Transformative Citizenship, Transformative Victimhood

Abstract

© 2022, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.By early twenty-first century, it has painfully turned out that the citizenship regime of transformative contributory rights has a fatal side-effect of structurally and abruptly engendering transformative victims, in numbers and extents that are no less conspicuous than those for transformative beneficiaries. There have been structural victims not only inherent in the substantive nature of each transformation (e.g., traditionalists and nativists in West-dependent modernization, peasants in capitalist industrialization, and local interests and communal agents in neoliberal globalization) but also embedded in the impulsive, excessive, and violent manners of pursuing the transformations. In fact, given the unevenly developmental and selectively democratic nature of South Koreas postcolonial capitalist modernization, virtually every category of transformative citizenship has been accompanied by the transformative victimhood of certain social groups.