Again and again,against abandonment

Thank you to the contributors for their generous engagement with our book and for raising provocative questions and broadening our horizon with critical insights from their own research. A lot has happened since Jennifer and I wrote the book together, so I would like to offer a brief update as a way to address some of the points they raise.

As we discuss in Against Abandonment, Moon Jae-in (2017–2022) rose to the presidency in the wake of the Candlelight Protests of 2016–2017 and the impeachment of his predecessor. His tenure is likely to be remembered not only for improving relations between South and North Korea and managing the upheavals of the global COVID-19 pandemic but also for its failure to advance structural economic reform and its inability to curb the surge of the far right and reactionary backlash that ultimately secured the election of Yoon Suk Yeol (2022–2025). Yoon embraced an unapologetically anti-feminist, anti-labor, and anti-democratic platform and exacerbated South Korea’s political polarization to an unprecedented degree. His emergency martial law decree and attempted self-coup on December 3, 2024 caused widespread political turmoil, public anxiety, and disrupted the everyday lives of countless individuals.

For many, though, the erosion of ordinary life had already been well underway—among them subcontracted shipyard workers, hotel employees dismissed through mass layoffs, and countless other workers who continued to protest under both Moon’s and Yoon’s presidencies. One of the most striking cases, in my view, dates to June 2019 during Moon’s administration, when 40 highway toll collectors—widely known as “tollgate workers”—launched a 61-day high-altitude occupation atop the canopy of the Seoul Tollgate in Sŏngnam, Kyŏnggi Province to protest against the mass layoff of 1,500 tollgate workers. Their action, part of a larger struggle against unfair dismissals and for direct employment by the Korean Expressway Corporation (KEC), produced an enduring image: a large group of predominantly middle-aged women workers wearing matching red and fern green union vests and hats, holding up placards with a slogan that stated rather simply, “WE ARE RIGHT! (Uriga ort’a!)” Their protest lasted seven months and became iconic, echoing earlier struggles of women workers such as those of KTX and Kiryung workers, which we examine in detail in Against Abandonment.

Another important struggle involves the workers of Korea Optical High-Tech, a subsidiary of the Japanese chemical company Nitto Denko. On January 8, 2024, two women workers, Park Jeong-hye (Pak Chŏng-hye) and So Hyeon-suk (So Hyŏn-suk), climbed to the top of the factory rooftop in Kumi to begin a high-altitude occupation—a struggle that continues to this day. They had worked at the labor-intensive factory for 12 years and 16 years, respectively, before losing their jobs when a massive fire in October 2022 destroyed the facility. The company collected millions of dollars in fire insurance payouts before permanently closing its doors, and the protest targets the company’s unilateral liquidation and the dismissal of union members in the aftermath of the fire. So Hyeon-suk ended her rooftop protest on the 476th day due to serious health concerns, but Park Jeong-hye still remains alone in place, setting an astounding new record for the longest continuous high-altitude occupation protest: by August 29, 2025, she would have endured 600 days on the rooftop.

In a remarkable show of solidarity especially between labor and LGBTQ+ and other social minorities, the Korea Optical High-Tech unionists joined representatives of the Sejong Hotel union and the Kŏje-T’ongyŏng-Kosŏng shipbuilding subcontractors union—each with members currently engaged in protest occupations of rooftops and traffic camera towers—and shared the lead float at the Seoul Queer Parade on June 14, 2025. The float carried a large poster that read, “THERE ARE PEOPLE UP THERE (Chŏwi e saram i itda),” a poignant reminder of workers risking their lives in high-altitude protests. The workers framed their struggle against precarity as a collective refusal of abandonment, linking labor militancy with queer visibility in a resonant coalition. As we observe in Against Abandonment, high-altitude protests are not simply desperate acts or demonstrations of militancy but practices that transform vulnerability into endurance and visibility.

These struggles, unfolding in the present, carry forward our reflections of protest repertoires in Against Abandonment. Women workers, who experience disproportionate rates of precarious employment and workplace discrimination, have led some of the longest and hardest fought struggles in South Korean history, using a range of protest tactics that foster embodied and transhistorical interconnectedness and conjure solidarity as affect, resiliency, and radical interdependency. Again and again, women workers perform protest repertoires to target opponents and sustain support, sometimes with success but certainly not always. Rina Agarwala (forthcoming) points out that South Korean protesters show an “underlying moral economy based on a belief in human worth and deservingness,” and raises an important point about successes and failures. She writes that our book presents “an extremely important list of successful outcomes” that includes how the protests have “energized grounds for solidarity, conjured communities of witnesses, increased exposure, created rituals and a shared sense of purpose, offered an antidote to the isolation and invisibility of precarity, empowered people to refuse human indignity, challenged the use of public space, and created new care infrastructures.” These are indeed successes in a manner of speaking, but I contend that they are achieved in the context of ongoing struggles against precarity, against abandonment, without a sense of conclusion.

The indeterminate nature of protest outcome led us to draw on Diana Taylor’s work, that “regardless of how well developed a repertoire is or how many times a familiar act or scene is repeated, the outcome of any given performance is never fixed or predetermined” (Chun and Han, 2025: 11). Taylor argues that the performative power of a repertoire to move people occurs through “reactivation rather than duplication” (Taylor, 2003: 32), and indeed our primary focus in the book concerns the relational processes that are activated and re-activated between protesters and supporters, witnesses and participants—without guarantee. Bridget Kenny (forthcoming) astutely picks up on this argument, noting that solidarity is not merely an outcome or a strategic posture but a catalytic force, “creating forms of being-together that refuse neoliberalized precariousness.”

At its core, “repertoire” means a list of things that can be found again or produced again, not only as in a set of songs, dances, or protests but also any set of repeatable practices that can be performed and re-performed, enacted and re-enacted, but never in an identical manner. Taylor’s distinction between the archive and the repertoire is especially instructive for us: while the archive preserves knowledge in static forms such as texts, documents, and artifacts, the repertoire sustains knowledge through embodied repetition—gesture, performance, and ritual. The protest repertoire endures by being enacted again and again. Each iteration is repeatable but never identical, linking past and present through embodied practice. Marcel Paret (forthcoming) asks about periodization, wondering if we perhaps overemphasize historical continuity across distinct periods. But this is precisely what I find fascinating about the South Korean protest repertoires. Protesters insist on continuity as a matter of principle, as though connectivity and repetition are as vital as a lifeline. This does not mean that contemporary resistance is “merely a replica of the past.”; rather, it is a refusal to abandon the struggles of the past and instead, enact a commitment to proliferate and thicken the web of protests as time passes. Protest repertoires link the past and present through shared embodied practice and through deliberate recitation of transhistorical connections, over and over again. Kenny rightly describes this as protesters working “across struggles to recombine and redirect connections, drawing on prior moments to energize new efforts.”

Of course, some things are new innovations, and some are new even when they appear to be a déjà vu. On December 3, 2024, as the book’s pre-publication process was drawing to a close, Jennifer and I traveled to South Korea and coincidentally arrived in Seoul at the onset of Yoon’s martial law debacle and the start of yet another wave of mass protests that ultimately culminated in Yoon’s impeachment and removal. This certainly felt like a moment of repetition, like the Candlelight Protests of 2016–2017, but with notable differences. For one, I was struck by the incredibly rapid mobilization of protesters who essentially protected the formal processes of liberal democracy and stopped the self-coup. Within hours of the martial law decree, in the early hours of the morning, hundreds of individuals rushed to the National Assembly and faced off against armed troops ordered to block and even arrest legislators. It was civilian protesters who safeguarded the parliament so they can vote to overturn martial law. And after that first night, one of the most notable features of the mass protests this time was the undeniable prominence of young women, who emerged as powerful political actors for social change. Though this was not entirely new or exceptional—young women protesters have long been visible in the public square—the K-pop light sticks used in protests this time were a remarkable protest innovation. Not only did they replace the wax candles and LED candle lights of the previous era, but they also became a salient symbol of the contemporary convergence between political protest and popular culture.

Like the Candlelight Protests of 2016–2017, the mass mobilizations of 2024–2025 renewed critical questions regarding the dynamic between history and change, continuity and rupture. Writing in Critical Asian Studies, Nan Kim describes the recent martial law crisis as “a serious threat of authoritarian relapse in nearly four decades since the military dictatorship era” (Kim, 2025: 352). I am intrigued by her deployment of the term “relapse.” Much of the critical public discourse similarly framed Yoon’s martial law decree as a failed attempt to return to authoritarian rule, carried out with the pretext of enforcing social order and national security. Implicit in this framing is that there is an arc of progress extending from military dictatorship to liberal democracy in South Korea, and that a relapse would signify a return to a previous condition that is undesirable and harmful, a backsliding into a pre-democratic political order.

It occurs to me that this logic runs parallel to a different kind of return, one that is posited by the Trumpian slogan “Make America Great Again (MAGA)”—which incidentally Yoon and his supporters borrowed and deliberately repurposed as “Make Korea Great Again” in support of right-wing politics. MAGA gestures toward a time and place in the past that never truly existed: a redemptive vision of “greatness” that systematically excludes racial minorities, immigrants and refugees, women, and queer and trans communities. MAGA’s logic of restoration weaponizes nostalgia and mobilizes the fantasy of return in order to authorize new configurations of power. Interpreted in this light, Yoon’s martial law decree can be understood not only as a relapse into an authoritarian past, a regression, but also as the harbinger of a new political order, the rise of global fascism. The mimetic borrowing of American populist symbols—such as U.S. flags and “Stop the Steal” signs seen in right-wing demonstrations in Seoul—makes visible the strange journey of populist repertoires, where nationalist discourse paradoxically crosses borders.

Considering these contradictions and discordant temporalities, I do not hold on to a notion of linear progress nor do I posit hope simply as a way forward. Indeed, Jong Bum Kwon (forthcoming) senses that in Against Abandonment and writes that we “do not intimate at a messianic future, a promised victory to come.” There is so much grief and suffering in the protest movements we discuss in this book, that writing about hope and joy functioned as a kind of a salve, not a celebration. Kwon points out that the question of persistence is the throughline of Against Abandonment, and indeed, persistence is what makes life itself possible. Persistence is the very condition of survival under the neoliberal capitalist systems of exploitation, poverty, and dehumanization. To persist is not a matter of heroic willpower; it can be a painful measure of how much structural hardship a person must endure. Seen this way, persistence is inseparable from questions of power, inequality, and survival, reminding us that life’s continuity is shaped by the social conditions that make persistence necessary in the first place. Persistence reveals both the enduring violence of the system and the possibility of abiding resistance.

Kenny points out that abandonment is a condition that is opposite of persistence, and that it operates in Against Abandonment as a “shorthand for the power of non-protection and ‘leaving to let die’ of workers and a range of minoritized residents of South Korea, primarily by the state and also capital.” This is true. Communities and individuals left behind and left to die by capital, the state, or patriarchy are forced to persist precisely because they have been abandoned. Persistence is not a freely celebrated strength but a demand placed on those abandoned by structures of power. To persist, then, is both a testimony to life’s endurance and an indictment of the systems that necessitate resilience in the first place.

Agarwala suggests that we appear overly cautious and do not adequately acknowledge the successes of the persistent protests we discuss, and that South Korean protests ought to be credited more for the successes they do achieve. This point is well taken. Perhaps our affective ambivalence reflects the fact that the book was written largely in the shadow of celebrated successes—in the deeply alienating and disheartening glow in the aftermath of the Candlelight Protests of 2016–2017—and completed during a time of tyranny, war, and genocide. Now that Yoon has been replaced by a more liberal president in South Korea, there is currently a familiar eagerness to exalt success, even if it means abandoning all that falls short and those denied its spoils. The success of democratization, the success of economic development, and even the success of K-pop on the global stage—these cast a disorienting shadow over the profound sorrow I continue to see on the ground.

Interestingly, as it turns out, the words “again” and “against” are etymologically connected. They share a common ancestry in Old English, but “against” retained the sense of opposition and came to signify being in opposition to, toward, facing, or resting upon something. By contrast, “again,” followed the sense of movement “back” or “in return,” which gradually evolved into the idea of repetition, giving us its modern meaning of “once more.” In this way, the two words are linguistic siblings: one grew into the language of confrontation, the other into the language of return. Being against abandonment is not simply limited to opposing abandonment or fighting abandonment, but reflecting the older sense of physical contact or adjacency—like leaning against a wall—it articulates an ambivalent relationship to abandonment. Against does not always mean to fight. After all, to lean against a wall is not to fight the wall, but to rest beside it, to let its steadiness hold you up. Against denotes both the posture of protest and the posture of pressing into something to withstand it or even be sustained by it. “Against abandonment” is the stance of those who endure neglect yet refuse to disappear, again and again. Against Abandonment calls out both the fragile persistence of life cast off, and the relentless persistence of violence concealed beneath hope’s shadow.