Post-democracy and political space

This chapter examines the salience that contemporary literatures on post-democracy and political space might provide for understanding the challenges raised by these policies and the elites who use them to enforce unpopular economic policies and to safeguard their power from popular contention. It promotes a concept of post-democracy adjusted to take Asian contexts into account, using South Korea as an exemplar, and a reading of political space that emphasizes its emancipatory potential. The frustrations of Korean democratization alert people both to the uneven pathways and space of post-democracy as well as to the necessity of situating the process in relation to specific actors and their geographies. But there is also another way in which the post-democracy literature is useful for interrogating Korean politics, and that is by focusing attention on the value of a concept of the political, and thus of political space, as a construction founded upon equality.