Roads not taken

In the late hours of 3 December 2024 South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol declared martial law in response to what he claimed was a ‘legislative dictatorship’ directed by ‘anti-state forces’. In shocking scenes broadcast around the world, citizens took to the streets in protest and mobilised army units defied orders to suppress dissent. Meanwhile, 190 legislators from both parties forced their way into the National Assembly to unanimously vote down the martial law declaration. It was rescinded just hours later, and the disgraced president was subsequently impeached and unceremoniously removed from office.

While the bewildering flurry of events illustrated, on the one hand, the durability of democracy in the Republic of Korea (ROK), they also invoked the legacies of the ROK’s formative years and the ghosts of American occupation. Yoon’s attempted coup bears the hallmarks of an ‘imperial presidency’, a term used by Jörg Michael Dostal in 2023, complete with a heavy reliance on force and the familiar scapegoating of the ‘northern threat’ to justify such force. Kornel Chang’s monograph A Fractured Liberation: Korea under US occupation is thus a welcome addition to the growing field of research on this formative period of Korean history, when the levers of power that would define decades of politics on the Korean Peninsula were first installed under reluctant and often incompetent American tutelage.