Presentation short abstract

This presentation reinterprets South Korea’s developmentalism through a posthumanist lens, seeing materials, technologies, species, and climate as active agents. It moves beyond human-centered accounts to show how human–non-human entanglements shaped modernization.

Presentation long abstract

Scholarship on East Asian developmentalism has traditionally explained industrialization through the actions of state, market, and social actors. Environmentalist critiques reframed developmentalism as generating inequality and ecological harm, and critiques of environmentalism have highlighted its entanglement with statist and growth-oriented power. Yet these approaches all remain anthropocentric, centering human actors and treating nature, animals, machines, materials, and climate as passive background conditions. Such assumptions constrain historical analysis in an era marked by climate crisis, ecological disruption, pandemics, and AI-related inequalities—conditions that blur the boundary between human and non-human.

This presentation proposes a posthumanist reinterpretation of South Korea’s developmentalism in the 1960s and 1970s. It repositions construction materials, seed varieties, electrification and home appliances, highways, river-improvement and land-reclamation projects, factory farming and livestock diseases, petrochemical substances, waste, and climatic events such as typhoons and droughts as active agents rather than mere policy objects. Examining how these non-human entities intervened in the design and trajectory of developmental programs reveals developmentalism as a relational and material process shaped by heterogeneous temporalities and material dynamics.

This perspective also moves beyond environmentalist narratives. Non-human entities are not framed as victims or objects of protection; water, soil, wind, pathogens, machines, waste, and weather appear as forces that reorganize space, redirect policies, and interact—sometimes productively, sometimes disruptively—with human intentions. By challenging the anthropocentric assumptions shared by both developmentalist and environmentalist frameworks, this posthumanist approach offers a new analytical lens for understanding how humans and non-humans together co-produced the historical conditions and consequences of South Korea’s developmental project.