Thinking about Student Movements Across West and East Asia
In the 1920s, during the Japanese occupation of Korea, a group of Korean school students formed a secret underground club to combat Japanese students who were regularly harassing Koreans in public. The club was exposed after a Japanese police investigation due to the continuous fights that broke out between Korean and Japanese students. During the interrogation, Korean students admitted that their plan was to use this strategy to remind their parents, who assimilated to the colonial rule, that they will always be considered as second class citizens under the Japanese empire, and that they should never stop resisting for their independence.
When I encountered this history as a high school student in Palestine, I wondered how this history, and student activism in South Korea, could or did speak to Palestinian student movements. Looking deeper into the student movements of both places, I chose to research two of the most focal uprisings in South Korean and Palestinian histories, in an attempt to understand if they shared common moments of resistance and strategy.
The Gwangju Uprising and the First Intifada
During the Gwangju Uprising of 1980, Korean students protested the dictatorship’s martial law, militant university closures, and anti-democratization laws. They enacted civil disobedience; using horizontal and vertical strategies and spread their resistance. In order to avoid repeating the same mistakes that led to major crackdowns on the student movement during the 1970s, they opted for a vertical strategy by seeking guideance from senior student activists. At the same time, students strategized a horizontal approach which was based on spreading the student movement activism to various areas across South Korea. This strategy decentralized student resistance and leaders, which hindered the brutal suppression of the police by complexifying their ability to pinpoint a stable resistance core.
In Palestine, the First Intifada of 1987, included Palestinian students, who resisted the settler colonial Israeli army, with many strategies that included militant underground mobilization, decentralized actions, and popular education. As with the Gwangju Uprising, student groups from the First Intifada resisted the power hierarchy imposed on them, and were able to mobilize and work towards sustaining the life of the uprisings. They were also able to gain the support and approval of their societies, which resulted in unprecedented social solidarity and resilience.
The Problem with Social Movement Theory
The 1980s witnessed various student movements across West and East Asia, as students from Palestine to Japan mobilized around nationalist and political issues. Student activism ranged from combating academic authorities, challenging regulations, policies, bureaucratic and educational issues, to demanding full governmental reforms, protesting corruption, student rights, martial laws, and aggressive military suppression.
Nonetheless, academic work on these movements, especially frameworks based on standard approaches to Social Movement Theory, have neglected the role of students in such non-western contexts. These students were resisting colonial and imperialist domination, and were involved in shifting the power dynamics within their societies and political structures. But these movements were often left untheorized, dismissed as ‘erupting volcanos’ or ‘irrational mobs’. We need better appreciation of these movements and their effect on social structures. Framing them as ‘social problems’ has contributed to a lack of understanding of their role in building alternatives to the political and social status quo.
Today we are witnessing various student movements taking action in the Global North through various forms of protests and encampments in solidarity with Palestine. At the same time, the student movements of the Global South and especially in the Middle East region are largely absent from grassroots activism. This invites various questions about how years of oppression and colonial violence, in addition to theoretical misrepresentation, might have played a role in weakening these movements.
South Korean students have been active since the first week of the war on Gaza, demonstrating their solidarity with Palestine, while also revisiting various internal discourses regarding their movement and social structures. Yet the Palestinian student movement remains confined between the dictatorship and colonial opression. These different waves of student responses from all over the world invites many questions on the history of these movements, their present, and future.
* Muntaha Abed is a PhD Candidate at Birzeit University, Palestine. Her research interests are focused on silenced bodies and social movement dynamics in East and West Asia. This blog was developed through discussions at the Mapping Connections Institute, held in Beirut between 27th – 30th May 2024 as part of the ‘Inter-Asia Week’ (Inter-Asia Partnership). The views expressed are the personal perspectives of the writer and not attributable to the Mapping Connections partner institutions.