Protest Dialectics represents the first monograph on the democracy movement of the 1970s written by a social movement expert. It offers an informative and accessible account of protest against military general-turned-president Park Chung Hee’s increasingly autocratic rule in that decade. In broad strokes, it traces how the anti-Park movement, confined to students in the early 1970s, evolved into a broader movement with diversified social actors, issues, and tactics by the second half of the decade. The book puts great emphasis on how this evolution did not take place in a political vacuum but in the context of an ongoing contest between political challengers and Park’s authoritarian regime. Not only did the features of protest change in the process of contentious interaction, the regime’s repressive policies also evolved as the government was forced to respond to political challenges. The focus on this interactive process is embodied in the book’s title, Protest...
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