Leslie, Yeon Sook (2023) How did underground student activists construct a collective identity for their movement and mobilise the public during the 1987 South Korean democratisation movement? Research Master thesis, Victoria University.

Abstract

This research examines the role of underground student activists in the 1980s Korean democratisation movement. Social movements have arisen to respond to repressive regimes, not just in Korea but globally, and in many of these movements, activists have been forced to go underground. However, little research has been done to explore collective life experience as underground activists. This study is an insider research project that pursues an in-depth retrospective exploration of students’ collective experiences as activists, specifically the ways in which they went underground to maintain their engagement and solidarity in the face of harsh dictatorship and developed strategies to mobilise the masses and challenge the military regime in 1980s South Korea. This study will demonstrate multi-dimensional efforts for shaping underground activists’ collective identity, and that the collective identity co-evolves with strategies which are heavily influenced by the relationship between activists and the public by incorporating evidence from interviews, letters, pictures, news articles, reviews and researcher’s experience. To effectively show this process, this study discusses the findings thematically from developing movement as underground activists, the activist-led period, followed by the time when activists co-worked with the masses, and the collective memory in shaping strategies and collective identity. It argues that ideological cohesion was the key glue to sustaining their movement, and that inclusionary practice in generating collective action and identity has greater effectiveness in mass-mobilisation than dichotomising social movement actors based on the strong boundary work. This study also indicates that emotional disturbance of underground activists has significantly impacted on their lives. This finding therefore recommend that comprehensive emotional care strategies need to be developed for sustaining movement.

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