Development, Dictatorship, and the meaning of Success in South Korea

my effort to get this initiative off the ground

Greetings. First, I must apologize for the woeful lack of anything new, or really anything at all. But now I am on sabbatical and actually living in Seoul while serving as a visiting researcher at Ewha Womans University.

I hope use some of my experiences in Seoul to think about the intersection of contemporary Korean politics and society with the multifarious, and often contradictory, legacies from its fraught past.

While I am working on a more substantive piece exclusively for this substack, I wanted to kick things off by sharing a recent peer-reviewed article I published. It is a bit lengthy, but is available open access, so please feel free to check it out.

It delves into many of the issues I hope to develop during my time in Seoul for a book with the working title Great Expectations: South Korean Development and the Fraying Miracle of Modernity. Please check it out and look for more posts soon. If you know anyone else with an interest in Korean politics and history, please let them know that we are coming back online!

The article can be accessed and downloaded here.