About This Module
Police lead activists away in Kwangju, 1980.
This module explores how a citizen decides to oppose an authoritarian regime and reflects on the challenging consequences of that dissent.
The setting is Seoul, South Korea, in 1985, and the source is an appeal written by Yu Si-min, who had been kicked out of Seoul National University for his activism and sentenced to prison. His “Statement of Appeal,” written while in prison, lays out a young person’s scathing critique of South Korea’s militarized authoritarian government, and yet it also expresses a more hopeful vision of what democratic and cultural freedom could look like in South Korea. The teaching plan offers many ways to understand the appeal, from a comparison of Si-min’s statement with Martin Luther King’s “Letter from a Birmingham Jail,” to a role playing exercise, to deep philosophical reflection on the conditions in which lawbreaking might be considered morally justified, and the perils and possibilities of moral dissent under authoritarian rule. As part of Authoritarianism 101, this module enables teachers to explore the theme of resistance to authoritarianism.
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Contributor
Namhee Lee
Namhee Lee is professor of modern Korean history and director of the Center for Korean Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). Her publications include The Making of Minjung: Democracy and the Politics of Representation in South Korea (Cornell University Press, 2007), The South Korean Democratization Movement: A Sourcebook (coedited with Kim Won, Academy of Korean Studies, 2016), and Memory Construction and the Politics of Time in Neoliberal South Korea (Duke University Press, 2022).
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