How can you say you're Korean? Law, governmentality and national membership in South Korea

Abstract

This study brings to light the problem of identifying, and of determining the status of, ethnic Korean migrants who assert membership in the Korean national community. The influx of members of the ethnic diaspora in China and the former Soviet Union has posed challenges to South Korea's legal definition of national membership and its practice of keeping the boundaries of nationhood. In response to the challenges, South Korea has calibrated its administration for admitting those coethnics and devised novel categories of membership. It has enacted executive rules and guidelines for the acquisition of citizenship by members of Korean minorities in China and Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) countries, and extended ethnizenship (non-citizen ethnonational membership) to members of the kin-minorities by way of two immigrant status categories (F-4 and H-2). This study gives an account of these legal strategies and inquires into the administrative practices of identifying and recognising applicants for citizenship and ethnizenship. In examining those practices, the study will shed light on Korea's unique taxonomy of ethnicity and practice of governmentality that sanctifies common ancestry as the essence of both citizenship and ethnizenship to the extent of requiring proof of biological ties with resident citizens or ancestors when determining an applicant's membership status. Instead of explaining away these unique practices in terms of an ethnic nationalist tradition and conception, this study makes sense of those practices as a product of the overlapping governmentality of the Korean state, the kin-minorities’ states of citizenship and of the administration under Japanese rule.

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