Introduction

Two decades have passed since the biggest outpouring of popular protest in the history of the Republic of Korea (ROK, South Korea) helped to bring down the leadership of former army general Chun Doo Hwan. The end of military rule and emergence of democracy in South Korea in the late 1980s and early 1990s can be seen as part of a global surge of democratization during that period, sometimes called the “Third Wave” of democracy, a surge that toppled authoritarian regimes in areas as far-flung as East Asia, Eastern Europe, Latin America, and South Africa.1 With this wave of democratization came the revival of the concept of “civil society,” the realm between the private sphere and the state, a concept that had been developed in Western political thought in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries but had lain dormant through much of the twentieth.2 The term was initially evoked in the popular protests against communist party-states in Eastern Europe, especially the Solidarity union movement in Poland in the 1980s, but came to be part of the discourse of democratic protest and democratic theory throughout the world.3