Self-Disciplining Protest Within the Candlelight Protests in South Korea in 2016-2017

Junghyun Nam

Advisor: John G. Dale, PhD, Department of Sociology and Anthropology

Committee Members: Manjusha Nair, Rashmi Sadana

Horizon Hall, #6325 and on Zoom
April 28, 2025, 10:00 AM to 12:30 PM

Abstract:

This dissertation investigates the relationship between space and protest in the South Korean Candlelight Protests of 2016-2017, which aimed to impeach a president implicated in an abuse of power and bribery. I identify and explore an apparent contradiction within these protests seeking to restore representative democracy in crisis. On the one hand, cultural events, performances, artifacts, and peaceful practices produced inclusive public spaces within which a peaceful and joyful mass protest culture bloomed, mobilization of citizens was facilitated, and heterogeneous ordinary citizens shaped their collective understanding of who they are and fostered cooperative relationships with police as their allies. On the other hand, the same protest activities and meanings assigned to them also generated spaces of exclusion in which peaceful protesters as the dominant group persistently marginalized other participants transgressing established and shared norms around protest. Peaceful protesters stigmatized transgressive participants, including activists, as aggressive deviants, interpreted their claims as irrelevant (or as issues that ought to be postponed until the impeachment was achieved), and diminished their agency to challenge the corrupt president through their own tactics that the dominant protesters perceived as transgressive.

Through the case study of Candlelight Protests in 2016-2017, this dissertation mainly addresses the following three questions: 1) how spatial appropriations through cultural events and performances created both inclusive and exclusive mobilizations; 2) how peaceful resistance practices drew the socio-spatial boundaries between legitimate and illegitimate participants; and 3) how candlelight protesters perceived and responded to non-coercive protest control.

Based on 40 semi-structured interviews and secondary data analysis, I ultimately argue that protesters’ socio-spatial practices can shape particular relational dynamics, which determine the characteristics of public spaces in protests and mediate the consequences of democratic resistance. While these practices can help fix the damaged democratic political system, they can simultaneously erode democratic relations between members of civil society striving to shape and participate in their own democratic governance. My findings show that peaceful candlelight protesters created regulatory processes through which they exerted their ability to control the ways in which protesters use public spaces, draw the boundaries between the legitimate and illegitimate actors, and manage engagement between peaceful and transgressive protesters, including each group’s engagement with police. As both a producer and product of the Candlelight Protests, public spaces then became spatial laboratories within and through which inclusive and exclusive relations, as well as socio-spatial norms around resistance, were forged, legitimized, mandated, and strengthened.
This dissertation contributes to deepening our understanding of the relationship between protest and space and the internal dynamics of mass protests beyond Western democracies.

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