What is the impact of repression on social movements? It turns out that the answers to this seemingly simple question are not only varied but also contradictory. While some argue that repression hampers social movements, because of the added costs associated with mobilizing, others insist that repression increases grievances leading to higher rates of protest and collective action. In reviews of this literature researchers have puzzled over the fact that both threats and political opportunities can lead to mobilization. The conflicting findings have led some to the unhelpful conclusion that “there are theoretical arguments for all conceivable basic relationships between government coercion and group protest and rebellion, except for no relationship.”

One way to disentangle the relationship between repression and protest is to disaggregate social movements into their various parts and assess how repression impacts individual components. That is, we can shift our focus away from aggregate counts of protest events – a commonly used proxy for the vitality of a social movement – to the quality of movement characteristics. Assistant Professor Paul Y. Chang pursues this strategy in a new book that tracks the emergence and evolution of South Korea’s democracy movement during the most repressive period in that country’s history. In Protest Dialectics, Chang analyzes quantitative, archival, and interview data to show how state repression differentially influenced dissidents’ ability to challenge South Korea’s authoritarian government in the 1970's, a period considered to be the “dark age of Korean democracy.”

Although state repression severely limited public acts of protest, Chang’s analysis provides evidence for the continuing development of the democracy movement as repression facilitated the diversification of social movement actors which then led to secondary consequences, including the evolution of tactics, ideology, and solidarity. In turn, the state responded to protestors with new repressive laws that helped to further consolidate authoritarianism in South Korea. The repressive capacity of the Korean state and the movement for democracy, in short, developed in tandem, each influencing the trajectory of the other. If South Korea today is characterized by a “strong state and contentious civil society,” Chang’s book shows how, through specific historical processes, the state became strong and civil society contentious.