Book by Celeste Arrington
Government wrongdoing or negligence harms people worldwide, but not all victims are equally effec... more Government wrongdoing or negligence harms people worldwide, but not all victims are equally effective at obtaining redress. In Accidental Activists, Celeste L. Arrington examines the interactive dynamics of the politics of redress to understand why not. Relatively powerless groups like redress claimants depend on support from political elites, active groups in society, the media, experts, lawyers, and the interested public to capture democratic policymakers' attention and sway their decisions. Focusing on when and how such third-party support matters, Arrington finds that elite allies may raise awareness about the victims’ cause or sponsor special legislation, but their activities also tend to deter the mobilization of fellow claimants and public sympathy. By contrast, claimants who gain elite allies only after the difficult and potentially risky process of mobilizing societal support tend to achieve more redress, which can include official inquiries, apologies, compensation, and structural reforms.
Arrington draws on her extensive fieldwork to illustrate these dynamics through comparisons of the parallel Japanese and South Korean movements of victims of harsh leprosy control policies, blood products tainted by hepatitis C, and North Korean abductions. Her book thereby highlights how citizens in Northeast Asia—a region grappling with how to address Japan’s past wrongs—are leveraging similar processes to hold their own governments accountable for more recent harms. Accidental Activists also reveals the growing power of litigation to promote policy change and greater accountability from decision makers.
Papers by Celeste Arrington
Ebisu, Dec 31, 2023
Le texte seul est utilisable sous licence CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. Les autres éléments (illustrations, fi... more Le texte seul est utilisable sous licence CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. Les autres éléments (illustrations, fichiers annexes importés) sont « Tous droits réservés », sauf mention contraire.
Routledge eBooks, Feb 2, 2023
International journal of Asian studies, Feb 12, 2024
Opinions vary in Japan on whether smoking is deviant today, but the behavior, once widely accepte... more Opinions vary in Japan on whether smoking is deviant today, but the behavior, once widely accepted, faces increasing regulation. Recent reforms, moving beyond reliance on nonsmokers' tolerance and smokers' etiquette, impose stricter and more detailed rules on smoking, along with penalties for noncompliance. As the Japanese government's promotional materials note, the reforms move "from manners to rules" (manā kara rūru e). The evolution of Japan's smoking regulations exemplifies a shift toward more legalistic modes of social control. Historically, Japanese governance relied on non-binding "soft law," administrative guidance, and societal cooperation. Legalistic governance, in contrast, hinges on formal rules and proceduralized enforcement mechanisms. This article, drawing on twenty-eight interviews and qualitative analysis of policy deliberations, advocacy organization documents, court rulings, and Japanese news coverage, traces how societal actors contributed to this legalistic turn. Tobacco control advocates filed lawsuits, pursued voluntary changes through local activities, and provided information subsidies to policymakers while lobbying for local and national reforms. They thereby helped de-normalize smoking and render it regulatable. By uncovering bottom-up drivers of legalistic governance and the strategies through which societal actors influence regulatory style, this paper contributes to scholarship on governance, policy diffusion, and law and social change.
Law & Society Review, May 13, 2023
There is growing interest in social movement actors as knowledge producers, but many movements ha... more There is growing interest in social movement actors as knowledge producers, but many movements have limited ability to access or produce credible, authoritative information. Building on sociolegal scholarship and social movement studies, we show how movements can overcome knowledge gaps they have via‐à‐vis state authorities and contribute to public knowledge through institutional tactics. We argue that features of the process of legal mobilization activate mechanisms that bolster movements' credibility, reveal or generate information, and thereby facilitate social movement knowledge production. We theorize these dynamics by analyzing environmental activism against U.S. military bases in Japan and South Korea, which allows us to leverage most similar legal contexts and types of claims to identify and illustrate the mechanisms.
Law & Society Review
There is growing interest in social movement actors as knowledge producers, but many movements ha... more There is growing interest in social movement actors as knowledge producers, but many movements have limited ability to access or produce credible, authoritative information. Building on sociolegal scholarship and social movement studies, we show how movements can overcome knowledge gaps they have via‐à‐vis state authorities and contribute to public knowledge through institutional tactics. We argue that features of the process of legal mobilization activate mechanisms that bolster movements' credibility, reveal or generate information, and thereby facilitate social movement knowledge production. We theorize these dynamics by analyzing environmental activism against U.S. military bases in Japan and South Korea, which allows us to leverage most similar legal contexts and types of claims to identify and illustrate the mechanisms.
Accidental Activists, 2016
Political Science Quarterly
The Journal of Japanese Studies
Pacific Affairs, 2018
Abstract The abductions of Japanese nationals by North Korean agents in the 1970s and 1980s figur... more Abstract The abductions of Japanese nationals by North Korean agents in the 1970s and 1980s figure prominently in Japanese conceptions of the North Korean human rights issue. In the past decade, global discussions about North Korean human rights have also come to include these abductions, the final report of the UN Commission of Inquiry in 2014 being a prime example. How did the abductions and North Korean human rights issues become so interconnected? I argue that these issues are mutually constitutive. Japanese state and non-state actors’ promotion of the abductions issue at home and abroad benefitted international advocacy for North Korean human rights and led to the integration of the abductions issue into the global North Korean human rights agenda. It also promoted awareness of North Korean human rights in Japan. Original interviews and content analysis of UN resolutions, Japanese media coverage, prime ministers’ speeches, and government publications empirically demonstrate the mutual constitution of local and international activists’ discursive messages. This article advances scholarship about feedback loops between local and international activism.
Law & Policy, 2019
We investigate cause lawyers' roles in movements for the domestic adoption of international human... more We investigate cause lawyers' roles in movements for the domestic adoption of international human rights norms. Social movements scholarship often assumes that lawyers will divert activism toward institutional tactics, while the sociolegal studies literature emphasizes that lawyers are active in diverse ways across venues. A paired comparison of antidiscrimination movements in South Korea and Japan reveals how critical junctures in regime history shape the tactical repertoires that cause lawyers bring to their interactions with movement actors, and thus also movement tactics. This research advances scholarship on professionals in social movements, cause lawyers as norm entrepreneurs, and legal mobilization in East Asia.
Comparative Political Studies, 2018
How and when do people participate in sustained collective action via the courts? Previous resear... more How and when do people participate in sustained collective action via the courts? Previous research highlights group identity or resources and political opportunities but overlooks civil procedural rules’ effects beyond the courtroom. This article explores how rules regarding privacy shape individuals’ decisions about sustained participation. Fears of exposing one’s identity deter participation, especially in the context of public trials. Yet, a paired comparison of litigation by victims of hepatitis C-tainted blood products in Japan and Korea reveals that court-supervised privacy protections, which were available in Japan but not in Korea, facilitate plaintiffs’ participation inside and outside the courtroom. They ease plaintiff recruitment and enhance claimants’ credibility. Counterintuitively, they also let claimants strategically shed pseudonymity to send a costly signal about their commitment to the cause. Theorizing “pseudonymous participation” as an understudied mode of activ...
Law & Society Review, 2014
Law & Society Review, 2019
Scholars argue that litigation can have positive and negative "radiating" or indirect effects for... more Scholars argue that litigation can have positive and negative "radiating" or indirect effects for social movements, irrespective of formal judicial decisions. They see litigation as a dynamic process with distinctive features yet nonetheless intertwined with advocacy in other forums. Litigation can indirectly shape collective identities, reframe debates, or provide political leverage. However, the mechanisms behind these radiating effects are poorly understood. Through an analysis of lawsuits and related activism by Korean survivors of Japanese actions in the first half of the twentieth century, this article disaggregates the mechanisms behind litigation's productive indirect effects. It theorizes and illustrates mechanisms such as attribution of similarity, brokerage, issue dramatization, political cover, and intergroup discussions. These mechanisms help us understand how litigants obtain litigation's indirect effects and thus also the broader impact of postwar compensation lawsuits in East Asia, despite few judicial victories. The article contributes non-Western and transnational cases to scholarship on litigation's indirect effects. In the past three decades, Koreans have filed dozens of lawsuits in Japanese, Korean, and U.S. courts with various claims related to Japanese colonial rule over the Korean peninsula (1910-1945). Claimants have included Korean victims of forced labor in Japanese factories, sexual slavery for Japanese troops (the "comfort women"), the atomic bombings (hibakusha), leprosy facilities, military conscription, and relatives of such victims. Chinese, Taiwanese, and claimants of other nationalities have filed similar lawsuits. Despite more than a hundred rulings, including more than 25 from top courts, such litigation has yielded few judicial victories for the claimants. Lower court rulings in the plaintiffs' favor were often
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Book by Celeste Arrington
Arrington draws on her extensive fieldwork to illustrate these dynamics through comparisons of the parallel Japanese and South Korean movements of victims of harsh leprosy control policies, blood products tainted by hepatitis C, and North Korean abductions. Her book thereby highlights how citizens in Northeast Asia—a region grappling with how to address Japan’s past wrongs—are leveraging similar processes to hold their own governments accountable for more recent harms. Accidental Activists also reveals the growing power of litigation to promote policy change and greater accountability from decision makers.
Papers by Celeste Arrington
Arrington draws on her extensive fieldwork to illustrate these dynamics through comparisons of the parallel Japanese and South Korean movements of victims of harsh leprosy control policies, blood products tainted by hepatitis C, and North Korean abductions. Her book thereby highlights how citizens in Northeast Asia—a region grappling with how to address Japan’s past wrongs—are leveraging similar processes to hold their own governments accountable for more recent harms. Accidental Activists also reveals the growing power of litigation to promote policy change and greater accountability from decision makers.