Thai Radical Discourse

Thai Radical Discourse PDF Author: Craig J. Reynolds
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501718886
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 191

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Book Description
Using Jit Poumisak's The Real Face of Thai Feudalism Today (1957), Reynolds both rewrites Thai history and critiques relevant historiography. Discussing imperialism, feudalism, and the nature of power, Reynolds argues that comparisons between European and Thai premodern societies reveal Thai social formations to be "historical, contingent, and temporally bounded."

Thai Radical Discourse

Thai Radical Discourse PDF Author: Craig J. Reynolds
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501718886
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 191

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Book Description
Using Jit Poumisak's The Real Face of Thai Feudalism Today (1957), Reynolds both rewrites Thai history and critiques relevant historiography. Discussing imperialism, feudalism, and the nature of power, Reynolds argues that comparisons between European and Thai premodern societies reveal Thai social formations to be "historical, contingent, and temporally bounded."

Radical Thought, Thai Mind

Radical Thought, Thai Mind PDF Author: Paul Wedel
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781792758249
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 336

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Book Description
Radical Thought, Thai Mind covers nearly 200 years of Thai political history, beginning with the early poets who rebelled against class privilege and authoritarian rule in Siam. It describes the defeat of the radicals who overthrew the traditional monarchy in 1932 and the efforts of leftist thinkers to combat the traditional mindset of deference to authority left by centuries of life under a system of class privilege. It describes the thinkers who sought to integrate Marxism and Buddhism and undermine royalist history and literature. Based on interviews with leading activists, the book describes the student-led uprising against military dictators in the 1970s, the right-wing violence against them and the collapse of their alliance with the Communist Party of Thailand. More recent interviews analyze the splits in the radical movement that led to the political violence of 1992 and set the stage for a decade of unrest starting in 2004.The new, completely revised edition of Radical Thought, Thai Mind includes much recent scholarship on the history of Thai radicalism, but it is written for the general reader. Sources are well documented, but the focus is on telling the story of the development of Thai radical political thinking and the personal stories of the leading thinkers. Literature research is combined with extensive interviews with key thinkers - from both the generation of the 1970s and the radical leaders of the 21st century. It provides a lively account of the ideological conflicts that continue to afflict Thailand.

Seditious Histories

Seditious Histories PDF Author: Craig J. Reynolds
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 392

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Book Description
This collection of eleven essays by senior Asianist Craig Reynolds features debates about meaning in Southeast Asian and Thai history. He explores themes that have hitherto been treated superficially in Thai historical writing, including Siam’s semicolonialism in the late nineteenth century, the concepts of militarism and masculinity, collective memory and dynastic succession, the relationship of manual knowledge to ethnoscience, and the dialectics of globalization. Other more familiar topics under Reynolds’s microscope, treated with new material and approaches, include cultural nationalism and religious history.

Commodifying Marxism

Commodifying Marxism PDF Author: Kasīan Tēchaphīra
Publisher: ISBS
ISBN: 9781876843984
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 412

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Book Description
In this study of the formation of modern Thai radical culture, Tejapira reveals a process of cultural and political interaction which results in a mutual transformation of exogenous Marxism/communism and indigenous Thai culture. The study draws on data from a number of primary and secondary sources, including memoirs from and interviews with leftist intellectuals, contemporary radical publications, and a number of unpublished Masters' dissertations in the Thai language. The book traces the introduction of Sino-Vietnamese Marxism/communism into Siam during the absolute monarchy in the late 1920s until the late 1950s when, under the military regime, it emerges as a particularly Thai cultural phenomenon. The exogenous ethnic character of the early Siamese communist movement made it an easy target for the conservative nationalist/royalist ideology of Thai-ness and socialism had been pre-judged as utopian even before its actual arrival in Thailand. After the fall of the absolute monarchy in 1932, both the lookjin communists (lookjin refers to Thai-born people of Chinese descent) and the left-wing People's Party tried separately to overcome this double-layered cultural resistance to radical ideas, but with only partial success. But the Japanese invasion and the resultant Phibun-Japanese alliance during the Second World War provided both groups with an opportunity to create a popular underground resistance movement and to earn a legitimate and legal foothold in the Thai policy after the War. Marxism/communism entered the post-war Thai cultural market in the form of printed commodities, whose demand, supply and reproduction ebbed and flowed with the volatile and violent tide of international and domestic events during the subsequent decade. More specifically, it was paradoxically diffused but dissolved by capitalist publishing, censored yet promoted by anti-communist authoritarian regimes, and confined to but freed in prisons. Through this process emerged a substantial group of (primarily) ethnic Thai radical intellectuals who proceeded to translate Marxism/communism into the Thai language and rhyming verse.

Civil Society in Southeast Asia

Civil Society in Southeast Asia PDF Author: Lee Hock Guan
Publisher: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies
ISBN: 9789812302588
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 296

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Book Description
What is the relevance of civil society to people empowerment, effective governance, and deepening democracy? This book addresses this question by examining the activities and public participation of non-governmental organizations (NGOs) in the areas of religion, ethnicity, gender and the environment. Examples are taken from Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam. State regimes' attempts to co-opt the concept or reject it as alien to "Asian values" have apparently not turned out as expected. This is evident from the fact that many Southeast Asian citizens are inspired by the civil society concept and now engage in public discourse and participation. The experience of civil society in Southeast Asia shows that its impact -- or lack of impact -- on democratization and democracy depends on a variety of factors not only within civil society itself, but also within the state.

Radicalising Thailand

Radicalising Thailand PDF Author: Ji Ungpakorn
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Radicalism
Languages : en
Pages : 358

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Book Description


Democracy and National Identity in Thailand

Democracy and National Identity in Thailand PDF Author: Michael Kelly Connors
Publisher: Psychology Press
ISBN: 0415272300
Category : Democracy
Languages : en
Pages : 286

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Book Description
"The book will be fascinating reading for Southeast Asia specialists, and researchers on democratization, national identity and the politics of Thailand."--BOOK JACKET.

Revolution Interrupted

Revolution Interrupted PDF Author: Tyrell Haberkorn
Publisher: Univ of Wisconsin Press
ISBN: 0299281833
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 254

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Book Description
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 Unhinged

Thailand Unhinged PDF Author: Federico Ferrara
Publisher: Equinox Publishing
ISBN: 9793780762
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 155

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Book Description
"Thailand Unhinged: Unraveling the Myth of a Thai-Style Democracy" offers a trenchant analysis of Thai politics and society over the tumultuous years that followed the ouster of former Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra. Thailand's ongoing political crisis is explained through the prism of the country's painful post-absolutist history - a history marred by the systematic sabotage of any meaningful democratic development, the routine hijacking of democratic institutions, and the continued suffocation of the Thai people's democratic aspirations orchestrated by an unelected ruling class in an increasingly desperate attempt to hold on to its power. The book includes scathing critiques of both Thaksin's administration as well as the military-backed government that came to power in late 2008, following the week-long siege of the country's busiest airports staged by the "yellow shirts" of the People's Alliance for Democracy. The essays are written in a provocative, confrontational style - making "Thailand Unhinged" a decidedly unconventional mix of academic scholarship, literary journalism, and radical pamphleteering. About the Author FEDERICO FERRARA (PhD, Harvard University) works as Assistant Professor of Political Science at the National University of Singapore. He will be joining the City University of Hong Kong's Department of Asian and International Studies in 2010.

Thailand

Thailand PDF Author: Charnvit Kasetsiri
Publisher: ISEAS-Yusof Ishak Institute
ISBN: 9815011251
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 264

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Book Description
“As a historian, Charnvit Kasetsiri is not satisfied simply to have found an instructive angle from which to explore the mysteries in a modern experimental monarchy. His keen sense of time has filled his narrative with insights that only a few people could have identified. To me, that is a mark of one with a fine sense of what the past can mean. I thank him for the chance to see this mature and thoughtful Charnvit at work and commend this book to everyone who wants to understand Thailand better.” -- Wang Gungwu, National University of Singapore “Charnvit makes clear in the final pages of Thailand: A Struggle for the Nation that he is not very sanguine about the country’s future. During Thailand’s democratic spring in 1974, the Thai constitution was changed to allow female succession. This apparent loosening of male prerogative had no effect on the reign change in 2016 when the designated male heir, Prince Vajiralongkorn, succeeded without challenge to become the tenth Bangkok king. Communism, long gone as the spectre that once haunted Thailand’s political order, has been replaced by another. The spectre now haunting Thailand is authoritarianism.” -- Craig J. Reynolds, Australian National University