Why did the ‘Square Politics’ Disappear after June 3rd Protest in 1964? A Study on the Spatial Characteristics of the Democratic Movement in Seoul in the 1960s based on GIS

Abstract

Until now, studies of the Korean democratization movement have focused on identifying the dynamics of the movement’s agents, without analyzing how external conditions such as spatial structures and state responses intertwined with the movement’s various characteristics. As a result, the Korean democratization movement has tended to be depicted as a unidirectional process of development and the external conditions of the movement have been depicted as abstract and static. As an attempt to expand the study of democratization movements, this study analyzes the changes in the spatial characteristics of the democratization movement in Seoul in the 1960s and its background through GIS research methodology. In the field of Korean history, GIS research methodology has been mainly used to analyze pre-modern period, administrative areas, geographical boundaries, and transportation routes, but the “3.1 Movement Database” (https://db.history.go.kr/samil) released by the National Institute of Korean History in 2019 showed that GIS research methodology is a very useful tool for identifying the spatial characteristics of the movement.BRInspired by the “3.1 Movement Database”, this study organized all the raw data on the number of protest schools, protesters, and the furthest points on the way of protesters in 1960s in Seoul and displayed them on a basemap in the QGIS program. e results showed that in 1964, when martial law was declared, student protests mostly reached the city center, but from 1965 onwards, even though the scale of protests was larger and the protests lasted for a longer period of time, the density of protests in the city center was signicantly lower due to the police’s ‘school gate lockdown tactic’ using tear gas. In other words, this paper argues that the police’s newly developed riot control tactics, in addition to media control and public security incidents, were important factors in the disappearance of ‘square politics’ aer the June 3 incident.