prioritize growth, stability, and integration. These different foundations shape policy choices and long-term outcomes.

The 2026 ceasefire should therefore be interpreted not as an endpoint, but as a signal. It indicates that the United States faces limits in sustaining prolonged conflict when costs rise and outcomes remain uncertain. It also indicates that Iran has already achieved a degree of deterrence through conventional means. The question is whether it will build on this foundation or abandon it in favor of nuclear escalation.

Vietnam’s experience suggests a viable path forward. By maintaining credible deterrence while prioritizing development, Vietnam transformed itself from a war-torn state into a rapidly growing economy. Iran, with its large population, educated workforce, and strategic location, has similar potential. Realizing that potential, however, requires a shift in strategic orientation—from confrontation to calibrated deterrence, and from isolation to selective reintegration.

The lesson of the 2026 war is not that conflict is sustainable, but that escalation has limits. Deterrence can be achieved without nuclear weapons, but development cannot be achieved under conditions of isolation. For Iran, the challenge is to recognize that these two goals—security and prosperity—are not mutually exclusive. The Vietnamese model shows that they can be mutually reinforcing.

Iran does not need to become North Korea to remain sovereign. It can, instead, become something closer to Vietnam: secure, independent, and economically dynamic. The ceasefire offers a narrow window to choose that path.

Joseph Yi is Associate Professor of Political Science at Hanyang University (Seoul), and co-founder of Heterodox East Asia Community, affiliated with Heterodox Academy. Daeseob Kim and Wonjun Yun (MA candidates in Political Science at Hanyang University) and Gerald Han (Sunny Hills High School) contributed to this essay.

Following my recent (March 30) announcement of the Heterodox Academy (East Asia) Spring 2026 forum series, two confirmed speakers for the South Korea–related forums withdrew. Updated speaker information will be posted on the registration pages.

Such decisions are, of course, the prerogative of individual speakers. However, these and prior experiences raise a broader question for our field: how best to sustain open scholarly exchange on publicly debated or controversial topics.

I invite colleagues to consider two general principles:

• Academic listservs and platforms function as venues for sharing scholarly events of potential interest; and

• Scholars should generally refrain from contacting publicly announced speakers in ways that may discourage their continued participation.

Situations of this kind discourage colleagues from sharing events or identifying speakers in advance, and limit the range of perspectives represented in Korean Studies, including discussions related to academic freedom.

I recognize that views will differ, and I welcome such disagreement as part of open scholarly dialogue.

To continue this conversation, I invite you to join an upcoming forum:

Challenges to Open Discourse in Asia-Pacific and in Asian Studies
May 22 (Friday), 10:00 AM KST

We welcome discussion of challenges to academic freedom and dialogue across different contexts (e.g., South Korea, India, Australia). Colleagues can also share their views (openly or anonymously) in Hx Open Asia 2026.

Finally, I welcome additional speakers of diverse perspectives for the following upcoming forums:

• Prosecution of the Unification Church — May 2 (Saturday), 10am KST

• U.S. Military Camptown Women in Comparative Perspective — June 5 (Friday), 10am KST

If you are interested or would like more information, please contact me directly.

Sincerely,

Joseph Yi
Hanyang University

joyichicago@yahoo.com

Civil & Academic Freedom in Hong Kong/China and among overseas Chinese

2026 April 2 Thurs 9pm ET (United States) || April 3 Fri 10am KST (Korea) | 9am Hong Kong

Kevin Yam (HK’s Progressive Lawyers Group), Shaun O’Dwyer (Kyushu University).

Register: https://forms.gle/BGW47mDaz1523xam8

April 30 Thurs 9pm ET | 6pm PT (US) || May 1 Fri 10am KST.

Engaging North Korea. Gabe Segoine (LNKM), Peter (Nuguna International), Tim Peters (Helping Hands Korea), Jonathan Cheng (China Bureau Chief, Wall Street Journal; author, Korean Messiah), Andrei Lankov (Koomin University)

Register: https://forms.gle/dhDWk9uAuwSmnKWw5

May 1 Fri 9pm ET | 6pm PDT || May 2 Sat 10am KST.

Prosecution of Unification Church in Japan and South Korea. Holly Folk (Western Washington University), Kenji Yoshida (Japan Forward), Yuna Son (Hanyang University)

Register: https://forms.gle/mFmpwbijznJq1oXh6

May 1 Wed 9pm ET | 6pm PT (US) || May 2 Sat 11:15am KST.

Extradition and transnational repression in Southeast Asia. Frances An (University of Western Australia). https://www.cfr.org/articles/renowned-academic-paul-chambers-flees-thailand-does-bangkok-really-get-what-it-wants

Register: https://forms.gle/mFmpwbijznJq1oXh6

May 21 Thurs 9pm ET | 6pm PT (US) || May 22 Fri 10am.

Challenges to Open Discourse in South Korea. Michael Breen (Korea Times), Oh Young-jin (Korea Times), 박경신 Kyung Sin Park (”KS Park”) (Korea University Law School), Joseph Yi (Hanyang University).

Register: https://forms.gle/bgfbGbFrKnr4huCE9

May 29 (or June 5) Friday 10am KST.

US Military Camptown Women and Women’s Rights in South Korea. Eun-jin Kim (Durebang), Attorney Ha Ju-hee 하주희 변호사, Wondong Lee (Inha University).

Register: https://forms.gle/F4rgQruUjf7i7ewD8

Contact: Joseph Yi (Hanyang University), joyichicago@yahoo.com

The durability of this bargain depends on credibility. When international rules yield to power, the incentive to remain non-nuclear declines. In a system where stronger states repeatedly use military force against weaker ones, nuclear weapons appear not as reckless instruments but as the ultimate guarantee of sovereignty. States without nuclear weapons face coercion, military pressure, and invasion. Under these conditions, nuclear proliferation emerges not as irrational behavior but as a logical response to “might makes right” power politics.

Ukraine and the Collapse of Security Assurances

After the collapse of the Soviet Union, Ukraine inherited the world’s third-largest nuclear arsenal. In 1994, Kyiv agreed to relinquish these weapons and join the NPT as a non-nuclear state. In return, the United States, the United Kingdom, and Russia signed the Budapest Memorandum, affirming commitments to respect Ukraine’s independence, sovereignty, and territorial integrity.

But Russia annexed Crimea in 2014 and launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. A nuclear-armed state violated assurances that accompanied Ukraine’s nuclear disarmament and attacked a state that had relinquished the ultimate means of deterrence.

For policymakers worldwide, the sequence produces a powerful lesson. A state surrendered nuclear weapons and later faced invasion by a nuclear-armed neighbor. Even though the Budapest Memorandum did not constitute a formal defense treaty, it symbolized a central promise of the post–Cold War nonproliferation order: states that renounced nuclear weapons would not suffer strategic vulnerability as a result.

The breakdown of that expectation reshaped the strategic conversation. Nuclear weapons deter aggression by raising the risks of escalation to catastrophic levels. Conventional military superiority loses much of its value when nuclear retaliation enters the equation.

North Korea’s Strategic Calculation

North Korea provides the clearest demonstration of this logic. For decades, Pyongyang has framed its nuclear program as essential for national survival. Kim Jong Un emphasizes that nuclear weapons protect the country from external aggression and guarantee the continuation of the regime.

For North Korean leaders, recent events validate this strategy. States that lacked nuclear deterrents experienced regime collapse or foreign intervention. Iraq was invaded and its regime overthrown in 2003. Libya dismantled its nuclear program in 2003 and later faced Western military intervention during the 2011 uprising.

North Korea followed the opposite path. It pursued nuclear weapons relentlessly despite sanctions and diplomatic isolation. The result is a regime that faces pressure yet remains free from direct military attack aimed at regime change.

This contrast reinforces Pyongyang’s central narrative: nuclear weapons transform a vulnerable state into a strategically untouchable one. A credible nuclear arsenal raises the costs of military confrontation to unacceptable levels for potential adversaries.

Iran and the Incentive to Cross the Nuclear Threshold

Tehran has maintained that its nuclear program serves peaceful purposes while simultaneously advancing uranium enrichment capabilities that shorten the technical distance to nuclear weapons.

Regional conflicts intensify debate within Iran about long-term security. Leaders evaluating national defense confront a stark comparison between states that possess nuclear deterrents and those that do not. Libya abandoned its nuclear ambitions and later experienced military intervention that contributed to regime collapse. North Korea built nuclear weapons and secured regime survival despite international hostility.

For Iranian decision-makers, nuclear weapons represent the most reliable protection against coercion by stronger states.

Next Tier of Proliferation Pressures: South Korea, Japan, Taiwan

Proliferation pressures extend beyond authoritarian regimes. Democratic states facing severe security threats confront similar strategic calculations.

In East Asia, Japan and South Korea confront both North Korea’s expanding nuclear arsenal and China’s rising military power. Although both democracies maintain their non-nuclear principles, growing debates in both countries about nuclear deterrence reveal anxiety about regional security and the reliability of US security guarantees.

The most vulnerable democracy remains Taiwan, facing mounting military pressure from China.

Extended deterrence, or the promise that the United States will defend allied states--formally with respect to South Korea and Japan, informally with Taiwan—historically discouraged nuclear proliferation among American allies. Any weakening of that commitment strengthens arguments for independent nuclear deterrents.

Conclusion

Global nuclear proliferation is often framed as a dangerous anomaly that diplomacy and sanctions must prevent. Yet from the perspective of vulnerable states, the pursuit of nuclear weapons reflects a rational strategic choice.

North Korea believes its nuclear arsenal guarantees regime survival. Iranian leaders observe the same pattern and draw similar conclusions about sovereignty and deterrence. Ukrainian strategists confront the consequences of disarmament under failed assurances. South Korea, Japan, and especially Taiwan face growing uncertainty in East Asia.

Each case reinforces the same lesson: nuclear weapons deter aggression more effectively than international or bilateral treaties.

The spread of nuclear weapons therefore reflects a deeper problem within the international system. When unconstrained state power overrides legal commitments and security guarantees, the incentives that sustain nonproliferation erode. States respond by seeking the most powerful deterrent available.

In such an environment, nuclear proliferation emerges as the logical outcome of a world of legally unconstrained power, where might determines right.

The court recognized Yoon as “leader of the insurrection,” but imposed life imprisonment rather than the death penalty sought by prosecutors. It found that he intended to prevent the National Assembly from functioning properly for a significant period, while rejecting the special prosecutor’s claim that he had planned a long-term dictatorship.

The court also emphasized the social costs of Yoon’s actions, which “severely undermined the political neutrality of the armed forces and police, lowered Korea’s political standing and international credibility, and ultimately left our society politically divided and locked in extreme confrontation.”

The ruling closes—for now--one of South Korea’s most dramatic constitutional crises. But the question remains whether the verdict will be considered sufficiently legitimate for the nation to move forward.

The case was presided over by Judge Ji Gwi-yeon, a career jurist noted for professional rigor. Ji demonstrated procedural fairness, ordering Yoon’s temporary release when prosecutors exceeded legal detention limits—a move that drew fire from progressives but signaled judicial independence. The life sentence reflects that measured posture: firm accountability without resort to irreversible punishment.

Still, the verdict is likely to deepen the conviction among many conservatives that the judiciary is systemically skewed. In this narrative, conservative transgressions are punished decisively, while progressive ones are not. In the 2000 “cash-for-summit” scandal during President Kim Dae-jung’s administration, a Hyundai affiliate transferred roughly $500 million to North Korea before the inter-Korean summit. Kim was never prosecuted, though his chief of staff was later convicted and pardoned.

In March 2025, while Lee Jae-myung was an active presidential candidate, an appeals court overturned his election-law conviction, removing a major obstacle to his candidacy. Other proceedings—including a case concerning unauthorized payments ($8 million) to North Korea—were delayed.

Conservatives interpret these actions as evidence that judicial and media elites treat alleged progressive wrongdoings—including illegal payments to a communist regime—as less damaging to constitutional values than conservative ones.

Korean democracy at a crossroads

By rejecting the death penalty, the court avoided further inflaming the political divide. Yet reconciliation requires more than judicial restraint. It demands a renewed commitment to constitutional principles applied consistently across political camps.

In recent decades, both conservative and progressive elites have become consumed with “militant-democracy” logic—the idea that democratic institutions must defend themselves against actors deemed hostile to the constitutional order, even at the expense of some constitutional rights, norms, and procedures.

Then-President Yoon’s response—the abrupt declaration of martial law—was chaotic, spectacular, and swiftly overturned by the nation’s institutions.

The progressive coalition has pursued a different approach—methodical and legalistic. Some of these efforts may resemble what political scientist Javier Corrales terms “autocratic legalism,” whereby dominant parties rely on courts, prosecutors and legislative reforms to steadily weaken opponents while maintaining a formal democratic framework.

After the failed martial law episode, President Lee reframed political conflict as a struggle against “insurrectionists,” a category applied broadly to individuals and groups associated with the previous administration. His rhetoric has been accompanied by investigations targeting religious organizations linked to conservative politics, the creation of special court divisions for insurrection cases, and probes into judges who issued unfavorable rulings.

In mid-February 2026, the ruling party advanced legislation to expand (“pack”) the Supreme Court from 14 to 26 justices. Critics interpret the proposal as retaliation for earlier rulings that affected Lee’s candidacy and—by altering the court’s composition-- ensuring favorable rulings for upcoming cases, including Yoon’s appeal.

Over the past decade, additional legislation—including laws addressing historical interpretation of the May 18 Gwangju uprising and measures targeting “fake news”—along with expansive applications of defamation law, has narrowed the boundaries of permissible speech – including a six-month prison sentence for a professor who lectured that some women volunteered to become comfort women. Supporters argue these measures protect historical truth and social stability. Critics warn they constrain dissent and echo earlier eras when national security laws were used broadly against ideological opponents.

These cumulative pressures on an independent judiciary, media, and civil society are less spectacular--but also damaging to the nation’s constitutional order.

The Yoon verdict marks a historic assertion of constitutional values. The long-term health of Korean democracy depends less on the sentence itself than on the country’s sustained commitment to uphold those values--respect for procedure, protection of dissent, and restraint in the exercise of power— against all challengers.

Joseph Yi is an associate professor of political science at Hanyang University (Seoul), co-moderator of Heterodox East Asia Community, and the recipient of Heterodox Academy’s 2025 Open Inquiry Award for Courage.

This verdict will be one of the most consequential in modern Korean political history. It is not merely about the fate of one former president. It is a test of how a democratic system responds when an elected leader invokes extraordinary powers during political conflict. It will also shape whether South Koreans see the courts as neutral guardians of the constitution or as instruments of partisan warfare.

In moments like this, the danger runs in two directions. If a democracy fails to punish genuine attempts to subvert the constitutional order, it risks normalizing executive lawlessness. But if it punishes too harshly—or on the basis of weak or politically driven reasoning—it risks turning democratic self-defense into partisan retribution. Either path damages institutional trust.

The only sound path is a ruling grounded in a legally demanding standard of proof, not political bias or pressure.

The core legal question: intent

South Korea’s criminal law treats insurrection as one of the gravest crimes, punishable by life imprisonment or death in the most serious cases. The question is not simply whether Yoon’s martial law declaration was reckless, misguided or unconstitutional. It is whether prosecutors have proven, beyond a reasonable doubt, that he intended to overthrow or subvert the constitutional order.

Intent is the dividing line between a grave abuse of presidential authority and an insurrection. Many citizens, especially those outraged by the martial law declaration, see the answer as obvious. But criminal courts cannot rely on outrage or intuition. They must rely on evidence—documents, testimony, orders and demonstrable plans—that show the defendant’s purpose.

The standard of proof exists precisely for moments like this, when political passions run high and the temptation to make an example of a defeated leader is strong.

What the December 2024 episode shows

The central facts are not in dispute. On Dec. 3, 2024, Yoon declared martial law, citing threats from “anti-state forces” and political paralysis. The National Assembly moved quickly, voting in the early hours of Dec. 4 to lift the order. The declaration was withdrawn shortly thereafter.

Investigations and reporting have described pressure on political institutions, media outlets and election bodies during the brief period of martial law. These actions raised serious concerns about executive overreach and the use of emergency powers against domestic political opponents.

But even troubling facts do not automatically establish insurrection. The legal issue is whether the president intended a genuine self-coup—an effort to nullify constitutional governance—or whether the episode was something else: a coercive political maneuver, a dramatic warning or a disastrously misjudged attempt to reshape the political narrative.

Criminal law punishes intent, not merely poor judgment.

The “performative” defense

Yoon’s defense has argued that the martial law declaration was performative—a political signal rather than an operational attempt to seize permanent control of the state. He has also claimed an urgent need to investigate alleged foreign or pro-communist interference in the National Election Commission.

Even if those beliefs were unfounded or irresponsible, the legal question remains: Did he genuinely hold them? And if so, do they amount to the specific intent required for insurrection?

Courts are not meant to resolve political debates about election integrity or partisan narratives. Their role is narrower. They must decide whether the evidence shows that the defendant’s actions were part of a plan to overthrow constitutional order—or whether they were a reckless, unlawful or theatrical move that nevertheless fell short of rebellion.

The difference is not semantic. It is the difference between ordinary imprisonment and extraordinary punishment.

The stakes for democratic legitimacy

In a deeply polarized society, courts do more than punish wrongdoing. They shape public perceptions of what is real, lawful and legitimate. If a verdict appears to rest on political pressure rather than careful legal reasoning, it will not unify the country. It will deepen the divide between rival camps, each convinced the other has captured the justice system.

That is why the standard of proof matters so much. A conviction supported by clear, overwhelming evidence of insurrectionary intent would carry authority, even among those who sympathize with the former president. But a conviction that appears stretched beyond what the record supports would turn the judiciary into another battlefield of partisan warfare.

The same principle applies in the opposite direction. If prosecutors fail to meet the burden of proof, an acquittal—however unpopular—would demonstrate that the courts remain bound by law, not by political demand.

What a just ruling means

A just and effective ruling is not necessarily the harshest or the most lenient. It is the ruling that persuades the public the court followed the law wherever it led. That means transparent reasoning, careful analysis of intent, and strict adherence to the prosecutor’s burden of proof.

South Korea’s democratic institutions have survived military rule, corruption scandals and presidential impeachments. Their resilience has rested on one central principle: that political conflicts are resolved through law, not force.

The Feb. 19 verdict offers another test of that principle. If the court shows it is guided by evidence rather than emotion, it will do more than decide the fate of one former president. It will strengthen the legitimacy of Korean democracy itself.

Joseph Yi is Associate Professor of Political Science at Hanyang University (Seoul).

** Op-ed draft ~ I appreciate reader comments! **

Japan’s Feb. 8 election is widely seen as a mandate, with conservative Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi’s Liberal Democratic Party winning a two-thirds super-majority in the lower house, reversing two difficult election cycles and giving the government the stability to address rising living costs and mounting security concerns.

Takaichi’s victory also demonstrate the electoral viability of a migration politics grounded in demographic realism and institutional management—an approach that stands in sharp contrast to the emergency rhetoric increasingly common among parts of the U.S. and South Korean right.

Japan’s predicament is structural. The country is aging faster than almost any society in modern history, and its working-age population has been shrinking for decades. The consequences are visible across the economy: chronic labor shortages in caregiving, construction, agriculture and manufacturing. Japanese conservatives do not deny this reality, but manage it. Japan avoids calling itself an “immigrant society,” but it has quietly expanded foreign labor programs to keep essential sectors functioning.

That realism is captured in remarks by Onoda Kimi, the minister responsible for coexistence with foreign nationals. In a January 2026 statement, Onoda acknowledged that “many workplaces already cannot function without foreign workers,” and that if Japan were to “immediately suspend the acceptance of all foreigners,” industries from caregiving to agriculture would “collapse at once, and society would no longer function.”

Yet Onoda paired that realism with a firm cultural boundary. “A country whose native language is Japanese, with Japan’s own history and culture, exists only here in the world,” and preserving “what makes Japan, Japan” is an “absolute red line that cannot be compromised.” Her message was neither open-border idealism nor apocalyptic nativism. It was a governing synthesis: demographic necessity paired with cultural continuity, implemented through bureaucratic tools and incremental reform. She rejected both unlimited acceptance and abrupt closure, emphasizing automation, productivity gains and improved labor conditions instead.

This institutional style is reflected in the composition of Japan’s conservative camp, which have welcomed mixed-heritage and ethnic minority conservatives, including from long-settled Zainichi Koreans. Their political significance lies less in their numbers than in their unmistakably conservative message, that assimilation to a shared civic culture is both possible and desirable.

Contrast this with the direction of debate among some U.S. and South Korean conservatives. In both countries, a strand of the right increasingly frames migration and “foreignness” as existential threats—not simply policy challenges, but struggles against infiltration by hostile outsiders and complicit elites. Once politics takes that form, enforcement becomes less about proportional law enforcement and more about performative displays of national sovereignty.

In the United States, this logic was visible in the large-scale federal deployment to Minneapolis in early 2026. Roughly 3,000 immigration and border agents were sent to the Minneapolis–St. Paul area—about six times the size of the local police force—during a crackdown linked to fraud investigations and immigration enforcement. Regardless of the merits of particular cases, the scale and staging reflected a broader shift: enforcement becomes the theater where sovereignty is demonstrated.

South Korea is not the United States, and its migrant share remains far smaller. But the rhetorical trajectory has begun to rhyme. Since former President Yoon Suk Yeol’s impeachment, conservative narratives about foreign election interference have turned “foreignness” into a partisan wedge, particularly in debates about China and online influence. Early in 2026, conservative lawmakers supported proposals requiring online platforms to disclose users’ nationality and location. Supporters framed the measure as a transparency tool against interference. Critics warned it would stigmatize foreign residents and chill lawful participation. Migration was no longer treated primarily as a labor or demographic issue, but as a political and epistemic threat.

Japan’s election suggests a different conservative instinct. If a party expects to govern for the long run, it cannot treat migration as a permanent campaign issue. It must manage the labor-market dependence it actually has, not the self-sufficiency it wishes it had. Long tenure incentivizes competence and predictability, not theatrical conflict.

The irony is that this Japanese realism is not alien to American or Korean conservatism. In the United States, Cold War–era conservatism paired strong national identity with pragmatic immigration governance and elite resistance to conspiratorial politics. Republican leaders supported enforcement while also accepting legalization and migrant labor, framing the country as both a nation of laws and a nation of immigrants. This posture was embodied by President Ronald Reagan, whose civic rhetoric celebrated America as a society continually renewed by newcomers and whose 1986 immigration reform combined legalization for millions with employer sanctions and enforcement provisions.

South Korea’s conservative party leaders once followed a similar path. Syngman Rhee was both a fierce nationalist and a Princeton-educated statesman. Park Chung-hee left his Japanese military post to build an independent Korean state and tied Korea’s development to global integration, beginning with normalization with Japan in 1965. Later presidents such as Kim Young-sam and Lee Myung-bak deepened globalization and international ties. For years, conservative and progressive governments alike shared a basic consensus: national strength required global integration, and foreign residents could be incorporated through civic institutions rather than treated as permanent outsiders.

Japan’s election is a reminder that conservatives do not have to choose between national sovereignty and demographic realism. Onoda’s formulation is instructive precisely because it is candid about dependence while unapologetic about continuity. That combination blunts the temptation to treat every migrant as a symbol of elite betrayal and keeps enforcement inside the bounds of law rather than turning it into spectacle.

Japan’s conservatives, newly reinforced by electoral mandate, are betting that competence, cultural boundary-setting and administrative realism outperform the politics of existential struggle. In an age of demographic decline and geopolitical tension, that may prove the more durable form of patriotism.

Joseph Yi is associate professor of political science at Hanyang University (Seoul), and Shaun O’Dwyer is Professor at Kyushu University. They are co-founders of Heterodox East Asia Community, affiliated with Heterodox Academy.

As Japan approaches its next general election, much of the discussion understandably centers on inflation, energy security, and demographic decline. But the election also carries a deeper significance: how Japan defines its role in a rapidly evolving international order.

For decades, stability in East Asia rested on American military and strategic leadership. That era is not ending, but it is changing. The United States is increasingly preoccupied with domestic polarization and challenges closer to home in the Western Hemisphere. This does not mean Washington will abandon Asia, but it does mean that regional democracies assume greater responsibility for defending the liberal rights and norms that have underwritten postwar peace and prosperity.

In this context, we hope Japan’s next government will prioritize building a principled and forward-looking partnership with South Korea. Japan and Korea are the region’s two most advanced liberal democracies, technologically sophisticated, globally integrated, and deeply exposed to the consequences of authoritarian expansion. Historical grievances have too often constrained cooperation. Yet shared interests and values are far more durable foundations for the future.

Such partnership should not be limited to security coordination. It should also be normative. A credible democratic partnership demonstrates respect for civil liberties, freedom of religion, and minority rights even when doing so is politically uncomfortable. This includes protecting the rights of controversial religious groups such as the Unification Church, whose members in both Japan and Korea deserve legal equality regardless of public sentiment. It also includes defending the dignity and social inclusion of North Korean residents in Japan, who remain vulnerable to discrimination despite generations of residence.

Beyond their borders, Japan and South Korea should speak clearly about the moral costs of repression in North Korea and China, where basic freedoms of speech, belief, and movement remain constrained, and exercise thoughtful diplomacy to promote such freedoms. Likewise, both countries have a vital stake in Taiwan’s democracy—not only for strategic reasons, but because its fate will signal whether democratic self-government can endure under sustained authoritarian pressure.

Elections shape priorities, rhetoric, and the limits of what leaders believe their publics will support. My hope is that Japan’s upcoming election will strengthen voices that see cooperation with South Korea not as a concession to the past, but as an investment in a democratic future—one in which regional leadership is defined not only by power, but by the consistent defense of human dignity and individual freedoms.

Endorsed by:

Joseph Yi. Associate professor of political science at Hanyang University (Seoul), co-founder of Heterodox East Asia Community, and received Heterodox Academy’s 2025 Open Inquiry Award for Courage. (AUTHOR)

Joe Phillips, JD, PhD (Associate Professor, Yonsei University, Retired)

Shaun O’Dwyer, Professor, Kyushu University, co-founder of Heterodox East Asia Community

Frances An, PhD, University of Western Australia

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America’s Divisions Appear on the World Stage — While Japan offers realist, consensus-based conservative leadership

At a moment when democracies such as Ukraine and Taiwan face existential threats from Russia and China, the United States should be projecting strength and unity. Instead, the spectacle of federal agents confronting communities in a major American city generates the opposite: a widening gap between rhetorical commitment to democracy and the political reality of division and paralysis.

The law enforcement operation in Minneapolis has become the Trump Administration’s domestic Vietnam—an open-ended conflict that consumes political oxygen, distracts from the Administration’s economic revitalization and foreign policy agenda, and questions federal legitimacy in enforcing basic civil rights and order. Internationally, it weakens the western narrative that democratic governance can be both just and effective: a pillar upon which alliances and collective security commitments rest.

This erosion of moral leadership matters. Democracies cohere not solely through military pacts but through shared values and the belief that those values are reflected in domestic governance. When the response to differing views on immigration becomes militarized enforcement rather than political accommodation and compromise, and when the Trump Administration rejects traditional law-enforcement procedures rules, such as joint federal-state investigations of officer-related shootings, the very idea of democracy as collective self-governance begins to fray.

This is not abstract: Kyiv and Taipei watch these dynamics closely. The strategic calculus of deterrence, alliance solidarity, and normative alignment all depend on credibility — the sense that democratic societies can address their internal challenges without descending into chaos or cynicism.

Against this backdrop, Japan’s ruling conservatives—exemplified by Onoda Kimi (Minister of State for Coexistence with Foreign Nationals)--offers a contrasting model of political realism, which discusses the hard truths of demographic decline, labor shortages, and economic sustainability without surrendering to reactionary simplification or fear.

Onoda’s recent message (January 24) — that some level of immigration may be necessary to sustain essential industries and prevent the hollowing-out of communities — is not a facile embrace of open borders, but a call for policies grounded in demographic and labor market realities. This is the kind of nuanced, empirical realism lacking among many populist leaders, who opt for a politics of tribalism and grievance that scapegoats immigrants, undermines existing legal frameworks, and amplifies polarization.

Onoda’s stance is a conscious effort to discuss complex truths that automation, labor-market reform, workplace modernization, and calibrated migration are policy imperatives for an aging, shrinking populace. Such frankness resonates with what US political scientist Richard Hanania terms “normie” voters, who understand that economic stagnation and community implosion are not acceptable trade-offs simply to satisfy reactionary demands.

Japan’s broader conservative formation, led by Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi, reflects a mode of political nationalism distinct from the insurgent populism that has characterized parts of the U.S. right. Where President Donald Trump mobilizes against institutional norms and position himself as an outsider disrupting the status quo, Takaichi’s brand of conservatism is institution-first: disciplined, rooted in state continuity, and framed around strengthening national capacity. Its slogans — from a revived “Japan Is Back” to an emphasis on economic and military resilience — evoke a nation that prepares itself to compete globally without turning inward and that understands that protecting neighboring democracies (Taiwan) is vital for its own national interest.

Structural nationalism grounded in policy coherence and institutional legitimacy offers a more sustainable basis for long-term governance than a politics that thrives on disruption for its own sake. Confronting “the crazies, bigots, and low-information morons” — as Hanania describes the fringe elements within the electorate — is not about moralizing but about reclaiming a realism-based conservatism in policy debate and public discourse. The median, normie voter desires order, not chaos in uniform. Militarized raids promise order but produce disruption, which is why traditional law and border enforcement appeals more to the realist instincts of normie voters than populist displays of massive force.

In American history, culturally foreign occupations have rarely end well, from the British soldiers in Boston to the Americans in Abu Ghraib. It is not just possible, but probable that the continued mass presence of armed, culturally conservative (“red”-coded) ICE officials in hostile, blue-coded Minneapolis will lead to more casualties.

The Trump Administration faces a choice. It can continue to allow internal enforcement battles to distract from strategic imperatives, or it can reaffirm democratic legitimacy by addressing underlying social and economic stresses — including immigration — with statesmanship rather than spectacle. In a global era where democratic solidarity is tested as much by internal coherence as by external threats, the world watches not only what democracies defend abroad but how they govern at home.

The Japanese government’s cautious but realist turn on labor and immigration is not a perfect model — every society must reconcile values with interests on its own terms — but it reminds us that political courage sometimes means telling uncomfortable truths to voters rather than pandering to emotional stereotypes. In an age of global uncertainty and rising threats from real autocracies, this kind of realism-based conservativism is what liberal democracy needs.

Joseph Yi is associate professor of political science at Hanyang University.

My family loves the College and appreciates its hardworking faculty.

Sincerely, Joseph Yi

Preserving Classroom Trust in a Polarized Time

Dear Members of the College* Community:

I write as a parent of a current College student, with deep respect for the values that define this institution. I understand and appreciate that many students—particularly immigrants and those from immigrant families—feel genuine fear and uncertainty under the current Trump administration’s immigration policies and the activities of ICE. I support the college’s efforts to share accurate information, to communicate clearly about safety procedures, and to ensure that students know what resources are available to them.

At the same time, I hope the community can reflect on how the delivery of these messages inside the classroom affects the learning environment and the student-professor relationship.

When professors introduce personal commentary on political controversies not directly relevant to the course material, it subtly divides the classroom between those who support and not support the commentary. Even when no one is singled out, the atmosphere shifts: some students hesitate to speak freely, worry about being judged, or feel that their relationship with a professor has become conditional on shared politics. Over time, this erodes the trust and open communication that make College’s teaching so effective.

My student shared two examples.

In one STEM class, the professor opened class by announcing that the campus would go into lockdown if ICE agents appeared, encouraged students to review immigration-related information posted on Moodle (not only for immigrants but for everyone), and recommended signing up for alerts or reporting systems to be notified of agents’ presence. The student did not recall explicit partisan statements, but the student could clearly sense the emotional and political framing, esp. when the professor added remarks on her/his personal connection to Minneapolis and that the world was unsafe and crazy.

In a humanities course, the professor frequently connected course material to contemporary politics, usually involving the Trump administration. The student felt distracted by how often the class drifted away from the subject matter. Because the student rarely agreed with the political connections being drawn, the student found them unhelpful and, at times, alienating. The student once raised this concern anonymously in a course survey. The professor later addressed it in class, explaining that real and important current events was essential to the professor’s teaching.

While these professors act out of a sense of care, the result for some students is a feeling of being sidelined.

I do not wish to criticize any individual professor, but to highlight a broader dilemma: how to support vulnerable students without unintentionally marginalizing others or eroding the professor–student relationship. We can and should support our students who feel vulnerable to changing federal policies. But we must do so without compromising the academic focus of our classrooms or making students with differing views feel like outsiders or oppressors.

Every institution and every professor will respond to this dilemma in different, good-faith ways.

From my experience (nearly three decades in academia), I posit that one can strongly criticize the policies of this—or any—administration and still caution about professors sharing personal political commentary during class. My concern rests on two points.

First, as a professor based overseas, I am aware that issues such as the Gaza crisis, protests in Iran, North Korean human rights, or religious freedom in South Korea evoke intense moral emotions and a tendency to divide people into good and bad. Professors are also human and feel these emotions. But when such views are expressed in the classroom, they are coupled with asymmetric power. Teaching and grading involve unavoidable subjectivity, and it seems unrealistic to expect students to openly disagree with their professors on emotionally charged matters without fearing—rightly or wrongly—that it could subtly affect how they are perceived or evaluated.

Even for those trained in political science, it takes many years to learn how to present controversial material with balance, to encourage disagreement without intimidation, and to separate personal conviction from professional responsibility. This is still a work in progress in my own teaching: I try consciously (but not always successfully) to understand and objectively evaluate students who hold opposing views from mine.

Second, if the goal is to oppose the current administration’s policies, there are more effective and less costly ways to do so outside the classroom. My student registered for a College program to visit the U.S.–Mexico border during spring break to learn directly about migration issues. Programs like this, public forums and protests, and engagement with broad audiences—including conservative voices such as Joe Rogan—are more likely to build durable coalitions and produce real policy change. By contrast, criticizing the administration in a captive classroom risks being more performative than persuasive.

College’s greatness lies not only in its moral commitments, but in its culture of human connection and intellectual openness. I hope we can preserve that culture, even in a deeply polarized time.

Respectfully,
A College Parent

The parent is a professor of political science and a member of Heterodox Academy.