The Race for Development: South Korea and the Epistemology of Longing

• In Event: Global and Transnational Sociology Section Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): 3. Knowledge and Politics II

Abstract

This paper asks why export-oriented industrialization came to be imagined as the most credible and desirable pathway to modernity in the first place. Rather than reexamining institutional capacity or geopolitical contingency, it proposes a reorientation within the sociology of development by shifting analytic attention from policy design to the epistemic conditions that render particular developmental futures credible and authoritative. Drawing on archival materials from Korean state agencies, Cold War development institutions, and contemporaneous intellectual debates, the paper argues that Korea’s trajectory unfolded within what we term an epistemology of longing: a structured field of global comparison in which modernity appears as a horizon to be approached, measured, and demonstrated. Within this field, recognition and value are unevenly distributed through a racialized global hierarchy. Proximity to whiteness structures legitimacy and developmental credibility, while antiblackness configures the limit against which the boundaries of development are drawn and stabilized. Export-oriented industrialization thus became legible not solely because of institutional efficiency or geopolitical contingency, but because it aligned with a broader hierarchy of intelligibility in which industrial production signified legible claims to modern humanity. Korea’s exceptional status, we argue, has not necessarily disrupted this hierarchy but has been incorporated within it in ways that reproduce uneven distributions of developmental plausibility across postcolonial states. By reconceptualizing development as a field of epistemic ordering rather than solely a set of policies or outcomes, this paper offers a new direction for the sociology of development.

Authors

• Jae Kyun Kim, Russell Sage College

• Yeon-Hwa Lee, SUNY-Binghamton