Contesting Modernity's Shadows: Remembrance, Mobilization, and Struggle In East Asia

This session examines how the unresolved legacies of empire, war, foreign military presence, and authoritarian governance have been contested, remembered, and mobilized against across postwar East Asia. While modern institutions reorganized social life into governable categories, the historical violence underlying them has remained a site of ongoing struggle: through civil society movements confronting the social and environmental costs of foreign military bases and camptowns, through communities seeking redress for wartime civilian massacres, through survivors contesting the forced institutionalization of vagrants and "undesirable" populations during rapid industrialization, through women's organizing across institutional divides, and through contested commemorations of religious nationalism. East Asian historical sociology has long grappled with colonialism, state violence, and historical reckoning as enduring features of the region's modernization, resonating with recent work on protest event analysis, military bases, civic networks, and religious nationalism. We invite papers addressing, among others:

1. Military bases and civil society: local communities and social movements responding to foreign military presence—camptowns, status-of-forces agreements, environmental contamination—and the evolving repertoire of contention from the 1990s to the present.
2. Gendered and civic mobilization: networks built by women and civic actors across institutional and political lines in postwar East Asia.
3. State violence, confinement, and contested memory: the silencing and contestation of wartime massacres, forced institutionalization of marginalized populations, and religious nationalism.
4. Comparative remembrance and reckoning: shared and divergent East Asian frameworks for "dealing with the past."

This session advances a comparative historical sociology attentive to both institutional and contentious dimensions of modernity's unresolved shadows.