Tracing the historical forces that have shaped the contemporary political landscape and ideological terrain in South Korea, Chapter 1 examines the ways in which the “right” and “left” have been constituted and understood. The definitions of ideological and political categories in Western milieus cannot be directly applied to the South Korean context, because the ways in which the left and right are understood are historical and social constructs that vary across time and geography. The unique historical and geopolitical context of the Korean peninsula – the division of the two Koreas and the Korean War, followed by three decades of authoritarianism – made anticommunism hegemonic and produced an extremely limited ideological setting for South Korean politics. This chapter argues that, due to the conservative hegemony and the right-leaning political environment in South Korea, the far right has been understood as representing mainstream conservatism, and centrists have been cast as the radical left. Thus, the distinction between the far right and mainstream conservativism within the right is blurred in South Korea.