Revolution Interrupted

Revolution Interrupted
Author: Tyrell Haberkorn
Publisher: Univ of Wisconsin Press
Total Pages: 254
Release: 2011-04-14
Genre: History
ISBN: 0299281833

In October 1973 a mass movement forced Thailand’s prime minister to step down and leave the country, ending nearly forty years of dictatorship. Three years later, in a brutal reassertion of authoritarian rule, Thai state and para-state forces quashed a demonstration at Thammasat University in Bangkok. In Revolution Interrupted, Tyrell Haberkorn focuses on this period when political activism briefly opened up the possibility for meaningful social change. Tenant farmers and their student allies fomented revolution, she shows, not by picking up guns but by invoking laws—laws that the Thai state ultimately proved unwilling to enforce. In choosing the law as their tool to fight unjust tenancy practices, farmers and students departed from the tactics of their ancestors and from the insurgent methods of the Communist Party of Thailand. To first imagine and then create a more just future, they drew on their own lived experience and the writings of Thai Marxian radicals of an earlier generation, as well as New Left, socialist, and other progressive thinkers from around the world. Yet their efforts were quickly met with harassment, intimidation, and assassinations of farmer leaders. More than thirty years later, the assassins remain unnamed. Drawing on hundreds of newspaper articles, cremation volumes, activist and state documents, and oral histories, Haberkorn reveals the ways in which the established order was undone and then reconsolidated. Examining this turbulent period through a new optic—interrupted revolution—she shows how the still unnameable violence continues to constrict political opportunity and to silence dissent in present-day Thailand.

Thailand

Thailand
Author: Christine Gray
Publisher:
Total Pages:
Release: 19??
Genre: Buddhism and politics
ISBN:

Thailand’s Political Peasants

Thailand’s Political Peasants
Author: Andrew Walker
Publisher: University of Wisconsin Pres
Total Pages: 294
Release: 2012-08-06
Genre: History
ISBN: 0299288234

When a populist movement elected Thaksin Shinawatra as prime minister of Thailand in 2001, many of the country’s urban elite dismissed the outcome as just another symptom of rural corruption, a traditional patronage system dominated by local strongmen pressuring their neighbors through political bullying and vote-buying. In Thailand’s Political Peasants, however, Andrew Walker argues that the emergence of an entirely new socioeconomic dynamic has dramatically changed the relations of Thai peasants with the state, making them a political force to be reckoned with. Whereas their ancestors focused on subsistence, this generation of middle-income peasants seeks productive relationships with sources of state power, produces cash crops, and derives additional income through non-agricultural work. In the increasingly decentralized, disaggregated country, rural villagers and farmers have themselves become entrepreneurs and agents of the state at the local level, while the state has changed from an extractor of taxes to a supplier of subsidies and a patron of development projects. Thailand’s Political Peasants provides an original, provocative analysis that encourages an ethnographic rethinking of rural politics in rapidly developing countries. Drawing on six years of fieldwork in Ban Tiam, a rural village in northern Thailand, Walker shows how analyses of peasant politics that focus primarily on rebellion, resistance, and evasion are becoming less useful for understanding emergent forms of political society.

Thailand, which Way in the 1970s?

Thailand, which Way in the 1970s?
Author: John P. Byrne
Publisher:
Total Pages: 66
Release: 1971
Genre: Communism
ISBN:

For the past two decades the United States has supported Thailand's efforts to develop a progressive and modern society. As the crisis in Indochina evolved during the 1960s, US military forces were deployed to Thailand both to support Thai efforts to resist subversion and insurgency, and to support combat operations in the Indochina nations. The Nixon Doctrine has declared a US intent to reduce the US presence in Asia and to rely more heavily upon the resources of allies for internal stability operations in the future. This report examines Thailand's progress during the 1960s and the prognosis for continued independence and development during the 1970s. (Modified author abstract).

A History of Thailand

A History of Thailand
Author: Christopher John Baker
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 345
Release: 2014-05-30
Genre: History
ISBN: 1107420210

A History of Thailand offers a lively and accessible account of Thailand's political, economic, social and cultural history. This book explores how a world of mandarin nobles and unfree peasants was transformed and examines how the monarchy managed the foundation of a new nation-state at the turn of the twentieth century. The authors capture the clashes between various groups in their attempts to take control of the nation-state in the twentieth century. They track Thailand's economic changes through an economic boom, globalisation and the evolution of mass society. This edition sheds light on Thailand's recent political, social and economic developments, covering the coup of 2006, the violent street politics of May 2010, and the landmark election of 2011 and its aftermath. It shows how in Thailand today, the monarchy, the military, business and new mass movements are players in a complex conflict over the nature and future of the country's democracy.