Necropolitical metamorphoses

2021 ◽  
Vol 14 (1) ◽  
pp. 45-69
Author(s):  
Sang-Keun Yoo
Keyword(s):  
South Korea ◽  
Environmental Justice ◽  
Environmental Toxicity ◽  
Unequal Distribution ◽  
South Korean ◽  
The Poor ◽  
Nation States ◽  
Political Conditions ◽  
The Rich ◽  
Distribution Of Power

This article analyses and compares two films by South Korean filmmaker Bong Joon-ho: his 2006 sf film Gwoemul (The Host; South Korea 2006) and his most recent film Gisaengchung (Parasite; South Korea 2019). I interpret these two films through the lens of outbreak narrative and socio-environmentalism. I argue the films foreground the way each class has a different power and ability to defend itself against environmental toxicity, even though our bodies share the same porosity to it. The films show that with the unequal distribution of power and wealth, the rich and necropolitical nation-states use outbreak narrative to (re)constitute communities based on class lines, drawing imaginary lines between them. As a fictionalised enemy, poor communities are pushed away to uninhabitable places - the exceptional places made for emergencies. Bong shows that those pushed away to live minimal lives metamorphosise into parasites in the mental, behavioural and somatic senses, and further demonstrates that the current economic and political conditions offer no possibilities of solidarity. The paper concludes that his films demand that humanities scholars rethink our approach to environmentalist discourses, reminding our audiences that environmental justice for the poor can never be achieved without changing the necropolitical system of politics and economics.

Are There Limits to Limits?

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrew Dobson
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Environmental Justice ◽  
Environmental Politics ◽  
Global South ◽  
Peak Oil ◽  
Limits To Growth ◽  
The Poor ◽  
Ecological Problems ◽  
The Rich

The idea that there might be “limits to growth” is a key and contested feature of environmental politics. This chapter outlines the limits to growth thesis, describes and assesses critical reactions to it, and comments upon its relevance today. It argues that, after an initial highpoint in the early 1970s, the thesis declined in importance during the 1980s and 1990s under criticism from “ecological modernizers” and from environmental justice advocates in the global South who saw it as way of diverting blame for ecological problems from the rich and powerful to the poor and dispossessed. “Peak oil” and climate change have, though, given renewed impetus to the idea, and this has given rise to new discourses and practices around “sustainable prosperity” and “degrowth.”

The Development of Gratitude in South Korean Youth

2017 ◽  
Vol 52 (1) ◽  
pp. 87-101
Author(s):  
Ebony D. Leon ◽  
Yue Liang ◽  
Soeun Lee ◽  
Sung-Ae Kim ◽  
Lisa Kiang
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
South Korea ◽  
Children And Adolescents ◽  
Cultural Values ◽  
Well Being ◽  
Regression Analyses ◽  
Korean Children ◽  
South Korean ◽  
The Poor ◽  
Korean Youth

Guided by Kağıtçıbaşı’s work on cultural values, the current study sought to examine the gratitude expressions, wishes, and spending preferences of South Korean children and adolescents. Participants included ( N = 229) 7- to 14-year-olds ( M = 10.79, SD = 2.19; 54% girls; 55.3% middle class) from Kimpo, and Seoul, South Korea. Regression analyses revealed that older Korean youth were less likely to express concrete gratitude than were younger Korean youth. In addition, older Korean youth were less likely to give their money to charity or the poor. With regard to wishes, Korean youth who wished for the well-being of others were more likely to also give their money away to others. This study contributed to the gratitude literature by considering how gratitude, wishes, and spending preferences may manifest themselves in an understudied group, young Koreans.

ARE THE POOR THE WEAK LINK? DEMOCRATIC SUPPORT AND INCOME LEVELS IN POST-CRISIS SOUTH KOREA

2016 ◽  
Vol 16 (2) ◽  
pp. 219-237 ◽  
Author(s):  
Byunghwan Son
Keyword(s):  
South Korea ◽  
Weak Link ◽  
Empirical Support ◽  
Economic Conditions ◽  
Income Levels ◽  
The Poor ◽  
Support For Democracy ◽  
Conditioning Effect ◽  
The Rich ◽  
Democratic Support

AbstractExtant literature on democratization documents that ordinary citizens’ unconditional support for democracy is indispensable to democratic consolidation. Yet observers of nascent democracies have repeatedly witnessed that such support often hinges upon their economic conditions. This article argues that income levels have a conditioning effect on this relationship; the Korean poor see democracy as a tool for income redistribution and are less likely than the rich to support it when economic hardships appear to close windows of opportunities for such redistribution. Using survey data from the first round of the Asian Barometer Survey on South Korea, I find strong empirical support for this argument. The implication of this finding for broader literature on democratization is that the weakening of young democracies can be attributed to the poor in times of trouble, or the “weak link.”

“The Rich Got the Loans, the Poor Got the Debts”

2019 ◽  
pp. 158-170
Author(s):  
Jerome Roos
Keyword(s):  
Debt Crisis ◽  
Adjustment Costs ◽  
Direct Consequence ◽  
State Autonomy ◽  
Wall Street ◽  
Debt Restructuring ◽  
Unequal Distribution ◽  
The Poor ◽  
The Rich ◽  
Reduced State

This chapter takes a closer look at the outcomes of the Mexican debt crisis and the consequences of the reduced state autonomy at the heart of the crisis of the 1980s. The first section considers the brief period of tension between Mexican policymakers and their foreign lenders, and discusses Argentina as a counterfactual case in which a democratically elected government came to power that was strongly opposed to debt repayment. The second part of the chapter considers the final resolution of the Mexican debt crisis through the Brady debt restructuring deal of 1989–1990, which, far from constituting a coercive default, was actually undertaken at the initiative of the Wall Street banks with their own interests firmly in mind. Finally, the chapter considers the unequal distribution of adjustment costs inside Mexico as a direct consequence of the creditors' power to shape the outcome of the crisis in their favor.

Visualizing and Invisibilizing the Subempire: Labor, Humanitarianism, and Popular Culture across South Korea and Southeast and South Asia

2018 ◽  
Vol 23 (1) ◽  
pp. 95-109
Author(s):  
Jin-kyung Lee
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
South Korea ◽  
Cultural Production ◽  
Social Engineering ◽  
Global Network ◽  
Television Programs ◽  
News Magazine ◽  
South Korean ◽  
Nation States ◽  
Television Medium

Abstract This article examines five South Korean TV programs, The Age of Global Success, Love in Asia, Asia Hunter, KOICA’s Dream, and Saving Mrs. Go Bongshil, all of which belong to varied and hybrid genres such as news magazine, serialized documentary, reality show, and television drama. Due to its partially elevated status as a middlebrow medium and its ability to combine multiple functions such as entertainment, information, education, and social engineering, South Korean television is a more socially influential popular medium than its Western counterparts. I argue that South Korean popular culture, as represented by these television programs, produces, circulates, and promotes the meanings of respective nation-states (e.g., South Korea, Vietnam, Sri Lanka) and of Asia as a bloc in relation to the region’s ongoing economic and cultural globalization. The following five aspects of South Korea’s relationship to the less developed parts of Asia emerge in the popular culture of the television medium: Southeast Asian and other Asian migrant/immigrant/off-shore labor for South Korea, and the distinct ways in which some are made visible and others invisible; popular cultural imaginings of a pan-Korean regional-global network; popular cultural production of a pan-Asian imaginary; South Korean humanitarianism and its subimperializing dimensions; and dissemination of popular culture within and outside South Korea—that is, the emergence of popular culture as a significant instrument of imaging South Korea as a subempire. I conclude by offering a couple of broad speculations on the changing and varied meanings of subempire for contemporary South Korea.

Borders, Conflicts and Bargaining in Federations and Communities of Governments

2009 ◽  
pp. 83-99
Author(s):  
A. Libman
Keyword(s):  
Economic Policy ◽  
Public Authority ◽  
Modern World ◽  
Main Research ◽  
Research Areas ◽  
Nation States ◽  
Distribution Of Power

Economic policy in the modern world can be treated as an outcome of interaction of multiple territorial centers of public authority: nation-states, subnational and supranational jurisdictions. In the last decades economics has increased its attention to the factors which influence the distribution of power among jurisdictions. The paper surveys two main research areas in this literature: economics of conflicts and theory of endogenous decentralization. It discusses the basic models of both approaches and their modifications applied in the literature as well as factors of conflict formation and bargaining over devolution.

Editor's Note

2004 ◽  
Vol 27 (1) ◽  
pp. i-iii
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Public Education ◽  
Economic Status ◽  
Ethnic Origin ◽  
Fair Use ◽  
Good Education ◽  
The Poor ◽  
The Rich

In this election year, 2004, people are grappling with the various forces that make up these United States. What forces encourage inclusion and which exclusion? Who is to be included and who excluded? Is this to be a country with wide discrepancies between the rich and the poor? Is this to be a country where public education is poorly funded and a good education depends upon private resources? Are we going to forget that discrimination on the basis of gender, race, ethnic origin, and economic status still exists and needs to be perpetually, vigilantly addressed? There is a deep division in the country over the proper and fair use of our resources that constitutes concern in all our citizens

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