Hwayeon Lee

HWAYEON LEE, then a graduate student at University of Colorado, Boulder, Colorado, received a grant in April 2022 to aid research on “Refusing Empire through Care: Anti-base dissent in Soseong-ri, South Korea,” supervised by Dr. Carla Jones. South Korea has been a key site for US military presence in the Pacific since the mid-20th century. Despite the democratization of South Korea and the nominal end of the Cold War, the US maintains an imperial relationship with South Korea through the continued expansion of US military sites, such as the new THAAD base created in Soseong-ri, a rural mountainous village in Seongju-gun. While the South Korean state sanctions this site, the lifeworld of dissent in Soseong-ri sustains itself through practices of relationality and mutual care. Despite the lack of attention from the media and contrary to the narrative that this dissent community is backward, hyper-localized, and brainwashed by the non-local “external activist forces,” community solidarity as a labor of care defies state conceptions of security and its tactics to divide and conquer. How do these seemingly unremarkable care practices reveal divestment from militarized life and expose the limits of imperial militarism? Based on two years of ethnographic research examining intimate forms of care as radical relationality in Soseong-ri, this dissertation reveals the limits of political affect and expands conceptions of dissent, informing new anthropological conceptions of political subjectivity, activism, and refusal of empire and its military security.