A Self-Coup Too Early? - The Unsuccessful Presidential Coup D’etat in South Korea

The brief declaration of martial law and disbanding of the national legislature by President Yoon Suk Yeol in South Korea (ROK) on the 3rd of December 2024 shocked the world. It was effectively an attempt at a coup (using military force) in an advanced western-style democracy, which was only stopped by institutional pushback and rather slow proceedings of the military. Yet, polarisation of politics and partisan networks in the security sector enabled the launch of it in the first place. These events exposed the ways partisan security networks and polarised elites can undermine even such wealthy and well-institutionalised democracies as South Korea in 2024. This paper deals with the issue of the failed coup attempt in ROK in the prism of the theories of self-coup, political culture, and civil-military relations. The main aims of this text are to determine whether the undertaking from December 2024 can be considered as a failed self-coup, and examine how the launch and outcome of the action was affected by the current state of political culture and civil-military relations in South Korea. In order to do so, this text reviews the development of the events of declaring martial law and attempting to occupy the parliament in detail from Korean-language sources (including the context of South Korean politics in the months preceding the event itself), in light of the key conceptual components of a self-coup (using the approach by D. Pion-Berlin and R. Goetze) and theories of civil-military relations and political culture.