Calling an Audible on Civil Service Reform: Bureaucrats as State-builders under Syngman Rhee
Presented by Dr. Rolf I. Siverson, Independent Scholar.
The event will take place on November 16, 5:00 - 6:30pm Los Angeles Time / November 17, 10:00 - 11:30am (Seoul Time).
Please register here: https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZwkdumtpz0vHtDeYhOtlYgO4xg5Ixaq-Wx2
국무원사무국운동회1 (1959) National Archives of Korea CET0026231
Abstract
After the Korean War, bureaucrats in South Korea’s Office of General Affairs were faced with a dilemma. Despite being tasked with creating a democratic, efficient civil service and a set of laws and regulations inherited from the U.S. occupation, the political reality was ambivalent if not outright hostile to changing the status quo spoils system. Nonetheless, the institutional structures and norms of the Korean civil service had changed significantly by the end of the decade. This presentation explores how these career officials approached institutional reform from within. They pursued the project of modernizing the civil service utilizing creative strategies inspired by examples from past and present. In doing so, they demonstrated many of the very same characteristics they aimed to institutionalize within the state. By foregrounding the agency of career bureaucrats as state-builders, this presentation aims to reconsider the history of the South Korean state and recontextualize the expansion of administrative capacity in subsequent decades within a longer and more complex process of incremental transformation.
About the Speaker
Dr. Rolf I. Siverson is an independent scholar of modern Korean and Japanese history. He received a PhD in History from the University of Pennsylvania in 2021 where his research focused on civil administration in Manchukuo and its impact on state-building in South Korea. His interests include the history of the state, global and transnational political movements, and critical biography. His goal is to introduce Korean history and historical concepts to a wide audience. He is currently developing a multimedia project that explores postcolonial Korean society through the lens of crime reporting in occupied Seoul. He is also a mentor and advocate for historians working outside of academia.