The Limits of American Power: The Carter Administration's Human Rights Policy in South Korea, 1977-1981

Abstract

While there has been much scholarly engagement with the Carter administration's human rights policy in South Korea, there has not yet been a more comprehensive historical analysis of the policy from Carter's inauguration until he left office in January 1981. Using primarily recently declassified documents from the United States, this thesis addresses the gaps in the historical literature of the Carter administration's human rights policy towards South Korea. By placing the human rights policy at the centre of its analysis, this thesis produces a more focused, detailed, and authoritative account of the Carter administration's human rights policy toward South Korea throughout its tenure.

A vast majority of the academic scholarship on this subject has tended to have an episodic rather than comprehensive focus on Carter's human rights policy. Episodic scholarship demonstrates one or two (or both) of the following features. First, it addresses the human rights policy as only one part of broader research efforts on, for example, United States-South Korea relations. Here, the human rights policy is not at the centre of analysis, which results in a limited analysis of the policy itself. Second, the work tends to address and privilege, to varying degrees of depth, certain episodes of the human rights policy, usually high-profile events or periods. Here, the focus on certain human rights episodes certainly yields important insight into the policy, but it nevertheless results in an episodic approach in the sense that the human rights policy is not addressed throughout the Carter administration's tenure. By comprehensive, this thesis means an analysis that places the human rights policy at the centre of its analysis and intricately traces the human rights policy's development throughout the Carter administration's tenure.

This thesis makes two overarching claims. First, the Carter administration's human rights policy in South Korea was more extensive and complex than previously acknowledged. The magnitude of the administration's efforts to promote human rights and the extent to which it infused human rights into the conduct of U.S. foreign policy toward South Korea illustrates that the Carter administration's commitment to human rights was also stronger than previously recognised. Second, this thesis argues that the implementation of the Carter administration's human rights policy was a fundamentally negotiated process between the United States and South Korean governments. Due to limited American leverage over the Korean government's decision-making and Korean agency and leverage of its own, the administration required the cooperation of the Korean government to implement its human rights policy. The administration was not therefore completely or even mostly in control of whether human rights progress would occur. At different times the Korean government aided, selectively engaged with, and blocked the implementation of the Carter administration's human rights policy. Show more