ABSTRACT
The process of mobilizing the law can have positive and negative ‘radiating’ effects for social movements contesting historical trauma, regardless of formal judicial outcomes. Litigation can shape collective identities, shift public perceptions or provide political leverage. To elucidate litigation’s productive radiating effects, this chapter theorizes and illustrates causal mechanisms such as attribution of similarity, brokerage, dramatization of issues, political cover and intergroup discussions via qualitative analysis of lawsuits and related activism by Korean survivors of Japanese actions in the first half of the twentieth century. Studying mechanisms helps us understand the multifaceted and dialectical impacts of postwar compensation lawsuits in East Asia. The analysis contributes non-Western and transnational cases to scholarship on legal mobilization.
