Human Rights in Thailand 9780812295108

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Human Rights in Thailand

PENNSYLVANIA STUDIES IN HUMAN RIGHTS Bert B. Lockwood, Jr., Series Editor A complete list of books in the series is available from the publisher.

HUMAN RIGHTS IN THAILAND

Don F. Selby

U N I V E R S I T Y O F P E N N S Y LVA N I A P R E S S PHIL ADELPHIA

Copyright © 2018 University of Pennsylvania Press All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations used for purposes of review or scholarly citation, none of this book may be reproduced in any form by any means without written permission from the publisher. Published by University of Pennsylvania Press Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104-4112 upenn.edu/pennpress Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper 1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Selby, Don, author. Title: Human rights in Thailand / Don F. Selby. Other titles: Pennsylvania studies in human rights. Description: 1st edition. | Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, [2018] | Series: Pennsylvania studies in human rights | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2017047292 | ISBN 9780812250220 (hardcover: alk. paper) Subjects: LCSH: Human rights—Social aspects—Thailand. Classification: LCC JC599.T5 S37 2018 | DDC 323.09593—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017047292

For Mailan

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Contents

List of Abbreviations

ix

Timeline of Events

xi

Introduction. Emerging Human Rights in Thailand

1

Chapter 1. Experimenting with Fate

15

Chapter 2. Political Struggle and Human Rights

40

Chapter 3. Patronage, Face, Vulnerability: Articulations of Human Rights

67

Chapter 4. “Kat Mai Ploi”: Motherhood and Pursuits of Justice

97

Chapter 5. The Return of Coup Politics

125

Conclusion

141

Appendix 1

147

Appendix 2

149

Notes Bibliography Index Acknowledgments

153 185 223 233

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List of Abbreviations

CPT HSRO IOM ISOC LPN LST MAP MoPH NCPO NHRC NPKC ONHRC OTO PAD TACDB TAG UDD

Communist Party of Thailand Health System Reform Organization International Organization for Migration Internal Security Operations Command Labor Rights Promotion Network Law Society of Thailand Medical Assistance Programs Ministry of Public Health National Council for Peace and Order National Human Rights Commission of Thailand National Peace Keeping Council Office of the National Human Rights Commission of Thailand Office of the Ombudsman People’s Alliance for Democracy Thai Action Committee for Democracy in Burma Tsunami Action Group United Front for Democracy Against Dictatorship

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Timeline of Events

This timeline identifies moments in Thailand’s political history important to the emergence of human rights in the late s and early s. Its purpose is to help orient the reader for the study that follows, rather than to provide an exhaustive history of Thai politics.  Student demonstrations in Bangkok against the military government force “The Three Tyrants,” Thanom Kittikachorn, Phraphat Charusatien, and Narong Kittikachorn, into exile, and democratic elections are restored.  Students protest the return of Thanom and Phraphat, but the military and paramilitary groups violently suppress them and reinstall a military government. – General Prem Tinsulanonda becomes prime minister and issues an executive order offering amnesty to the Communist Party of Thailand (CPT) fighters, and the CPT sees massive defections, bringing armed struggle to an end.  – May: “Black May.” General Suchinda Kraprayoon deploys military to disperse up to , demonstrators in Bangkok demanding a return to electoral democracy after a  coup overthrowing Chatichai Choonhavan’s elected government. Fifty-two officially confirmed dead.  September: Chuan Leekpai elected prime minister.

xii

Timeline of Events

  October: The “People’s Constitution” replaces the  constitution drafted by the Suchinda regime. Section () required the passing of an organic law to establish the National Human Rights Commission within two years.  National Human Rights Commission (NHRC) Act passes, and the process of selecting commissioners begins.  January: Thaksin Shinawatra becomes prime minister when Thai Rak Thai wins the election. July: NHRC formally constituted.  February: Thaksin Shinawatra completes electoral term and wins reelection.   February: People’s Alliance for Democracy (PAD, or Yellow Shirts) forms, alleging Thaksin’s conflict of interest upon the Shinawatra family’s selling its majority holding in the telecommunications company Shin Corp. April: Thaksin Shinawatra calls snap election, which the Democrat Party boycotts. Thai Rak Thai wins a majority. Thaksin resigns within two days of victory, continuing as Caretaker Prime Minister until parliament reconvenes. The Constitutional Court declares the elections invalid, calling for new elections in October.  September: Coup d’état, led by General Sonthi Boonyaratglin while Thaksin addresses the United Nations Council on Foreign Relations in New York; martial law declared. “Red Shirts” (initially the Democratic Alliance Against Dictatorship but soon renamed the United Front for Democracy Against Dictatorship [UDD]) begin to organize.

Timeline of Events

xiii

 October: General Surayud Chulanont appointed prime minister (by the Council of National Security, previously the Council for Democratic Reform, which carried out the coup). Promulgation of interim constitution (providing immunity for coup makers).   May: Thai Rak Thai dissolved by the Constitutional Tribunal for violation of election laws in .  August: New constitution ratified by national referendum.  December: Elections won by Samak Sundaravej of the People’s Power Party (PPP), widely taken to be a proxy for Thaksin, who remained in selfimposed exile.  September: “Yellow Shirt” (PAD) protestors occupy Government House in Bangkok, demanding Samak’s resignation. Constitutional Court dismisses Samak for conflict of interest (after hosting two cooking shows while in office). Parliament chooses Somchai Wongsawat (of PPP) as prime minister.  September: Pheua Thai (generally seen as the third iteration of Thai Rak Thai) formed in anticipation of the outcome of the Constitutional Court’s investigation of the PPP. Yellow Shirt protests continue.  October: Thaksin tried in absentia and found guilty by the Supreme Court on two counts of corruption over land deal.  November– December: Yellow Shirts occupy Bangkok’s Suvarnabhumi Airport.  December: PPP dissolved by the Constitutional Court for electoral fraud; Somchai loses premiership.  December: The majority of former PPP Minsters of Parliament join Pheua Thai, but many join a coalition with the opposition Democrat Party, which then forms the government.  December: Abhisit Vejjajiva of the Democrat Party becomes prime minister.

xiv

Timeline of Events

 March–April: Red Shirts (UDD) protest Democrat government economic policies. Prime Minister Abhisit brings troops to Bangkok to break up Red Shirt protests; over  injured. June: Yellow Shirt leadership creates the New Politics Party. December: Roughly , Red Shirts demonstrate in Bangkok, demanding new elections.  March–May: Red Shirts occupy and paralyze central Bangkok, demanding Abhisit’s resignation and new elections. Military attacks break up the demonstrations, leaving ninety-one dead.   July: Pheua Thai, led by Thaksin’s sister Yingluck Shinawatra. The Democrat Party resumes the role of opposition. October: Controversial rice subsidy scheme guarantees a price for farmers, causing a spike in government debt and rice prices.  June: Responding to a proposed reconciliation bill (granting amnesty to military personnel who injured or killed demonstrators and to Thaksin for his corruption conviction), Yellow Shirts blockade parliament to stall debate on the bill. November: Massive Yellow Shirt protests call for Yingluck’s resignation.  April: The Constitutional Court prevents the Pheua Thai government from amending the  constitution. November: Yellow Shirts protest amnesty bill that would allow Thaksin to return without facing imprisonment.

Timeline of Events

xv

December: Responding to opposition pressure, Prime Minister Yingluck calls early elections for February .  February: Constitutional Court invalidates election results over opposition disruption of voting in several dozen constituencies.  May: The Constitutional Court invalidates Yingluck’s ministerial status for a  transfer of the secretary-general of the National Security Council that violated the constitution. Deputy Prime Minister Niwattumrong Boonsongpaisan assumes leadership of the caretaker government until new elections, scheduled for July .  May: General Prayut Chan-Ocha imposes martial law and declares himself head of the newly created Peace and Order Maintaining Command.  May: General Prayut leads successful coup.  July: King Bhumibol Adulyadej assents to the junta’s interim constitution, which grants coup leaders amnesty for the coup.  August: Prayut formally appointed prime minister.  March–April: Martial law lifted.  Draft constitution ratified by referendum on August , providing for a Senate fully appointed by the National Council for Peace and Order, with veto powers over the elected House of Representatives on constitutional amendments; elections postponed until .

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Introduction

Emerging Human Rights in Thailand

After the Thai state violently suppressed a massive prodemocracy protest— itself a response to the metronomic return of military governance just months earlier—in “Black May,” , an unprecedented period arose in Thailand. The military, shamed and chagrined, withdrew from political life, while the progressive spirit inspiring the democracy movement had freer rein than, perhaps, ever in Thailand’s history, and further, it gained an institutional presence unseen previously. Beginning with the Democracy Development Committee, which, through public hearings chaired by Dr. Prawase Wasi, solicited input across Thai society for the drafting of a new constitution, through to the promulgation of the  “People’s Constitution,” the inclusive, progressivist spirit became constitutionally entrenched (Harding and Leyland , ; Kitchana , ). Through the  constitution, it also found institutional expression in independent agencies like the Constitutional Court and the National Human Rights Commission of Thailand (NHRC). “Thailand’s most democratic constitution” (Harding and Leyland , ) was also the first under which an elected prime minister, Thaksin Shinawatra, completed his term, to say nothing of standing for and winning immediate reelection. Indeed, as prime minister, Thaksin initiated policies that were clear violations of human rights—like his war on drugs that led to thousands of extra-judicial executions—the NHRC was unhesitating in publishing “a damning report of the government’s record” (McCargo and Ukrist , ). This unprecedented moment offered the unique opportunity in which human rights could grow, for the first time, on a national scale in Thailand. Based on fieldwork during this singular moment, shortly after the July  appointment of the first tranche of NHRC commissioners and running

2

Introduction

to , several months before the coup that would oust Prime Minister Thaksin, this book occupies itself with the question of how human rights emerged in Thailand during this period. As the descriptive project it undertakes aims to show, this question is inextricably entangled with the question of why this moment was ripe for the emergence of human rights on a national and constitutional scale. That is, there were egalitarian and, in some ways, nonconformist social, political, and moral resources that had been developing for some time, a generation at least, available to human rights advocates after Bloody May. Drawing on these resources—whether Buddhist scholarship, the egalitarian student movements of the s, everyday practices of face-work and observances of social stratification and rank, or the moral force of motherhood—simultaneously afforded human rights a tint of familiarity that they otherwise lacked for most Thai, while altering the resources on which they drew in novel ways (orienting Buddhism to this-worldly concerns, recuperating leftist politics, inverting power and vulnerability, finding transgressive potential in motherhood).

Human Rights as an Anthropological Object Attending to the entanglement of human rights with other social, political, and moral forms helps, rather than hinders, thinking of human rights as an anthropological object. It clarifies the understandings, practices, and struggles around human rights that are particular to Thailand and specifies how they relate to one another in contemporary Thailand, albeit with an appreciation of their historical depth. We can see the same sort of thing in the ways that E. E. Evans-Pritchard describes political systems of the Nuer not as isolated social phenomena but as knit into Nuer kinship structures and economy (Evans-Pritchard ); or in Pamela Reynolds’s discussion of child labor not as separable from other aspects of Tongan sociality but as coherent only with an understanding of its relation to the specificities of gender, kinship, and economy in the Zambezi Valley (P. Reynolds ); or how Clifford Geertz depicts political theatricality in Bali in relation to kinship, patron-client relations, and irrigation practices (Geertz ). In other words, human rights become visible as an anthropological object through interconnections with other aspects of sociality in Thailand. This does not produce a picture of human rights that matches many of the views that dominate human rights debates. It does not accommodate the

Emerging Human Rights in Thailand

3

sort of cultural relativism visible in the Asian Values argument (see De Bary ; Falk ; Ghai ; Kent ; Mahbubani ) because it finds that Thai human rights advocates articulate human rights principles as consonant with dearly held values like Buddhist ethics. This is not the rejection of human rights (as Western impositions inappropriate to Asian conditions) that one finds in the Asian Values argument. Nor does the picture align with the more widespread view that human rights are necessarily Western, liberal, and freestanding and imply societal convergence on values (sometimes conceptualized as socialization into human rights values) (see, for example, Donnelly , , ; Howard ; Howard and Donnelly ; on socialization specifically, see Risse et al. , ; on the interplay of coincidence and coercion as spreading human rights values, see Hafner-Burton ; for an argument in favor of recuperating Enlightenment individualism in human rights, see Ignatieff a). Shifts dating to the early s in anthropological work emphasize local renderings of global human rights and related legal mechanisms, for example, as a process of casting human rights in the vernacular (Merry b, ) or as structuring or textualizing local disputes, violations, and subjectivities (Ross , a, b; R. A. Wilson , ). These anthropological views constitute an innovation in anthropology’s range of approaches to human rights and helpfully push into the foreground the active reception of global human rights discourses and instruments, disclaiming passive adoptions of a ready-made package of moral and political principles, but they still do not quite capture the way that human rights emerged in Thailand. We might think of them, loosely, as focusing on human rights as an anthropological subject: in large part, they address the structuring influence human rights have on disputes and social actors’ maneuvering with and within such structuring. In this way, human rights appear as a subject, acting on social actors, their conflicts, and the norms and practices for adjudicating conflicts or violations. One important strand of this scholarship, the emphasis on translation or vernacularization of human rights discourse, has leapt anthropology’s disciplinary borders to become increasingly pervasive in the broader human rights scholarship. Seyla Benhabib, for example, employs vernacularization as the hinge connecting democracy and human rights, as well as allowing for resistance to elite discourses (Benhabib ). Christopher McCrudden situates the vernacular differently, finding dignity to perform a vernacularizing function with respect not to the content of human rights but with methods of

4

Introduction

their interpretation and adjudication (McCrudden ). Gerard Hauser engages with Michael Ignatieff ’s work as a formulation of human rights not as a set of moral absolutes but as a discourse that offers a moral vernacular providing for “minimal agreement on the necessary conditions for a life worth living” (Hauser , ). Hauser extends this analysis to distinguish between thin and thick vernaculars of human rights, the former circulating in official public spheres, the latter deployed by victims of human rights violations and their advocates (). One could continue to trace the path of vernacular and translated human rights into media studies and communication studies (Gregory ; Brooten , ). There is, then, a widespread adoption of a language-centered, top-down understanding of human rights (even where language may include visual languages, as with Gregory), in which human rights discourses undergo translation or vernacularization. By comparison, in what follows, I place greater emphasis on human rights as an anthropological object in that I focus on what social actors do to and with human rights (for example, articulating them with and through Buddhism or harnessing them to the cultural authority of motherhood) and offer an ethnographic description of this work by social actors. I argue that what gave emergent human rights in Thailand their shape, force, and trajectories are the ways that advocates engage, contest, or rework (a) debates around Buddhism in its relationship to rule and social structure, (b) political struggle in relation to a narrative of Thai democracy that disavows egalitarian movements, and (c) regimes of social stratification and face-saving practices. In these ways, human rights emerge in Thailand less as global-local translation and more as a matter of negotiation within everyday forms of sociality, morality, and politics, albeit in relation to nebulous concepts and institutions (like the NHRC), with mysterious rather than transparent powers. Such (re)working is also what has allowed human rights to take on meanings as they articulate with and through other political, religious, and social discourses. I also show, however, that at moments when particular individuals—two mothers caught in land disputes with government bodies—found their claims to rights or entitlements went ignored or unheard, they explored nondiscursive ways to marshal the force of human rights, like gestural expressions of maternal dismay, perseverance, and authority. We cannot, therefore, model the emergence of human rights in Thailand solely on language or meaning but must use other descriptive vocabularies.

Emerging Human Rights in Thailand

5

Fieldwork The fieldwork supporting these arguments began in the summer of , during which time I started making contact with the NHRC and the Office of the National Human Rights Commission (ONHRC, the bureaucracy, headed by the ONHRC secretary, that supports the NHRC). In the summer of , I continued research at the NHRC and ONHRC, interviewing commissioners, accompanying staff to meetings in which they deliberated cases and to on-site visits in cases under investigation, and engaging in interviews and informal conversation with them at work or, as an example, when we took meals together. I extended this research for roughly six months in , at which time I also interviewed and attended events with former NHRC employees and several figures who worked in closely related fields, like health reform, public health initiatives, women’s rights, and a university human rights program. On the whole, as I will describe in a moment, this fieldwork concerned the struggles of the NHRC and other human rights advocates to define and disseminate human rights principles and to advocate human rights either on a preventive basis (to avoid the occurrence of violations in areas with a high potential for abuse, like prisons) or on a reactive basis, assisting those who had suffered violations. At the end of , the tsunami that smashed into the Andaman coast (to say nothing of the devastation in Aceh, Indonesia, and Sri Lanka, among other places) drove my research in unanticipated directions. Accompanying lawyers associated with the NHRC, I traveled to three southern provinces badly damaged by the tsunami: Ranong, Phang-nga, and Phuket. There, the lawyers embarked on a number of projects devoted to protecting Burmese migrant workers affected directly or indirectly by the disaster. I traveled with the lawyers’ team to the Andaman provinces through August , as they worked on a DNA testing facility for Burmese who had lost family to the tsunami, rights education programs for foreign migrants, a collaborative rights education project with a local prison holding foreign migrants, anti– human trafficking interventions, and a number of individual cases of rights violations. This portion of the fieldwork also introduced me to antitrafficking and Burmese rights NGOs with which the lawyers worked in Bangkok and Mahachai (south of Bangkok), whose work dovetailed with the projects in Ranong, Phang-nga, and Phuket. In all of their work, the NHRC is either a direct or indirect participant, and so a preliminary sketch of the work it did during its first term will do important orienting work at this point.

6

Introduction

National Human Rights Commission of Thailand The commission consisted of eleven members appointed by the senate (reduced to seven by later constitutions) and is an autonomous body funded by the state and supported by the ONHRC. The ONHRC grappled with a proliferation of subcommissions that dominated their working days and a dramatic growth in cases between  and  (see Tables  and , below). A product of the  “People’s Constitution” (itself stemming from the  democracy uprising), the  National Human Rights Commission Act is the NHRC’s governing document. The act instructed the Senate to appoint a selection committee of twenty-seven members (with legal, political, and/or NGO credentials), who chose twenty-two candidates. The Senate selected the first eleven commissioners from these twenty-two candidates and included five women, six men: NGO activists, academics, lawyers, an educationalist, and a journalist, giving the NHRC a broad and relevant range of expertise (Harding and Leyland , ). We can see a slow, steady growth of complaints to the NHRC in the first full year of the operation, then a doubling, from January to February of , with sustained, high levels in  and . Further, while one notes a general stability from  to  in the distribution of complaints as sorted by the type of accused party, there are massive changes in two categories: state project/policy, law, and government officer. Cases falling into one category could easily fall into the other, and it is not clear that the redistribution represents a shift in the type of violators from one year to the next or differences in how cases were sorted. The lack of data from  on cases by type of violation is especially regrettable here, as one notes that in , the proportion of cases by state project/policy, law, and police combined is almost exactly equal to the largest proportion of cases by violation, due process. A correspondence seems plausible, but with no way to track it from year to year, it is hard to arrive at any conclusion with confidence. Ultimately, though, what these data reveal is that, from its infancy, the NHRC served a significant and growing population. This trend continues, the cumulative average of annual cases only leveling off in the low s after  (see Table ; the NHRC source for Table  counts cases by budget year, from October of one year through the end of September the following year, accounting for the discrepancy with Table , which counts from January through December).

Emerging Human Rights in Thailand

7

NHRC Data 2002–2004 Figure  shows the decreasing fluctuation in the number of cases approaching the present, remaining in the mid to low s over the last four years. This leveling off of an annual caseload is the achievement of a degree of endorsement by the Thai populace, of normality (not least in the sense of embodying or reflecting norms). It shows the NHRC as a reasonably, reliably accepted venue for leveling complaints of violation. That this level of acceptance has wavered only slightly through regime changes, coups, and the appointment of new commissioners as term limits arrived speaks to the institutional approbation and permanence enjoyed by the NHRC. The process of filing a complaint has changed somewhat since the foundation of the NHRC, when it was located at  Phayathai Road, in the heart of Bangkok, a short walk from two Skytrain stations (the elevated metro system), down the road from the National Stadium and several major shopping malls. The Anti–Money Laundering Office remains at that address, but the NHRC has moved to a less accessible government complex near Don Muang Airport, in the northern extremity of Bangkok, well past the last of the Skytrain or subway stops. In the early s, as Table  shows, one could file a petition by phone, mail, email, or in person (the latter of which was greatly facilitated by the NHRC’s location). In Rattana Sajjathep’s case, which I

Table 1. Complaints Received (by month/year) Month/Year







January February March April May June July August September October November December Total

            

            

            

Table 2. Complaints by Region in 2003 Region Bangkok Central Eastern Upper northeast Lower northeast Upper north Lower north Western Upper south Lower south

Proportion . . . . . . . . . .

Table 3. Complaints by Violation in 2003 Violation

Proportion

Foreigner/alien citizenship Assets/property Health/environment Assembly Labor rights Youth/education Family Political rights Freedom of communication Disability Dwelling Due process Other

. . . . . . . . . . . . .

Table 4. Complaints by Accused, by Percent Type





State project/policy, law Police Military Administration/locality Physician Teacher Government officer Employer Private individuals Business Other

. . . . . . . . . . .

. . . . . . . . . . .

Table 5. Complaints Received (by delivery method) Proportion Type





Letter Phone Email In person Raised by NHRC Private organization/interest requesting mediation

 . . . . .

. . . . . .

Sources: คณะกรรมการสิทธิมนุษยชนแห่งชาติ (, , ); (NHRC Annual Reports, –)

Table 6. Annual Cases from 1 October to 30 September Year Average              

No. of Cases ( October– September)

Cumulative

             

             

Source: http://www.nhrc.or.th/NHRCT-Work/Statistical-information/ Statistical-information-on-complaints/Yearly-(-Now).aspx

10

Introduction

Figure . Annual NHRC petitions. Source: http://www.nhrc.or.th/NHRCT -Work/Statistical-information/Statistical-information-on-complaints/Yearly -(-Now).aspx.

discuss in Chapter , she approached the NHRC in person to lodge her complaint. An ONHRC staff member received her complaint and, as they do with complaints received through any of the other means, generated a report. After the preliminary report is ready, a small working group (typically four or five staff members in the cases I observed directly) discusses the nature and merits of the complaint, deciding how to categorize it (that is, as a violation of a particular human right), and who the stakeholders are (as aggrieved parties—in Chapter , we will see that entire families may be included as co-petitioners even though only a single member of the family files the complaint—and as rights violators). The working group would draft a report that the NHRC could present to the National Assembly, use to urge the parties into mediation, or provide a paper trail tracking a case as it continues to unfold (often in close contact with the party who filed the petition). As we will see in Chapter , however, the NHRC can undertake investigations unilaterally (without a petition filed from outside) and/or in concert with independent organizations (like the Law Society of Thailand). Currently, the NHRC website also offers a hotline and a link with a template for online

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11

complaints but has no dedicated address for mail-in filing. Despite its increased inaccessibility by public transit and by mail, Table  and Figure  show that the public continued to file petitions in high numbers, indicating the sustained relevance of the NHRC to the Thai public, even in times of political upheaval. The existence of the NHRC is interesting in its own right, emblematic as it is of its moment in Thailand’s political history. What I explore in this book, however, is the way that efforts to establish what human rights are and what they mean, as well as how to disseminate them, advocate for them, and protect them—work importantly but not exclusively done at the NHRC—are also ways of exploring and transfiguring everyday social forms and conventions. Experiments aimed at articulating human rights with and through ordinary morality and sociality (by discovering them in Buddhism; employing conventions of face-work, social status, and rank in their pursuit; or recovering political arguments for an egalitarian society) give human rights in Thailand their particularity while also introducing a turn in morality, sociality, and politics. I explore these themes throughout the chapters of this book.

Chapters Probably the single most influential nexus of legitimacy in Thai politics is the point where Buddhism and power meet. Chapter  focuses on the way that Buddhism figures in the formulation, defense, and deployment of human rights, both overtly (in the speech and writing of commissioners) and implicitly (as organizing principles in the practice of human rights advocacy). Casting human rights as Buddhist involves, I argue, engagement with ongoing debates on Buddhism and this-worldly action, promoting a specifically egalitarian view of Buddhism that draws on the scholarship and following of the late monk Buddhadasa Bhikkhu (who prioritizes nibbana over kamma). On one level, this scholarship offers human rights advocates a theoretical foundation, allowing them to present human rights as ordinary (because Buddhist), as possessing a familiarity, once properly understood, that can lift the cloud of confusion many Thai encounter with respect to human rights. On another level, this view of Buddhism subtly implicates itself in the practice of human rights advocates, sometimes in unexpected ways, as this chapter explores through anti–human–trafficking initiatives and projects to educate incarcerated foreign migrants of their rights. While it is by no means given

12

Introduction

that human rights and Buddhism will prove reconcilable (as, for example, Leve [] demonstrates in Nepal), here they provide an opportunity to rework the dominant view of Buddhism and, in doing so, becomes wedded to Buddhism in a defining way. Chapter  moves from the emphasis on Buddhism and politics to examine the influence of democratic struggles on the NHRC’s vision of its mission and its heritage, as well as the specific implications this influence holds for human rights practices. Prodemocracy uprisings and their suppression by military and paramilitary organizations in , , and  are all significant for the NHRC, but not all carry the same importance or approval among Thai more generally. In particular, I look at how the NHRC recuperates and inherits the “failed” protests in , which have largely been expunged from the narrative of Thai democracy (Thongchai ) but that were probably the most conspicuously egalitarian of Thailand’s popular movements. Positioning human rights as emerging from (rehabilitated) leftist protests of authoritarianism gives human rights their shape and direction, imbuing them with this particular egalitarian ethic, but I argue that this inheritance goes beyond, so to speak, the story that the NHRC tells of its origins. The further influence this history exerts on the NHRC comes through the Ministry of Public Health (MoPH), which was welcoming to those students-turned-insurrectionists of  who, upon receiving amnesty in the s, relinquished armed struggle. The MoPH became home to many of them, and many refocused their energies into the nascent NGO movement. I have already alluded to the place that NGOs had in the selection and constitution of the NHRC’s first tranche, but I also examine in this chapter how specific individuals, drawn from the MoPH, brought their MoPH experience to bear on human rights practices through the ONHRC. In part, I show how this influence produced competing models of human rights advocacy and practice (a preventive model and a reactive, juridical model), creating a tension that was not definitively resolved but rather induced differing strategies for different actors. Chapter  describes the work of lawyers and their team in post-tsunami Ranong, Phang-nga, and Phuket. The lawyers, from the Law Society of Thailand (LST), were connected to the NGO Labor Rights Promotion Network (LPN) and worked with the backing of the NHRC. I explore how everyday social practices of face-work, observances of difference in status, and conventions of patronage (especially in ranked institutions like the police), all of which typically favor the powerful, provided the lawyers with important leverage in pursuing the rights of, arguably, the most vulnerable people in

Emerging Human Rights in Thailand

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Thailand, Burmese migrants. In the aftermath of the tsunami, chronically vulnerable Burmese in Thailand found themselves in acutely precarious circumstances, having lost family members, homes and belongings, and legal documents like visas and work permits. Always wary of Thai officials, they could not bring themselves to participate in the Thai state’s DNA testing program (to identify those killed by the tsunami) or place trust in the police to protect them from the heightened threat of abuse by employers or human traffickers. Indeed, they saw the police as potentially connected to human trafficking. The LST lawyers embarked on programs to address these and other concerns but frequently met with police indifference, expressing the disdain that many Thai feel for the Burmese. The chapter attends to the ways that the lawyers deployed human rights in combination with the social conventions mentioned above, in an experimental fashion, to generate force behind the rights of Burmese (and other foreign) migrants. Beyond the immediacy of the tsunami, though, the lawyers also engaged in NGO work with the LPN and the Thai Action Committee for Democracy in Burma (TACDB). I study how they engage in longer-term antitrafficking projects in cities like Mahachai, a port near Bangkok, in industries, like fisheries, that have especially high rates of human trafficking and slave labor. Chapter  studies the long-term struggles of Yai Hai Khanjanata and Rattana Sajjathep with the Thai state and the city of Bangkok to recover, respectively, farmland flooded twenty-seven years earlier by a state dam and a Bangkok house slated for demolition, ten years previous, under dubious circumstances, by the city. Having protested without significant progress toward a hearing with state and city agencies, both Yai Hai and Rattana resorted to desperate tactics. The chapter describes how, having gone unheard for such long periods, they combined the moral authority of motherhood with provocative, extraordinary gestures to gain public support for their demands for justice. These bold gestures coincided with the infancy of the NHRC, which was able to play an important mediating role with state and city officials. The thrust of the chapter, then, is that Yai Hai and Rattana’s ability to embody familiar, potent tropes (like motherhood) to express their determination and dismay through well-executed and highly visible gestures, as well as draw on the institutional power of the NHRC, was decisive in the resolution of their campaigns. Chapter  assesses the changes in fortune of the NHRC as the national organ for human rights promotion and protection after night descended on the extraordinary moment of human rights’ emergence. That is, from the

14

Introduction

early s through , Thailand experienced roughly fifteen years of unprecedented progressive politics, even budgeting for the excesses of the Thaksin government. That progressive moment (dominated by elected government, the rise in stature and force of human rights institutions and discourse, and a growing freedom of political expression) entered its twilight in  with the coup that ousted Prime Minister Thaksin. This chapter addresses the return of the coup-election-coup cycle of governance, beginning with the royalist Yellow Shirt protests of Thaksin in . The chapter does not intend to present a thorough account of the political maneuverings of the myriad political factions and interests but rather judges the implications of successive military governments, constitutions, and dramatic enhancement and application of the lèse-majesté law for human rights.

Anthropology of Human Rights Thinking about how one takes human rights as an anthropological object involves this work in ongoing but quite recent discussions within anthropology that have freed themselves of the previous straightjacket of cultural relativism. As I mentioned at the outset, a focus on the social life of human rights provides the broad parameters into which this study fits. What human rights advocates in Thailand impressed upon me, though, is that it is less what human rights do to actors in a given situation that allows for a clear picture of human rights’ social force than what social actors do with human rights as ways of working out relations among themselves. That is to say, human rights in Thailand are a mode of relating to one another but a novel, emergent mode that attaches in unforeseeable and unexpected ways to longestablished social practices and conventions. This book describes Thai social actors’ preliminary efforts to make sense of and judge the dimensions and implications of this emergent form of relating and attends to the mutually transfiguring force that human rights and the modes of sociality with which they entangle exert on one another.

Chapter 1

Experimenting with Fate

In this chapter, I make the case that human rights emerged in Thailand significantly in relation to experiments with Buddhist morality. These experiments employed everyday ethics turned in specific ways by certain readings and practices of Buddhism that are at once recognizable within the Thai ethos and yet at odds with principles that many Thai take to be intrinsic to Buddhism (especially around questions of kamma, nibbana, meditation practices, or merit in relation to social stratification). I examine here how Buddhism, which in principle eschews participation in worldly affairs like politics, becomes a resource for human rights and how, in turn, human rights invite a renewed consideration of debates over Buddhist morality. This is evident in the ways that key figures in the NHRC formulate human rights as available, if latent, in Buddhism and in the way Thai lawyers advocating for Burmese migrants’ rights enact consonant egalitarian principles. In this way, human rights politics and Buddhist politics configure or transfigure one another within a history of Thai Buddhisms that manifest progressive and reactionary faces, engaging sometimes with one another and sometimes with political events of the moment. This chapter argues that in this contingent nexus of historical, moral, and political forces in Thailand at the dawn of the millennium, human rights emerge as an event that reduces neither to the force of the official human rights discourses and practices of international organizations (like the United Nations [UN], in which the NHRC nonetheless participates) nor to indigenous forces (despite the claims of NHRC commissioners who find human rights in Buddhism but must still account for why they emerge at this time). I argue that human rights appeared as if overheard, involving a construction of understanding around a fragment, with the resources one has at hand

16

Chapter 1

rather than a process of vernacularization. Ultimately, such overhearing provides an opportunity, through engaging human rights, to renew stakes in an egalitarian Buddhist morality that provides for an articulation of human rights.

The Event of Human Rights While Thai did not widely employ the language of human rights in their struggles, I contend that human rights were themselves an emergent event in Thai political and moral life, as distinct from a critical event that introduces a break with the everyday. To say that human rights are in this way ordinary in Thailand does not mean that they are normal. The way that particular social actors articulate human rights with or through Buddhist ethics is not a normalization of human rights but a turning back to alternatives within Buddhist moral thinking on the occasion of human rights’ emergence. In this sense, human rights offered an opportunity to resist dictation or conformity on moral issues, with conformity effectively crushing ordinary efforts to think and act morally or ethically. I take suppression of the ordinary to be the suppression of voice through dictation, with the implication that the recovery or discovery of voice may be possible only within the everyday, hence the need not to transcend but to turn again to the everyday. The aversion of conformity, or normalization, is a task that involves declining available discourses where one cannot find one’s voice with them (see Cavell , –). This is not an inability to speak—scripts are available, thrust upon us—as much as it is an inability to have one’s say. Cavell captures this perspicuously when he says that the aversion of conformity is “to turn around, or turn back (Wittgenstein says lead back), the words of ordinary life . . . that now repel thought, disgust it” (Cavell , ). Finding or recovering one’s ethical voice takes a turning back, again or anew, to alternatives that have remained suffocated—in the present work, stifled in Thailand’s particular religious, political, and social ethos. Below, I argue that the emergence of voice with or through human rights involved opposing hegemonic Buddhism not through escape but by a turn to specific Buddhist alternatives. In this way, transfiguration, rather than transcendence or rupture, connects the event to the eventual in the everyday. This is not an inevitable product of human rights, so we must attend to the specificities of human rights as an emergent event in Thailand to see how

Experimenting with Fate

17

their articulation with and through Buddhist morality provided resources for the transfiguration of that very morality.

Human Rights and Worldly Buddhism On  September , the NHRC hosted a memorial service for Phra Supoj, a monk assassinated while promoting conservation in Chiang Mai province. It was  days after his murder, and the banner announcing the memorial at the NHRC’s original Phyathai Road location counted him among human rights defenders. In the lobby, outside the hall where the memorial would take place, were tables with coffee and food, as well as CDs and books for sale recounting Phra Supoj’s work and life. A little after : a.m., a dozen monks and around fifty laypersons entered the hall, which held a small shrine with a statue of the Buddha, lotuses, candles, burning incense, the Thai flag, a photo of the king, and a photo of Phra Supoj. The monks sat shoulder-to-shoulder, facing the seated attendees, and just before : a.m. began chanting. Forty minutes later, the religious ceremony concluded with individuals offering alms to the monks. They then extended a string from the Buddha statue around the monks and the photo of Phra Supoj, along which merit would travel to the deceased. Following the religious ceremony and a break for lunch, there were sessions by NHRC commissioners, monks, human rights activists, and government officials on topics ranging from the security of human rights defenders, the stagnation of Phra Supoj’s case, and the problem of “influential persons” in areas where threats to human rights defenders arise. The ostensive reason for convening this event was to sustain attention on the case. What interests me in particular, though, is how this effort—and, indeed, the work of Phra Supoj and his colleagues—brings together religious and secular activity, each bleeding into the other. The head monk, Phra Kittisak Kittisophon, who chaired the proceedings, was a controversial figure, in part for his previous campaigning for the Democrat Party in the South and in part because he had remained openly and publicly critical of Prime Minister Thaksin (of the rival Thai Rak Thai party). Of interest to me here is both that these monks participated, as monks, in this-worldly activity, and that the NHRC hosted the religious ceremony for Phra Supoj. I take the crossing of human rights and Buddhism not to be coincidental but to reflect positions within political and religious debates.

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Chapter 1

Both monks were active in the Buddhadasa Study Group, which follows the teaching of the late monk Buddhadasa. Although Phra Kittisak has been criticized for the attention he has drawn to his own voice as a critic of Prime Minister Thaksin, Phra Supoj has won accolades for his work through the group, especially for the project in Chiang Mai province to extend Buddhadasa’s work by founding the Metthadhamma Forest Dhamma Center. The Thai news outlet Prachathai covered Phra Supoj’s murder extensively, describing increasingly violent efforts by local business interests to usurp land from the center in order to plant an orange orchard. The center’s land was around  acres ( ha)—too much to monitor—and so, when developers started to clear, plow, and plant it, Phra Kittisak sought police assistance. Once the police overcame their reticence to visit the scenes, they told the workers who were clearing land that henceforth they had to request Phra Supoj’s permission to enter the fields. Several weeks later, Phra Supoj was hacked to death on the center’s grounds. These accounts and a report by the Thai Civil Action Network (in which the NHRC participates) conclude that it was Phra Supoj’s sustained efforts to protect this land from development over several years of escalating threats and developers’ brash disregard for the center’s land title, as well as his efforts to protect forests in Chiang Mai province from logging, that irritated local power brokers and business interests to the point of murder. Ultimately, the few protections offered by Thai law, human rights, and his monk’s robes were enough to facilitate Phra Supoj’s activism but not to deter his killers. Phra Supoj is by no means the only monk attached to the forest monk lineage to suffer persecution. Arguably, powerful state, economic, religious, and monarchical interests have dogged forest monks from the outset (Jackson ; Kamala ; Tambiah ). Forest monks may be defined roughly by their observance of thirteen ascetic practices described in the Visuddhimagga, or discourses of the Buddha (Kamala , ; Tambiah , –), and the importance they place on retreat from towns and cities, dwelling in the forest, in open air, and so on (practices eight through twelve). They are, thus, removed from easy observation and control by the sangha. It is, therefore, not entirely surprising that the “wandering monks” have often had a tenuous relationship with the sangha (Kamala , –). All the same, their emphasis on helping villagers through their acts (like healing, assistance cultivating new crops, as community leaders and advocates), as well as their religious teachings—in short, their mobilization of Buddhism to help others in both spiritual and practical matters—generated trust among

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19

villagers, even as the sangha regarded them as lazy and doctrinally dubious (Kamala , chaps. –). Tension with the sangha shifted from coercive persecution (including, in the s, incarceration of forest monks and villagers who gave them alms) to grudging tolerance and later a degree of acceptance (Kamala , –, –). One can see how a figure like Buddhadasa, whose scholarship and practice were so securely tethered to the principles laid out in the Visuddhimagga, may simultaneously challenge the conservative bent of the sangha and yet remain unimpeachable. That the sangha should reach a level of equanimity with forest monks, however, clearly does not imply that other sectors of Thai society would, especially where the monks’ practices to preserve their forest domains or promote the rights of poor Thai interfere with the economic projects or social privileges of powerful individuals. The activism of followers of Buddhadasa, then, raises the question of what relationships there might be between Buddhist morality and this-worldly action. Such questions are especially pointed with respect to human rights, imbued as they are with ethics and this-worldly action. Indeed, Buddhadasa’s teaching, influential as it was in the monkhood, is central to the lay movement of socially engaged Buddhism, perhaps most prominently and influentially embodied in Thailand by Sulak Sivaraksa (see Sulak ). I will return to Sulak’s contribution to Buddhist scholarship and this-worldly action below, but for the moment, I will note that Sulak has had a lengthy and profound impact on Thai society. On one hand, he has been politically nonconformist and publicly critical of authoritarian regimes since the s and threatening enough to the reactionary right wing that he has been subject to lèse-majesté charges several times (Sulak ). A rough contemporary of commissioners like Saneh Chamarik and Khunying Amphorn Meesuk, Sulak was also preoccupied with the application of Buddhism (and, especially, Buddhadasa’s vision of Buddhism and social action) to the pursuit of a just society. Also like Saneh and Khunying Amphorn, his appeal to Buddhism had both progressive and conservative qualities to it. His antiauthoritarianism combined with a longing to restore the virtues of a particularly Siamese Buddhism, and in this light, he saw Buddhadasa extending the Siamese king Mongkut’s scholarship and vision of Buddhism as a means of confronting social ills (Sulak , –). Ideas of Buddhadasa as a Buddhist source for responses to social injustices through social action were then circulating widely among influential Thai figures. It is, therefore, unsurprising that commissioners in the NHRC

20

Chapter 1

took up these sorts of questions. In particular, the chair of the commission, Saneh, and Khunying Amphorn addressed the relationship between human rights and Buddhism, each claiming that human rights are available in Buddhism. Khunying Amphorn, for example, told me that the international debate between universalism and cultural relativism, especially its Asian Values variant, is misplaced in Thailand. Buddhism provides a domestic sort of human rights, she said, such that human rights are Asian values. Significantly, she placed the emphasis less on a Buddhist conception of rights than on a Buddhist picture of the human. The five precepts that all Buddhists ought to pursue in their daily lives (abstaining from taking life, from stealing, from sexual misconduct, from false speech, and from intoxicants), combined with an emphasis on collective harmony, she said, frame human rights practices, not that she foresaw any direct line between the availability of these precepts and an end to human rights violations: “I quote, a lot, the Lord Buddha: We must practice compassion, starting from the family, and go on to the community, then national and also international [levels]. If we practice compassion, then things will be much easier. The problems won’t go away, but it will be much easier.” In this way, she thought it a misconception that human rights must be imposed on a society. “We are all born with certain basic rights, we are all human,” she said, adding that what she takes from Buddhism is a search for the middle path as a human rights model but admitting that “it is difficult to determine which is the middle path, especially because societies tend to be in the extremes, including Thailand, like a pendulum, from one extreme to the other. Which is the middle one?” Khunying Amphorn and Saneh have published their thinking along these lines under the title Human Rights in Thai Society, and Saneh has also published Buddhism and Human Rights. He, too, insists that human rights are available in Buddhism, so that they are not an import, not grafted on to Buddhism, but arise, as it were, naturally and harmoniously with Buddhism.

Buddhism and the National Human Rights Commission Saneh, like Khunying Amphorn, argues that the guidance Buddhism offers human rights is to direct them toward the cultivation of good and that “there is no need to search for a place for human rights in the Buddhist tradition. Freedom is the essence of Buddhism” (Saneh , ). He notes, however, a conservative potential in the popular understanding of Buddhism that

Experimenting with Fate

21

emphasizes personal salvation and supports the status quo (Saneh , ). In a broadside against patron-client relations (which are typically understood through the prism of persons’ relative kamma), he criticizes the claim that it is necessary—either as a matter of nature or of history—to submit oneself to one’s “superior group ‘who knows better’” (Saneh , ). Rather, he takes freedom in Buddhism to contrast with liberal notions insofar as Buddhism looks inward for freedom, and liberalism looks for freedom from external constraints. The obstruction, in Saneh’s view of Buddhism, is “one’s own ego and the three poisons: greed, hatred, and delusion” (Saneh , ; see also ). The grounding of human rights in Buddhism, in this view, begins with the idea that individuals are neither a means (as in patronage) nor an end (as in the pursuit of individual merit) but rather that “although men may not be born ‘free’ [because born into an ephemeral world of suffering], they are equal in dignity and rights, that is to say, dignity and rights to their own salvation or freedom” (Saneh , ). In Saneh’s view, the route to this salvation, the Noble Eightfold Path (right view, right thought, right speech, right action, right livelihood, right effort, right mindfulness, and right concentrations) essentially concerns conduct and, therefore, training (in higher morality, mentality, and wisdom). In this connection, he cites the Buddha instructing his disciples, “I, monks, do not say that attainment of profound knowledge comes straightaway; nevertheless it comes by gradual (doing of) what is to be done, a gradual course. In this connection, one having faith draws near, he comes close, he lends ears, he hears Dhamma and learns it by heart .  .  . being self-resolute, by means of body he realizes the highest truth itself ” (Saneh , , cited from Humphreys , ). Saneh summarizes the ethical weight of conduct as follows: “It is this principle of human conduct which is inherent in the essential meaning of the law of kamma. In contrast to what tends to be popularly mistaken as a matter of simply individual affairs and salvation . . . Buddhism stresses as a matter of principle the individual’s responsibility for all his deeds and actions” (Saneh , ). I draw attention to three things at this point. First, Saneh pits his claims against a popular, mistaken emphasis on individualization of salvation. Second, in the passage Saneh cites, learning is a matter of overhearing—overhearing the highest truth, which one realizes through dispositions of the body, which is to say conduct. Third, the emphasis on conduct is simultaneously an emphasis on the social, both in learning and in deeds. Khunying Amphorn, we saw above, made similar arguments—that the

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Chapter 1

popular emphasis on individual merit is a misguided understanding of Buddhism, that there is a matter of overhearing the truth in Buddhism (also the truth of human rights), and that the path to salvation is social insofar as conduct and the learning of conduct are social. These points are important here in that they show the binding of Buddhism and human rights to be more than a maneuver within the politics of human rights but also a move in the politics of Buddhism; they show the emergence of human-rights-asBuddhist to be a matter of a certain kind of overhearing that finds them not to be named as such in Buddhism but available latently, or obliquely, yet nonetheless available for discovery as one among the truths of Buddhism; and finally, that conduct, the realm of the social, is constitutively part of Buddhist teaching and practice, as Buddhadasa’s followers maintain.

Human Rights Politics, Buddhist Politics At the beginning of her contribution to Human Rights in Thai Society, Khunying Amphorn argues that human rights are deeply sedimented in Thai history, within Thai beliefs and Buddhist teachings of compassion and mutual helpfulness. “Truly, there have been ideas and promotion of human rights in Thai society that go far back, even if they did not use the words, in line with our traditional customs, and based fundamentally in beliefs and religion, especially Buddhism, which taught people to live together with kindness, to sympathize, to help one another. We see here the ancestry of human rights” (Khunying Amphorn and Saneh ,  [my translation]). She also reiterates the pride Thai should feel in the progress their ancestors made in the direction of human rights by following the middle path and the five precepts of lay Buddhists. She cautions, however, that modern life, particularly as manifest in materialism and consumerism, has undermined the spiritual development of the past (in Khunying Amphorn and Saneh , ). It is difficult here, as with Saneh’s contrasting of freedom in Buddhism and Western liberalism, to find a simple way to map their positions with respect to the poles of progressivism and conservatism. This has something to do with the emergent quality of human rights. The formulation of human rights within Buddhism (Buddhism, here, in a heritage vanishing under consumerism) simultaneously presents human rights as emergent, conditioned by an age-old Buddhism that did not name its work “human rights.” Two things stand out here. The notions of freedom

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and liberation that Saneh depicts find their ground in Buddhist ethics rather than a liberal lineage. Second, Saneh and Khunying Amphorn propose a model of human rights protection that follows the practice of the Buddha in that it does not seek to confront violators with their guilt but rather to help awaken would-be violators to the moral implications of their actions. Given this starting point, what are the implications of thinking of human rights through emergence? In one direction, we find human rights latent in Buddhism and in Thai customs and traditions dating to King Ramkhamhaeng in Sukothai (in the s), and yet, in another direction, they only take the name “human rights” in the present. They are conditioned by this past (hence the orientations of liberty, freedom, and awakening). Finding human rights latent in the past, in Buddhism, only takes place, however, in a time and place of manifest human rights, and reading them back into their latent state alters the traditions in which we find them. That is to say, finding human rights within Buddhism and proposing a novel end for it (in human rights) alters the picture of Buddhism as well as of human rights. One way we can characterize the discovery of human rights in ancient Thai traditions and beliefs, perhaps Buddhism above all, is the unfamiliar appearing familiar or the familiar appearing as unfamiliar. Such a discovery is not neutral with respect to these traditions and beliefs, and emergence, here, is invasive, as the claims that Saneh and Khunying Amphorn make are not only moves made on the terrain of human rights (bringing them home by linking them to a familiar ethos). They are also intrusions into debates about the politics of Buddhism, which is to say, Saneh and Khunying Amphorn make claims about morally sustainable action and teaching within Buddhism. In the environment of the NHRC, then, we may also see the memorial for Phra Supoj (hosted, recall, by fellow follower of Buddhadasa, Phra Kittisak) as similarly maneuvering in debates both about human rights and about the politics of Buddhism. Buddhadasa, as I have indicated, is an important figure in these debates, less because he was overtly political than for the distinctiveness of his Buddhist teachings and the influence they have had on Thailand’s growing, professional middle class—an influence visible in the way members of the NHRC brought Buddhism and human rights together. His teaching and practice became especially important in the early s, at the height of the Communist Party of Thailand and antileftist reactionary movements, and at just the time that Saneh was a lecturer in Political Science at Thammasat University, placing him at the center of the tumultuous politics of the s. If he eschewed

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political participation, Bhuddadasa was nonetheless an important interpreter of Buddhism and exerted political influence in the ways that antiauthoritarian political critics picked up his teachings (Jackson , ). Other influential monks were, by contrast, much more politically active, both in their public pronouncements and in an organizing capacity. Most prominent among these monks was Phra Kittiwuttho.

Reactionary and Progressive Buddhisms: Kittiwuttho and Buddhadasa In the s, during the “communist scare” against which Phra Kittiwuttho directed his energies, many of the first commissioners and workers at the ONHRC (the bureaucracy supporting the commission) were professors or students forming their political dispositions. Following large demonstrations at and around Thammasat University in Bangkok in , the authoritarian government of Thanom Kittakachorn and Praphat Charusatien fell, and Thanom and Praphat went into exile. From  to , there was a progressive, elected government, but during that time, right-wing forces organized on several fronts, forming a variety of more and less militant organizations. A pivotal figure on the right, Kittiwuttho played such an exceptional role. I contend that when members of the NHRC formulate human rights through Buddhism, they in part respond to Buddhist politics stemming from Kittiwuttho’s expanding influence and to the results of his initiatives. In brief, Kittiwuttho claimed that it was meritorious within Buddhist morality to kill any and all leftists, and in , members of right-wing organizations among whom he had influence participated in the mass murder at Thammasat University of students protesting Thanom and Praphat’s return from exile (Baker and Pasuk , –). This context, the use of Buddhism to silence or kill one’s political adversaries, informs the NHRC’s Buddhist claims for human rights. Kittiwuttho publicized his view that killing communists was on balance a merit-making practice in speeches and in print and defended his view against criticism on a number of occasions. The initial line of his argument was that anyone who poses a threat to the Thai nation, Buddhism, and monarchy personifies Mara (the Evil One), and so it is the duty of Thai Buddhists to kill that partially human being. Killing leftists, in this view, brings merit to the killer, as killing a fish for a monk’s alms bowl is a merit-making act, though it involves killing. He said, of killing leftists, in an interview with the magazine

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Jaturat, “Jaturat: Does killing leftists or communists result in demerit or not? Kittiwuttho: It is my view that we ought to do it. Thai, even though we are Buddhist, should do it, but it should not be regarded as killing persons, because whoever harms the nation, religion, and monarchy is not a whole person. That means we do not intend to kill persons but rather Mara. That is the duty of all Thai. Killing people for (the sake of) the nation, religion and monarchy is meritorious, like killing a fish to make curry to put in a monk’s bowl” (my translation). Such a picture of the human and nonhuman is not unique to Kittiwuttho but has also circulated in the service of Buddhist nationalism in Sri Lanka and Burma (Bartholomeusz ; Obeyesekere , –; Tambiah , , –). The point in each case is that Buddhism and national politics entwine. Kittiwuttho offered, however, two sorts of clarification in response to criticism. The first concerns what counts as killing according to Buddhist doctrine, the second just what he pictures himself to advocate killing. On the first count, he said, “I still hold the opinion that killing communists is not demetorious. This is because for an act to be considered as killing and thus resulting in demerit it must fulfill the following conditions. First there must be an intention (cetana). Second, the animal must have life (pana). Third, one must know that the animal has life (panasannita). Fourth, one must intend to kill (vadhakacittan). Fifth, one must act in order to kill (upkano). Finally, the animal must die by that act (tenamaranan)” (cited in Somboon , ). Kittiwuttho claimed that his comments in Jaturat met none of these conditions. He claimed, further, that when he said Thai should kill leftists and communists, he meant these as ideologies. “Communism is a complex compound of false consciousness, delusion, greed, jealousy, malevolence and anger. It is not a person or a living animal. Thus killing communism is killing ideology” (cited in Somboon , ). In , he seemed to obstruct this backpedaling (that is, wishing to kill only an abstraction, an ideology, not living humans). In a speech commemorating the founding of the Buddhist order, Kittiwuttho told his audience of monks, “Let us take today as an auspicious moment to declare war on communists. Let us determine to kill all communists and clean the slate in Thailand. The Thai must kill communists. Anyone who wants to gain merit must kill communists. The one who kills them will acquire great merit” (Somboon , ). Throughout these passages, Kittiwuttho’s central concern is whether or not killing leftists gains or loses merit, and he marshals Buddhist doctrine to claim that it gains merit. The initial passage from Jaturat suggests, however,

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that his dodge—he wishes only to exterminate an ideology—is not what he took to be at stake. If the communists on whom he rallies Buddhist Thai to declare war and eliminate completely (in order to gain merit) are like the fish he suggests killing for the curry you would put in a monk’s bowl (to gain merit), then in fact he advocates killing actual, living persons and not abstractions, just as he advocates giving actual, not abstract, curried fish to monks. Kittiwuttho called on Buddhism to justify large-scale murder but denies that the dead are, in fact, fully human. Against this backdrop Saneh writes, Buddhism as a social reform movement, has its own dynamic attitude towards life and great innovative potential. On the other hand, Buddhism, as an institution, could be vulnerable . . . to a relapse into mere dogma, incapable of living up to new challenge, that is, the crisis of change. There will then be a danger in that Buddhism, too, would serve the status quo and the powers that be, instead of humankind, which is the central purpose of Buddhism. There would be a further danger in that it could even degenerate into becoming a coercive and oppressive instrument, instead of promoting Path towards human liberation, which is the ultimate goal Buddhism. If such is the case, Buddhism, like any other religions, would need its own transformation to be of true service to mankind. (Saneh , ) This passage is not just an indictment of the sorts of theo-politics Kittiwuttho extolled but also takes a side in debates ongoing at the time () that Saneh first drafted it. A distinctive feature of Buddhadasa and his followers’ teachings can be glossed as a focus on nirvana, rather than the stress on karma favored by the religious and political establishment. I have noted above that Saneh and Khunying Amphorn connected Buddhism and human rights in the pursuit of a vision of Buddhism departing from the popular emphasis on individual merit, and their primary view, which they share with Buddhadasa, is that the relevant Buddhist quest is the world here and now (on this emphasis in Buddhadasa’s writing, see Tambiah , ). In doctrinal terms, Buddhadasa opposed a vein of eternalism that he saw dominating Thai Buddhism (the picture Kittiwuttho promoted), in which there is an eternal soul that gains and loses merit (a view he criticized as Hinduism or Brahmanism), and argued instead for an immanentism that finds nirvana possible at any and every moment (Buddhadasa , – passim; Tambiah , ). This is not to say that he saw nirvana as easily attainable, but he

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did see it to be the original condition of the mind and in principle available to any practitioner, not just long-practicing monks (Jackson , ). The repercussions of Buddhadasa’s challenge to traditional Thai Buddhism extend beyond religious doctrine and practice to touch Buddhism’s legitimating role in Thailand’s political structure. As one of the three pillars of Thai politics (nation, religion, and monarchy), a chief justification for social stratification (as a reflection of kamma), and a conceptual ground for monarchical legitimacy (the king attaining his position via accumulated merit), “even apparently theoretical debates on Buddhist doctrine may have political implications” (Jackson , ). We may then approach the relationship between Buddhism, politics, and Buddhist alternatives by recalling the normalizing role Buddhism plays. Contests over interpretations are unavoidably contests over legitimate forms of authority, sociality, and morality. This relationship naturally works in reverse, too. The political use of religious symbols (say, during demonstrations) shows how Buddhism becomes not just a political resource available for diverse agendas but also a stake in political struggles. While egalitarian Buddhism of the sort modeled on Buddhadasa’s teaching provides a sort of ethical and philosophical grammar for emergent human rights, in doing so, it turns back to ethical visions that resist the normalizing role of Buddhism. That such a model of Buddhism participates in the secularization of Buddhism and politics in Thailand makes it part of the story of distinct Buddhist movements like Santi Asoke and Wat Dhammakaya that arose as contemporaries of Buddhadasa (Swearer , –) and show how an insistence on egalitarianism can slide into an insistence on conformity. As influential Buddhist movements that have stood, at times, in dramatic tension with the Thai sangha, in what relation would they stand to human rights? For reasons that I explore below, the first cohort of the NHRC proposed a relationship of Buddhism and human rights that not only diverged from Wat Dhammakaya and Santi Asoke’s models of Buddhism but also placed them in revealing ways on the opposing side of a push toward a more secular state and religion.

Dhammakaya and Santi Asoke Late in , as part of a youth exchange in Thailand, I went to a spacious and distinctive temple near Bangkok. Rather than the ornate gold, red, and blue typical of Thai wat, with layered roof tiers and intricate carving on the

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tympana, this temple was minimally adorned, with white soaring columns and walls supporting a simple, dark roof of two steep, concave arches that met in the middle. We were brought into a comparably spare interior, where we were seated facing a monk who instructed us in meditation and fielded our questions. In this chapel at Wat Dhammakaya, he had us visualize an orb moving through seven points in or near our bodies (corresponding to chakras), finishing near the navel, where we were to visualize progressively refined images of ourselves. This stress on meditation, especially through visualization, rather than on doctrine and concepts, is central to the Dhammakaya movement. Initiated by the former abbot of Thonburi’s Wat Paak-naam, who is known popularly as Luang Por Sot, the Wat Dhammakaya movement has enjoyed a meteoric rise in popularity and influence since the consecration, in , of its ordination hall in Phathum Thani province (Jackson , –; Swearer , –). This growth in popularity coincided with a wave of religious intolerance in Thailand (Jerryson , –), and one reading sees both Santi Asoke and Dhammakaya as fundamentalistic reactions to the secularization of Buddhism (in which reformist Buddhists like Buddhadasa participated), albeit in distinct ways (Swearer ). The Dhammakaya movement was institutionalized by two of Luang Por Sot’s disciples (Phra Dhammajayo and Phra Dattajivo), who maintained the emphasis on meditation technique, principally organized around concentration on a crystal ball (as I described from my own experience, above), a method of meditation characterized in Buddhist tradition as samadhi, concentration meditation (Keyes , ; Jackson , ). In this respect, Wat Dhammakaya offers a view of Buddhism that differs from Buddhadasa’s in a way that makes it incompatible with human rights, as the NHRC was conceiving them. Where samadhi meditation allows for the supernatural and posits nibbana as a transcendental reality, reformists like Buddhadasa emphasize vipassana (or insight) meditation that stresses insight into immanent reality, here and now (Jackson , ). As part of a secularizing movement in Thailand, human rights first avoid recourse to the supernatural and second maintain an ethical focus on the here-and-now, rather than on a transcendental realm, which lends itself to the justification of social inequality as an expression of kamma. There are, however, other aspects of Dhammakaya that make it prohibitive to human rights advocates. While it is critical of the sangha’s ecclesiastical hierarchy (partly over its bureaucratization), Wat Dhammakaya resists the secularization of (what it sees as) besieged personal, community, and

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national identities by promoting a fundamentalistic, authoritarian ethos, built around its two charismatic leaders (Keyes , ; Swearer , , , ). This, on its own, would be anathema for human rights advocates promoting an egalitarian vision of humanity, but there are issues of political toxicity, as well. Dhammakaya is a conservative movement prone to accusations of elitism in part because of connections to the military, which became highly visible as early as , with the “conspicuous” support of the commander-in-chief of the army, General Arthit Kamlengek (Keyes , ; see also Jackson , –). Perhaps the most noxious association, however, is with Kittiwuttho (Swearer , ). In promoting a distinctive Thai Buddhist identity designed to enforce a religio-nationalistic ethos in alliance with influential members of the military and militant monks like Kittiwuttho, Wat Thammakaya embraces the sort of normalizing Buddhism that an egalitarian human rights vision opposes. By contrast, Santi Asoke embodies a form of “dhammic socialism” (Keyes , ) that would seem, on the face of it, congruent with Buddhadasa’s egalitarianism. Further, for some time it has been inextricably linked to Chamlong Srimuang, the popular former governor of Bangkok and retired major-general, who became especially visible in popular uprisings against the coup government of General Suchinda Kraprayoon from  to  and has been a key figure in the Yellow Shirt protests over the past decade. In the first instance, he is the picture of incorruptible Santi Asoke asceticism: a vegetarian taking only one meal per day; abstaining from alcohol and sex (though married); abjuring materialism and living in an old garment factory, where he sleeps on a mat on the floor; and dressing in the traditional, indigo mohom clothing of the peasantry (Swearer , ). Santi Asoke also seems closer than Wat Dhammakaya to Buddhadasa’s reformist Buddhism in its rejection of magic and superstition in traditional Thai Buddhism, as it seeks to restore national, community, and individual integrity through the ascetic practices to which Chamlong adheres (Swearer , ). In fact, it is this very asceticism, folded as it is into critiques of the sangha, that has generated ecclesiastical challenges for Santi Asoke. Phra Bodhirak, who founded Santi Asoke on the strength of a revelatory experience in , has been harshly critical of monks within the sangha on a number of counts. In the early s, he took his sermons to lay Buddhists as an opportunity to denounce other monks at the monastery (Wat Asokaram in Samut Prakan province) for a variety of transgressions, including eating meat and consuming stimulants like cigarettes and betel nut, and later for engaging in

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supernatural rituals (Jackson , –). Perhaps his greatest offense to the sangha, though, was his renunciation of membership in it and his denial, upon establishing his own center in Nakorn Pathom, that it was necessary or desirable to register it officially (Jackson , ). Bodhirak, compared to “the vegetarian turncoat from the Buddha’s time, Devadhatta” (Klima , ), was forced, along with Santi Asoke monks he had ordained, to defrock (Swearer , –). A number of things, though, set the NHRC and human rights advocates along a diverging path as they formulated human rights in Buddhist terms. In the s, when the NHRC commissioners were cutting their political teeth, Photirak was occupied with criticizing other monks and the sangha, rather than politics, leaving him somewhat marginal to the political debates around Buddhist morality that would later inform the reception of human rights. Further, Photirak deviated from Buddhadasa, pointing out that the latter privileged doctrinal scholarship (to which, however, Photirak finds Buddhadasa’s contributions important) over practice (Jackson , –). On doctrinal issues, further, Bodhirak maintains a less radical rationalism than Buddhadasa and continues to “regard traditional notions such as rebirth and kamma—notions which Phutthathat de-emphasizes to the point of rendering them irrelevant—as denoting real conditions as in the traditional interpretations of Thai Buddhist doctrine” (Jackson , ). This varies directly with the notions of rebirth that Buddhadasa rejects in favor of the immanentism that contributes to his egalitarian Buddhist formulations, which in turn allow for a Buddhist articulation of human rights (Buddhadasa ; Tambiah ). Having noted these serious obstacles to drawing on a body of practice that bears at least a superficial comparison to Buddhadasa’s teachings, which are serious enough in themselves, Chamlong remains an insurmountable problem. At the time of the  October  massacre of Thammasat students protestors—the moment when Kittiwuttho was at the height of his influence—Chamlong was associated with the Young Turk faction of the military. There is a persistent haze around Chamlong’s role in the massacre but a widely held conviction that the Young Turks were behind (though not active on the streets with) the violent, reactionary groups that participated in the massacre at Thammasat University (Klima , ; McCargo , ). While Chamlong denied participation in rather equivocal terms, a candidate in Chamlong’s Palang Dhamma Party (Dhamma Power Party) publicly attested to his participation in antistudent (and antidemocratic) maneuvers:

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One of Chamlong’s PDP candidates, a Mrs Chongkol Srikancha, told a July  election rally that she had worked with Chamlong in a right-wing movement during the period immediately preceding the massacre. She also claimed that Chamlong had gone in disguise to rallies of this movement, the Klum Maeban, or housewives’ group, and had shared the platform with her, even handing her the microphone. Mrs Chongkol insisted that both she and Chamlong had been actively working for the overthrow of the (democratically elected) government, which they had held responsible for the prevailing political turmoil. Mrs Chongkol seems to have believed that her claims would increase support for Chamlong and the Palang Dhamma Party. . . . Although Chamlong’s religious precepts forbid him from lying, many of his attempts to explain his role in  “honestly” begged more questions than they answered. (McCargo , ) While Chamlong, like Bodhirak, cites Buddhadasa favorably (Jackson , ), his murky connection to  October  refracts his religious asceticism in ways that raise suspicions rather than accolades, leading some to wonder if he would rather be more a “Buddhist Ayatollah Khomeini,” favoring authoritarian theocracy over secular democracy (Gooi , , cited in Jackson , ; Swearer , ). Because of his virtual identity with Santi Asoke, it should be clear that, in fact, the Buddhist vision for society that it holds aligns it with conformist authoritarianism and in conflict with a Buddhism that resists normalization. The NHRC, as the product of a secularizing constitution (which is to say, a constitution that both arose from and sought to extend a secularist ethos), marshaled reformist Buddhism to articulate human rights as already intrinsically Buddhist. The particularity of the commissioners’ election of egalitarian Buddhism to frame human rights as Buddhist dates, as I have tried to show, to the political and religious ferment of the s. The gravity of debates around Buddhist morality in that moment and their relation to political movements has continued to exert its force to the present. While fundamentalistic and highly conformist Buddhist movements like Wat Dhammakaya and Santi Asoke have arisen as a response to modernization and secularization, trying to invigorate conservative Buddhist morality, reformist Buddhism has struggled to promote an egalitarian, secularizing, and nonconformist moral vision. What I have tried to show here is that, in the uniquely progressive, democratic moment of the turn-of-the-millennium, the emergence of

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human rights both benefited from the availability of reformist Buddhism and in turn provided secularist reformism a platform from which to push against not only conventional Buddhist rationalizations of social stratification but also fundamentalistic movements with roots in the reactionary, right-wing politics of the s. In a sense, then, human rights have been an occasion to revisit the disputes of that time and reignite the democratic secularism that flickered to life from  to , only to be (incompletely) suppressed until Bloody May .

Overhearing Near the beginning of this chapter, while I opened the discussion of Buddhism at the NHRC, I raised overhearing as an aspect of how human rights have emerged in Thailand. A way that “overhearing” may elucidate the emergence of human rights is how it suggests catching a fragment of conversation, possibly addressed elsewhere, that holds interest or implications for oneself, while leaving one to do the work of finding one’s way about with respect to the overheard. A human rights activist and professor at the Office of Human Rights Studies and Social Development at Mahidol University told me a story of her political activism with the nascent Democracy Campaign Program when she was in high school that demonstrates this aspect of overhearing. In the early s, she was inspired to join a movement pushing for increased freedoms and democracy. She went to Surat Thani province with a student group seeking to educate villagers about democracy, even though they, the students, as yet lacked a clear concept of democracy. The implications of this conceptual murkiness, tied as it was to a compulsion to explain something, became clear during one particular meeting. The meeting had just started, with the students saying that they were there to talk about democracy, prachaathipatai (ประชาธิปไตย), which has the ring of a personal name. One of the villagers then spoke up, asking, “Who is this Prachaatipatai?” Human rights, she continued, faced the same sort of problem:  to  percent of Thai do not know of human rights. This is a different sort of claim than saying they do not understand what human rights are, as she did not understand what democracy was when she was a teenager. Rather, it says that, like the man who asked, “Who is this Prachaathipatai?” they do not yet have a place for human rights, in contrast to the way that she had a place for democracy, just not an explanation of it.

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Here, the inability of the teenage student to explain democracy is not congruent with the villagers who, so to speak, had no place prepared for it, in the way that someone who has no familiarity with board games will have no place prepared for a piece called the king in chess. Those, like the professor when younger, who had heard of democracy but could not explain what it meant, received it like something overheard. Crucially, to make something audible is not to make it intelligible. Making sense of something overheard is a work of transfiguration of the sort we saw with Saneh’s understanding of human rights through a Buddhist grammar of freedom and liberation. This is a second aspect of the trope of overhearing that is important for our understanding of human rights’ emergence: it is not a matter of passive reception but is rather an active engagement—a making-familiar (or makingone’s-own). Pim had worked in the Bureau of Human Rights Promotion in the ONHRC, where she worked closely with the director, Dr. Chuchai. While she had a graduate degree from an American university in women’s studies, Pim had no special training in human rights and initially was unsure how to promote or teach them or even what they meant. Her problem resembled what the professor faced when she went to disseminate democratic ideas in Surat Thani. Pim tried to educate herself, but the challenge was that commissioners had differing views of human rights, leaving her unsure whom to consult. She began work on public education campaigns uncertain if the message she was delivering was right, and she had difficulty securing enabling recommendations from commissioners for her projects. The trouble Pim faced was twofold. First, she ran up against her own uncertainties about what to teach and how to teach it because human rights were unfamiliar. Second, she found that the NHRC was beset by the “culture of bureaucratic ranks” that left commissioners somewhat inaccessible to her. This system of ranks had a divisive influence on the director of the ONHRC, too, who found, despite his position, that his proposals for pursuing human rights fell on deaf ears.

Buddhism and Social Action Dr. Chuchai came to the ONHRC from the Ministry of Public Health, which had become home to many leftist student activists of the s. In a way, his model for human rights appeared entirely congruent with the Buddhist ethic, promoted by Saneh and Khunying Amphorn, to awaken potential human

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rights violators to the possibilities of abuse. Dr. Chuchai was pivotal in drafting the master plan of the NHRC’s inaugural strategic plan. The plans were proactive in conception, modeled on the Ministry of Public Health system of surveillance for disease, and called for the establishment of mechanisms to work on focus groups or subcommissions. The idea, Dr. Chuchai explained in his office, was to identify high-risk areas like juvenile correction centers and meet with children, families, and officials to collect data on abuses and then set up fora to find solutions. Central to this model was that all parties would search for ways to resolve problems together. This way, he said, they could undertake “capacity building” for officials (not unlike the awakening Saneh advocated), so that they could learn how to abide by the constitution and avoid violating children’s rights. An important agency for Dr. Chuchai was the police, who he said are major violators of human rights. His wish, though, was to show the police data on abuses without blaming them and without taking an adversarial posture; in short, he advocated the nonconfrontational ethos of Thai culture, as he saw it. To accomplish this, the NHRC would invite retired police officers to accompany them on investigations so that the police would listen and be able to hear their findings. Again, he reiterated, it was important to remain sensitive to Thai culture. Not all commissioners shared this view, though. Lowering his voice, Dr. Chuchai said that over half of the commissioners had rejected the original master plan he had drawn up according to these principles. “Because they come from NGOs they are anti-bureaucratic. The problem is that they are [now] national commissioners, not national activists.” The commissioners, Dr. Chuchai continued, spend most of their time on case-tocase investigations and are only reactive. “The commissioners are interested in their own areas, not in strategic foci. There has been a proliferation of sub-commissions,” he concluded. They have brought a negative attitude toward government agencies that has resulted in their adversarial approach to human rights. Dr. Chuchai found this regrettable because with the “charisma and social capital” of the commissioners, he felt that they could successfully mediate with government agencies to avoid violations.

Politics Otherwise If members of the NHRC intervene in debates on Buddhism and politics in Thailand to promote an immanent understanding of Buddhism (one occu-

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pied with action in this world) and use human rights to awaken people to their own possibilities for liberation by avoiding abusive acts, then it is noteworthy that they have not incorporated ideas of monarchy into this understanding. Throughout my fieldwork at the NHRC and with lawyers working under its auspices, mention of the monarchy in relation to human rights was conspicuously absent. A quick look at the rhetoric and tactics of political movements and political leaders for several generations shows consistent— even pervasive—invocations of the monarchy. It seems unthinkable to mount any sort of political campaign without proclaiming loyalty to the king. I contrast this form of political expression and the silence on kingship in discussions of human rights to emphasize the extent to which the NHRC was cultivating an alternative politics: not just another position within an existing political formation but a differently oriented politics. Commissioners like Saneh and Khunying Amphorn maintain the relationship between Buddhism and politics but direct it away from an explanation for or justification of social inequality based on kamma and toward a defense of human equality and commensurability, which lie at the heart of their picture of human rights. Prevailing ideas of kingship are coterminous with a view of Buddhism that places kammic inequality in the foreground, the king holding his position through kammic superiority. It follows that those who argue through Buddhism for equality rather than social stratification must also mute the kammic justification of kingship. Although they may not be in a position or of the disposition to argue the legitimacy of kingship, promoting human rights through an egalitarian Buddhism reflecting Buddhadasa’s denial of the importance of kamma in favor of quotidian striving for nibbana implies a corresponding denial of the link between spiritual merit and legitimate authority. It seems, indeed, a refutation of royalism generally. What, however, might this sort of political orientation look like in practice? On the whole, the NHRC adopted an adversarial approach to human rights, preferring to pursue individual cases on a plaintiff-defendant model, particularly human rights causes (like community or environmental rights), in the mode of NGOs protesting an extravagant state. Such a model for receiving and investigating human rights violations may be inevitable, and it follows the Buddhist critique of social stratification, that is, the idea that nobody is above investigation, and nobody may, by virtue of status, abuse another’s human rights any more than anyone’s position is so lowly as to disqualify a claim on them. I did, however, see another expression of the presumption of human equality in Thai human rights promotion.

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During a July  trip to the Andaman coast in southern Thailand, the group of lawyers I accompanied worked to help Burmese migrants affected by the destruction of the recent tsunami. This population already felt vulnerable to abuses by Thai police and business owners, and the devastation many experienced as a result of the tsunami—including not only property, work permits, and visas but also wrenching losses of family and friends—haunted their lives with the threat of human trafficking. Their specific fear was that, if arrested, they would wind up sold to trafficking rings at the Thai-Burmese border. Two scenes will illustrate how the egalitarianism I mentioned above showed itself in the lawyers’ work.

Scene 1: The Military as Human Rights Defender The threat of trafficking to Burmese communities in Phang-nga, Ranong, and Phuket had become a pressing concern for the lawyers. Early in July, they held a meeting at World Vision in Ranong, in a new, sparsely furnished but spacious building at the end of a muddy road, next to a Thai health center. Pinyo, who had joined the lawyers for this trip, explained that it had been built with a $, donation from the Japanese government, primarily to address the health care of Burmese migrants. It served around  people per day and was heavily used by pregnant women. Having such a high level of contact with the Burmese in Ranong, it was inevitable that the staff would learn of cases of human trafficking and had recently interviewed a Burmese man who had worked several months without remuneration. World Vision had passed the information on to the lawyers, who were now strategizing how to address trafficking. They had started to discuss whether it was better to have a team come to Ranong or have migrants travel to Bangkok to conduct interviews when an army general entered. He was stationed near the border, and he and his soldiers witnessed human smuggling and trafficking of Burmese, a problem he attributed to mafia working in the area. That it was both illegal and a human rights problem was exacerbated, he said, by border police collusion with mafias. “The police have the power of the law,” he said, “the army has only force to use with the mafia,” the problem being that the army has no standing authority to deploy its force as a law enforcement agency. They have, further, little power with respect to the police, he added, and so nothing they can use against police officers with mafia connections. Still, his soldiers witnessed traf-

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• Injured party—foreign labour—witness soldiers in particular • Perpetrator—broker/business person—organization—influential person • Assisting Agency—NGO—Law Society of Thailand section Government Agency • Facets of the Problem – Influence – Investigator – Case law – Injured party—marginal persons—protection – Aid organizations • Means of execution

Figure . Alip’s poster.

ficking, and he wanted, on his own account, to help confront it. Alip, heading the lawyers’ team, summarized the meeting and the team’s tasks on a poster, which I reproduce in Figure . The perpetrator-victim model is not absent here, but the interesting thing is the placement of soldiers as witnesses alongside the injured party, foreign workers. An abiding concern for Alip was that witnesses feel secure in coming forward. The implication of this meeting was that collaboration with the military was an important aspect of responding to human trafficking, both in receiving soldiers as witnesses, as allies of foreign labor, and in being able to ensure the soldiers, as witnesses, adequate protection. Collaboration with agents of the state arose again the following day, in Takua Pa, Phang-nga.

Scene 2: The Prison Warden as Human Rights Promoter The lawyers had arranged with Phiphat Samphaonoi, the warden of Takua Pa Prison, to talk to foreign migrants held there. Departing from our mini-van, we entered the prison after depositing all of our cameras and cell phones in a secure room inside the gates. We walked along a stone path on the edge of a large clearing, sparsely shaded by trees, that was surrounded by low, mostly single-story buildings occupied by the inmates. Many inmates chatted in

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groups in or on the edges of the clearing. We entered one of the bungalows, which was packed tight with inmates (mostly young men) sitting on the concrete floor. Besides the lawyers and Madawi, the translator, the warden, and several officers, there were forty-nine inmates, of whom forty-three were Burmese. There was a small space at the front of the room with a microphone and an easel with large sheets of foolscap. Phiphat took the microphone and introduced the lawyers, telling the inmates that the lawyers were there to explain their rights under Thai law and to answer any questions they might have. Chokchai, a prominent lawyer who had joined the group for this project, spoke first, briefly explaining that the constitution guaranteed certain rights to all of them, regardless of their nationality. Making conspicuous use of the language of human rights, he said, “You are human, and so you have rights. The police must explain them clearly and offer translation.” He emphasized the problem of acting under conditions of lack of understanding, like signing forms the police present to them when they are unsure if they must sign or what the forms mean. Chokchai continued, saying that they may be held a maximum of two days without charge and are entitled to lawyers who speak their language. In response, a Burmese man stood to ask whether, when a man is arrested, the police can then go and arrest his wife and children. At this point, Madawi leaned to me and said, “Some people stay in here for years but do not know they have rights . . . do not know their own rights.” In part, she blamed this on the Burmese government, as it was very sensitive on the subject of labor migration and on human trafficking in particular. It was, therefore, unsupportive of Burmese imprisoned in Thailand and uninterested in pursuing or even informing them of their rights. After Pinyo’s brief presentation on HIV/AIDS prevention, the inmates, who had remained attentive but said little, filed out, and the rest of us went to have lunch with the officers and the warden. After ensuring that Phiphat, the warden, was sitting between Alip and Chokchai (the senior lawyers), the rest of us took our seats and engaged in small talk over our meal. An atmosphere that could easily have been testy—human rights lawyers sitting with prison officers—was light and congenial, underlining the spirit of cooperation among the lawyers and officers. This seemed to epitomize the model of human rights protection that Dr. Chuchai had described, but there is an ethics underlying it that reflects, implicitly, Buddhadasa’s teachings. That is, this approach seems to wish for circumstances that facilitate Burmese migrants’ movement toward nibbana but more directly guides agents of the state away from

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demeritorious acts—human rights abuses—by acting in the world. The ethical model, then, is not the renunciate monk but an engaged Buddhist who promotes social welfare. These examples, echoing Dr. Chuchai, Saneh, and Khunying Amphorn, show how Buddhism and human rights lent one another force. As an ordinary event in Thai political and social history, human rights’ emergent character imbued them with an indeterminacy that resisted reduction to a settled body of principles and practices. Receiving them as if overheard, Thai human rights advocates were then able at this moment to conceive of human rights through egalitarian views of Buddhism, finding their voices in human rights by way of everyday moral understandings. Buddhism allowed human rights an especially potent anchorage in Thai morality, but securing the moral and cultural salience of human rights in this way has allowed experimentation in the politics of Thai Buddhism. Human rights here did not transcend the Buddhist morality that supported authoritarian rule and social stratification but became a way of turning that morality and reoccupying its moral space. Taking the ordinary as the ground of events (Dumm , –), human rights partake of the eventedness of the everyday in that, inviting a turn within Thai morality to an egalitarian vision of Buddhism, they allow an alternative not as revolution but transfiguration, the ordinary invaded by another ordinary (Mulhall , ; Cavell , ). To be sure, human rights discourses can appear as language on holiday, disconnected from ordinary life (Das , ). What I have tried to show, however, is how finding human rights a home in everyday ethics—a struggle within the everyday for persuasiveness—in fact opened Buddhist morality to experimentation, to transfiguration, to new opportunities for the discovery or recovery of an ethical voice.

Chapter 2

Political Struggle and Human Rights

The previous chapter argued that the way that human rights advocates articulated human rights with Buddhism allowed for experimentation simultaneously with religion and with the political. In this chapter, I show that the political vision of human rights agents like the NHRC does not end with arguments for an egalitarian Buddhism but also seeks to legitimate itself through the inheritance and recuperation of a particular political history, the history of democratic struggle. Such claims are sometimes overt and sometimes implicit, and my argument here is that laying claim to the history of democratic struggle involves promoting a certain way of remembering and memorializing moments of democratic struggle that have been subject to projects of collective forgetting. Just what should count as part of Thailand’s history of democratic struggle has been a matter of contest for two generations, especially over the status of the  student uprising mentioned in the previous chapter. This chapter explores how the NHRC envisions itself as an inheritor of the radical democratic movements in Thailand’s past and in part how it sees human rights in Thailand as a product of those movements and the sentiments that motivated them. To support this argument, I review three critical moments of prodemocracy uprising (in , , and ) that preceded the NHRC and discuss the potency of specific political symbols deployed during the uprisings. The NHRC, in what amounts to a declaration of its identity, its foundational strategic plan, recasts these symbols—and, indeed, makes symbols of the demonstrations themselves—to position the NHRC within the heritage of democratic struggles. Just as the articulation of human rights in and with Buddhism transfigured each, as I explored in the first chapter, the recuperation I describe here of Thailand’s radical democratic past as the soil from which human rights have grown gives them a specific

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hue and cast. Finally, this chapter shows that there is not a single vision of human rights or their advocacy, despite this egalitarian, democratic bent in the NHRC, but that there are plural, sometimes competing visions. The NHRC is then not just a site for defining and promoting human rights but also of contest over their scope and practices. On my first visit to the ONHRC (the secretariat that supports NHRC commissioners), Kat, a lawyer working there, drew my attention to this contest. Having seated me across from her at her desk, one of the fifteen or so cubicles squeezed into the ground-floor office on Phayathai Road that made up the ONHRC, she asked her assistant to bring us glasses of Nescafé. While we sipped them, she explained that the lynchpin of human rights in Thai society is Buddhism. The refrain is now familiar: the problem is to encourage equality (ส่งเสริมเสมอภาค), but inequality is sustained by the idea that the wealthy have more merit. Immediately after this, she said that it was a problem of establishing a new hegemony (she used the English term here), an effort that began with the  October  uprising and continued in May  but was not yet complete. The  constitution (created after the restoration of democracy following the  uprising), she continued, secured the right to equality and was the most progressive constitution Thailand had produced. While Kat emphasized that the effort to settle the problem of equality is not contrary to Buddhism or Thai society, here I emphasize the line connecting events from the  October  demonstrations through the May  democracy uprising to the  constitution. To that end, I will review the history of democratic struggle that began in the s; how the rise and implosion of the Communist Party of Thailand (CPT) led to a wide-ranging and widespread NGO movement; the ways in which the channeling of many former leftist students, sometimes via NGOs, into the Ministry of Public Health (MoPH) has led to a divergence in human rights methodologies; and how the NHRC, in laying claim to a particular vision of Thailand’s democratic history, struggles to employ, promote, and legitimate the form of egalitarianism that Kat mentioned above.

Democratic Struggle: Three Watershed Events It is tempting to think of human rights in Thailand as an issue or process of vernacularizing a global discourse. When Kat told me “Marxist is no longer a bad word, since the end of the Cold War” (ตั้งแต่สงครามเย็นผู้นิยมลัทธิมากซ์ก็ไม่ใช่คํา

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สาปแช่ง), she alerted me to the ways in which such a thesis of domestication would have to account for the domestication of other global discourses (Marxism and democracy, for example) and the particular variants of these discourses (in the Thai case, Maoism) as they shaped the process of domestication. The statement is also arresting for the sort of sea-change it indicates in Thai politics, a change that sets the demonstrations of  apart in important ways from the student democracy uprisings of  and .

14 October 1973 to 6 October 1976 In November , Prime Minister Thanom Kittakachorn launched a coup against his own government, suspending a three-year-old constitution and dissolving the equally young parliament (Baker and Pasuk , ). Student organizations had undertaken sporadic demonstrations over Japanese control of the economy and corruption, among other issues, but by June , the demonstrations were better organized, focusing on the restoration of the constitution and democracy (Baker and Pasuk , ). The military government responded by arresting student leaders, and on  October, up to half a million Thai from throughout the country joined student protestors at the Democracy Monument on Ratchadamnern Klang Avenue to demand a constitution, the restoration of elected government, and the release of jailed students. This was the first mass uprising against a Thai military government (Giles , ). As the police and military presence grew, protestors became uneasy and moved toward the palace both for their security and to appeal to the king to mediate (Baker and Pasuk , ). Although the generals backed down once the student leaders won an audience with the king, releasing jailed students and agreeing to restore the constitution, the  October dispersal of the demonstrators dissolved into chaos, and the military attacked, killing and wounding several hundred. Thanom Kittikachorn, Praphat Charusatien, and Narong Kittakachorn (Thanom’s son and Praphat’s son-in-law), the junta’s leadership, hastily fled into exile, the last shred of their government’s legitimacy falling with the massacred protesters. Further, it is widely believed that the king pressured them to leave, making way for the restoration of constitutional democracy (Connors , ). Whether or not this is true, the king did choose the members of a National Convention that elected the National Assembly that would serve as the interim parliament and draft a new constitution. By ,

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Kukrit Pramoj held the prime minister’s office, heading a fragile coalition, but was forced, under pressure from the army, to dissolve parliament. In April , he lost in the polls, to be replaced at the head of the Democratic Party by his brother, Seni, who formed a new coalition government under the banner of reformism (Baker and Pasuk , –). Over the same period, the reactionary elements of the right wing had reorganized, forming, in particular, two paramilitary and propaganda organizations, the Red Gaurs and Nawaphon (meaning new or ninth force). In concert with the Village Scouts, a rural, anticommunist program started by the border police in  under royal patronage during the Thanom regime, these groups undertook a campaign of intimidation and assassination of leftists, student leaders, and labor organizers, following an explosion in  of the number and scale of worker strikes (Giles , –). Their impact and the reluctance of police to intervene emboldened Praphat (temporarily) and Thanom (now donning a monk’s robes) to return from exile in August and September. Students at Thammasat University, located at the western edge of Sanam Luang (Royal Park, which is itself at the western end of Ratchadamnern Klang, before it rises to the Pinklao Bridge), protested the return of the junta leaders. For roughly a decade, building on the prosperity of the s and s, the demographics of the university population had shifted from elite dominance to include Thai from a much wider range of economic and regional backgrounds, with the result that students were no longer automatically assumed to have the kind of mandarin status they enjoyed in the s and earlier. On the contrary, there was a growing animosity among those Thai who saw students as averse to work and as leftist agitators (Giles , ; Anderson ). On  October , the three paramilitary groups mentioned above, those harboring resentment toward students, and the reactionary elements of the police and military got their opportunity for revenge. Armed with firearms, rocket launchers, and weapons of opportunity like pipes, sticks, fire, and rope, they sealed all exits from the Thammasat campus and assaulted the students inside. Students who tried to escape were shot or beaten, some being hanged and burned in a no less visible and symbolically charged location than the Royal Park (สนามหลวง, Sanam Luang), which borders the ceremonial Royal Palace and the Temple of the Emerald Buddha, one of the temples most closely identified with the monarchy (Baker and Pasuk , –; Giles , –; Anderson ). The military and paramilitary suppression of the protest was brutal and exhaustive enough to

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allow Praphat and Thanom to return without further opposition. Over the next two years, there were three more coups, until finally, in , General Kriangsak Chomanand succeeded in both maintaining a stable government and turning government policies toward the reformism of the Kukrit premiership. Critical to future developments, he placed General Prem Tinsulanond, who had risen to head the army, in the post of defense minister (and he would become prime minister in , after elections were restored in ). When Kat was describing the history of human rights’ formation in Thailand, she explained that there was a rift within the upper echelons of the military between the doves and the hawks (ทหารมีนกพิราบ เขาเรียกร้องสันติภาพและมี เหยี่ยว), the doves trying to keep the military out of the political process and the hawks being ferociously anticommunist, with several having been involved in the attack on  October. The significance of Kriangsak and, in particular, Prem rising to office is that they favored a political rather than military response to the threat of communism, emphasizing an agenda of rural development (to reduce the appeal of joining or supporting the CPT and to undermine CPT propaganda) and conciliation. The support of the “doves” was crucial to the success of such a strategy in the face of CPT numbers swelling as leftists, student activists, and labor organizers left Bangkok for the jungle after  October. When Kriangsak began to normalize relations with China, however, the CPT lost Chinese support, and when Prem initiated amnesty policies in  and  to allow disaffected CPT members to return to the fold of Thai society, they did so in droves, evacuating the CPT of the bulk of its fighting force by  (Baker and Pausk , ; Giles , –). To all appearances, the left had dissolved.

“Black May” 1992 The s and s, however, did not see the dissolution of the left as much as its reconfiguration. After Prem’s amnesty program, many of those who returned from the countryside and from armed resistance refocused their attention away from social revolution toward NGO work on particular social issues. Individuals who, as CPT members or student activists, had faced imprisonment or death in armed conflict with the state or violence at the hands of paramilitary groups could now work openly and legally. Although NGOs existed before the s, they blossomed during this period. They had a range of foci, from rural development to poverty alleviation in Bangkok

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slums, but of particular interest here is the participation of doctors in NGOs. During the s, there was an increasing NGO emphasis on HIV/AIDS treatment and prevention, but before that, there were NGO programs focused on the health of the rural poor and on providing primary health care (Bamber , –). During the mid-s, a particularly close relationship developed between the MoPH and a number of NGOs like the Rural Doctors Society. Below, I will discuss a bifurcation in NGO methods that has everything to do with the MoPH adopting a welcoming posture to left-leaning or activist medical personnel (Bamber , ). The important thing here is that, between  and —the better part of a generation—there was an explosive growth in NGOs and NGO members alongside relative political calm. In , for the first time since , there was an elected prime minister, Chatichai Choonhavan. There had been no regime changes during the “Premocracy” (Baker and Pasuk , ), from  to  (despite three attempted coups), but at the same time, Thailand had yet to see an elected prime minister complete his term. Prime Minister Chatichai would be no exception. The Chatichai government took corruption to levels that neither the public nor the military could stomach. The government became widely known as a “buffet Cabinet” (Baker and Pasuk , ; Connors , –). This stemmed from a biting reference to an antique model of governance. Members of the Thai public replaced, in their discussions of the Chatichai regime, “politics” (การเมือง, or kan meuang) with the phrase kin meuang (กินเมือง). Kin (กิน) means “eat,” but the compound word kin meuang refers to a specific system of “traditional remuneration from the profits of office” (Baker and Pasuk , ). Somboon discusses this model as characteristic of the period preceding , ending during the reign of King Chulalongkorn. Before then, provincial administrators (chao meuang) appointed by the king received no salary and so raised their income from taxes and corveé labor. In this decentralized system of authority, it also gave the chao meuang control of the judicial administration, permitting self-serving interpretations of law. In some cases, the office of the chao meuang became semi-hereditary (Somboon , ; , ). When Thai referred to the Chatichai government with the epithet kin meuang, then, it indicted Chatichai for trying to reinstall a system of unmerited rewards for elites who, by virtue of their office and the command it afforded of the law, felt entitled to consume the people they ruled. The military in the mid- and late s saw a new group of officers, disdainful of the ideological debates of the hawks and the doves, emerge as a

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dominant faction at the same time that the political status of the military was on the decline. Forming the National Peace Keeping Council (NPKC) in , they saw the general disgust with the Chatichai government’s excesses as the opportunity they sought to restore the military as a commanding political presence (Baker and Pasuk , ff.; Connors , –; Chai-Anan , ). In February , the NPKC seized the reins of the state in a bloodless coup d’état, arraigning Chatichai on corruption charges and dissolving parliament. The NPKC appointed Anand Panyarachun as prime minister until elections could be held in March . The process met with little public resistance, until the junta leader, General Suchinda Kraprayoon, breaking his earlier promises not to seek public office, stepped unelected into the premiership to replace the candidate of the winning party (Samakkhitham, a party created by the NPKC for the election), who withdrew amid drug trafficking allegations (Baker and Pasuk , ; Connors , –; Klima , –). Large protests at the Democracy Monument (steps from Thammasat University and Sanam Luang) began late in April at the urging of the Campaign for Popular Democracy, led by Chamlong Srimuang, the popular former mayor of Bangkok and key member of Santi Asoke, discussed in the previous chapter. Early in May, Chamlong began a hunger strike that he vowed to maintain until Suchinda stepped down. Whereas Suchinda defended breaking his promise by saying, “I sacrifice my honor for the sake of the nation,” Chamlong responded, “I sacrifice myself for the sake of the nation” (Klima , ). The campaign drew demonstrators across Thai society, reaching around , on  May (Baker and Pasuk , ). The Suchinda government’s response took its cue from the s, starting with a massive show of military power that escalated to violence lasting for three days and nights. My friend Bun told me that while he was training to become a commercial jet pilot, he met a retired air force officer who explained the use of violence this way: “He said that the military makes people stupid, because it rewards people who follow orders, not people who think. In  [], they brought soldiers in from upcountry, who had no idea what was going on in Bangkok. They did not use troops from around Bangkok, because those troops saw the news, and saw the people gathering at Democracy Monument for a long time, so maybe they wouldn’t fire on them. The soldiers from upcountry, when they were told to shoot, they followed orders.” The ensuing bloodshed, claiming dozens of lives, ended only when the king summoned Suchinda and Chamlong and ordered them to come to a

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peaceful resolution. The damage to the military’s reputation was thorough, and Suchinda stepped down, bringing Anand back as interim prime minister until elections in September. While in office, Anand gutted the NPKC, and the doves about whom Kat had told me were assigned control of key military posts. High though the price was in terms of human lives and well-being, in this case, large-scale peaceful protest had succeeded not just in ousting an unelected government, but in the process the protestors became, like the students in , heroes and martyrs in the narrative of Thai democracy (Thongchai ).

Symbols in Struggle and the Claim to Democratic History A notable feature of these moments—, , and —is that the demonstrators in each instance displayed images of the king, the Thai flag, and Buddhist symbols, sometimes combined in single articles. In certain moments, the national/religious/monarchical symbols had the power to stop bullets temporarily. Alan Klima, present during Black May, describes a scene that is equal parts surreal and terrifying: It was now fully morning, but not bright. The army battalion was marching forward, while the crowd had come up off the asphalt, where they had been lying prostrate, and were now standing in unison, thankfully singing the national anthem. Then the crowd sang the anthem to the king. With that, the soldiers stopped their advance, held their firearms at their side, and stood at attention. For the duration of the anthem to the king, both sides stood at attention. When the people finished singing, they erupted into applause and cheers. For the soldiers’ part, as soon as the song was over, they charged. (Klima , ) In no case did these symbols stall violence altogether (as Phra Supoj’s robes also failed to do), but this passage shows that such demonstrative claims to national loyalty, Buddhist faith, and reverence for the king were powerful for all concerned. If protestors knew they risked their lives in each case, they did so literally under the banners of nation, Buddhism, and monarchy, claiming the legitimacy of their struggles by virtue of the allegiances they displayed.

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Figure . A Thai flag widely distributed in the May  prodemocracy demonstrations bears the phrase throng phra jareun, equivalent to “long live the king.” Photo: Ron Morris.

While there are many photos and some video of the  October assault on Thammasat University, virtually all were taken outside the walls of the campus and show acts or the outcome of acts of violence against protestors. Girling argues that the three pillars—nation, Buddhism, and king—played an important role in progressive politics throughout the s, including the Thammasat protestors, but points out that the nation of the progressive movement was a constitutional nation, not the paternalistic nation of authoritarian regimes (Girling , ). It is this constitutional nation that was the condition of possibility for the NHRC. “Before, they could forbid people to speak, but with the new constitution they cannot,” Kat told me. The “People’s Constitution” (รัฐธรรมนูญฉบับประชาชน) was drafted with unprecedented popular consultation, allowing for input from a wide range of Thai. Perhaps more significantly, the pressure of private individuals (like Dr. Prawase Wasi) to found a drafting assembly (rather than

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Figure . Demonstrators, Black May . Photo: Tomas From.

leaving the production of the constitution to politicians and bureaucrats alone) resulted in the generation of the s (which is to say not just those who participated in  and  but all those who shared the broad democratic aspirations of those demonstrations) to have a decisive role in the drafting process (Ockey , –, ). The constitution, Kat said, was an effort to change society, and it was to that ethos of change that the NHRC in several ways laid claim. In , the NHRC circulated its first educational video compact disc (VCD), focusing on children’s rights (สํานักงานคณะกรรมการสิทธิมนุษยชนแห่งชาติ ). It opens, however, with an account of the NHRC’s origination, tracing it to struggles for equality and democracy. Over footage of  October , 

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Figure . Democracy Monument,  October . Photo: Adam Carr.

October , and Black May , it describes the People’s Constitution as the product of protracted democratic struggle, finishing the story with coverage of a parade of people carrying yellow flags reading รัฐธรรมนูญ ฉบับประชาชน (People’s Constitution), carrying the national flag, and wearing yellow T-shirts, headbands, and caps sporting the same slogan. Finally, many of the parade marchers carried a copy of the constitution, holding it out to the camera as they passed by. This wielding of the constitution, as if a shield, is important. Kat explained that protestors of the Thai-Malay pipeline that was being built through the town of Hat Yai in southern Thailand in  used the constitution as a tool, when confronted by police, to argue that they had the right to congregate and to mount their protest. Similarly, when I met with Dr. Sriprapha, chair of the human rights program at Mahidol University, she said that the vast majority of Thai do not know or understand their rights but that the s saw increasing awareness on this front. As an indicator of this trend, she said that many of the rural people she works with in an NGO capacity now carry the constitution with them as a kind of protection: “When the police harass them, they can pull out the constitution, and the police may doubt themselves— they may think this villager knows his rights better he does. But there are no guarantees.”

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The constitution in these cases is more than a document that outlines rights but also is symbolically potent, a fact emphasized in the video by the coincidence of the camera panning over the Democracy Monument—the site par excellence of popular democratic struggle and repository of a symbolic constitution—as the narrator talks of this constitution being the first that enjoyed public consultation. What, however, is at stake in showing the Democracy Monument? Benedict Anderson takes monuments to be a form of speech (Anderson , ) but also cites Robert Musil half-approvingly when he says, “There is nothing in this world as invisible as a monument” (cited in Anderson , ). This may be so. The Democracy Monument sits directly in the path of traffic moving along Ratchadamnern Klang. It is unavoidable, and yet this quotidian feature may be just what makes it invisible as a monument. Anderson orients his analysis to the contingency of meaning a monument may have—what, as a form of speech, it can say—but I argue that when the NHRC conjures the image of the Democracy Monument, it is less because of what it might mean or say and has more to do with how the history of demonstrations, with their bloodshed and deaths that can be called heroic, at its site gives it affective force. Anderson writes of Indonesia’s National Monument that it is “less a part of tradition than a way of claiming it” (Anderson , ). Anderson means this as the form of speech he discusses, but the idea behind showing the Democracy Monument while lauding the inclusivity of the constitutional drafting procedure in a video about human rights is to create associations not—or not just—of meanings between them and democratic heroism but at the level of affect: that is how the claim on the democratic tradition arises.

The NHRC Strategic Plan The VCD is not, however, the only place where the NHRC uses the image of the Democracy Monument. In its inaugural strategic plan, the monument also appears, as do other references to the violence around it. The same concentration of associations as in the VCD occurs on the opening page of the introduction (see Figures  and ). The VCD and the strategic plan, in particular, do not just communicate facts, or a perspective, on the constitution and the defense of human rights flowing from it but also express the NHRC’s inclination toward democratic struggle and a claim to be a product of that struggle. In short, the strategic plan is in part a story the NHRC tells (itself) about itself.

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Anchoring the bottom of the introductory page, the image portrays, from foreground to background, a seated group, with one standing, hand raised to speak, before a panel that sits under a banner reading “Constitutional Drafting Stage,” which is in turn before a section of the central element of the Democracy Monument (see Figure ), a roughly chedi-shaped structure on which rest two golden offering bowls (phan, พาน), the likes of which Buddhist rituals use to carry consecrating items for the ordination of new monks (like robes, candles, and incense). Resting on top of the bowls is a replica of the box that held the first constitution in . As with the VCD, we have here, at the site of democratic struggles, the constitutional drafting committee conferring with the public on the opening page of the first human rights strategic plan in Thai history. Indeed, the eye is drawn from the wide base of the image—the seated public—upward and right, as the image tapers toward the monument. The next occurrence of the monument, Figures  and , occupies the lower left margin of the section titled “Challenges to human rights protection within the country.” The introduction reads, “As a result of social movements for political reform and democracy, a new National Constitution was promulgated in  which guarantees human dignity, all basic rights and fundamental freedoms of people” (NHRC , ). Although section . mentions the threat to human rights posed by nonstate actors like crime rings and multinational companies, the positioning of the soldier—seated, gun raised, in front of the monument (and drawn from a photo of a soldier on  October , in Figure )—shows an ongoing challenge to human rights to be the threat of military coups or suppression of demonstrations. The positioning of the rifle and the soldier’s torso and head, however, provide a V-shaped frame in which the monument sits. It is noteworthy, on that count, that the illustrator, Denchai Thamthitipong, replaced the photo’s backdrop (other soldiers, unremarkable buildings) with the Democracy Monument, simultaneously sharpening the focus on the military as a threat to democracy and to human rights as the inheritor of democratic movements put down by the military. The soldier’s positioning, especially when contrasted to the upright wings of the monument, leads us to wonder whether this soldier’s posture is one of exhaustion, regret, defeat, or waiting. It is not an image of military triumph, and the monument, dominating the upper part of the image, seems also to dominate the soldier: the soldier sits in the shadow of the Democracy Monument. While I was doing fieldwork, it was a nearly constant refrain that the

Figure . Page  NHRC strategic plan.

Figure . Detail page  NHRC strategic plan.

Figure . Centerpiece of the Democracy Monument. Photo: Adam Carr.

Figure . Page  NHRC strategic plan.

Figure . Detail page  strategic plan.

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Figure . Seated soldier,  October  uprising. Source: https://krwism.files .wordpress.com///p-.jpg.

age of the coup in Thailand had passed. Henceforth, regime change would come through the ballot box. Indeed, not only was Prime Minister Thaksin the first prime minister to complete his term, but he was also the first to win successive elections. That he was ousted by a coup less than a year into his second term should not detract from the sense that prevailed during the beginning of the decade that coups no longer characterized Thai politics. This image, then, may not identify an ongoing, latent challenge to human rights so much as celebrate the (perceived) cessation of the particular threat of the military coup. By all appearances, the next image could support such a conclusion. Marking the end of the second chapter, here the monument is swamped by jubilant demonstrators. Among the scores of national flags is a single banner, the writing illegible except for a single phrase: “rise up, fight, fight, fight” (ลุกขึ้น สู้ สู้ สู้). In this case, the banner’s poles descend to provide a frame for the monument, barely visible though it is under a swarm of demonstrators. This is the image of triumph that the soldier’s was not, the mass of demonstrators on the monument backed by a swarm of supporters so numerous they become an amorphous mass as they trail off to the right, bottom corner of the image. While this trail is surely important, it occupies only a small portion of the drawing. The monument, with its framing banner, sits directly in the center, the individuated demonstrators sitting, perhaps intentionally, on the left.

Figure . Page  NHRC strategic plan.

Figure . Detail page  NHRC strategic plan.

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The NHRC repeats with these images the association that Kat made explicitly to me between the three watershed moments of democratic struggle; the opportunity, following the eclipse of the hawks and the NPKC in , to draft the People’s Constitution and the mandate it in turn provided to establish the NHRC. The images, rather than saying what the connection is (as the text does), shows it. Two issues spring from this. One is how we understand the inclusion—more explicit in the video than in the plan—of  October within the narrative of Thai democracy. The other, to which I will turn first, is what we should make of the fact that, where the video uses existing footage, the plan uses drawings, which it places in the margins. In his Dictionary of Phrase and Fable, E. C. Brewer has this short entry: “Margin. In all our ancient English books, the commentary is printed in the margin” (Brewer , ). Michael Camille’s study of medieval illuminated manuscripts, monasteries, cathedrals, and courts makes a similar point. The margins of the main sites of medieval power, like monasteries and cathedrals or the court, were dangerous and powerful zones of transformation, confrontation, the crossing of social boundaries, parody, and supplementarity (Camille , –). The drawings in the margins of illuminated manuscripts, then, do more than simply illuminate the written text but may also be the occasion for mockery, ridicule, contradiction, amendments, and additions to and subtractions from the text: commentary. The margin was a site of play, but as Camille says of a drawing in the fourteenth-century Ormesby Psalter, “In these plays and jokes made by Christ’s tormentors as they hammer the nails into his hands and feet remind us that games can be deadly serious” (). The idea of margins as sites of commentary, especially commentary that can find no place in the text, speaks to the images under consideration here in different ways. If it is not possible to gloat over the defeat of reactionary elements in the military, then it remains possible to take a playful—and deadly serious—jab at them by placing a deflated, despondent, or defeated soldier in the margins of the plan. By the same token, it is possible to complement that drawing with another of celebratory protest under the national flag. There is something else involved here, though. If the margins allow a place for that which finds no place in the text, that does not mean that the associations I have insisted upon are absent from the text of the plan or from the VCD. In both cases, they are there explicitly at the introduction, but marginal drawings allow for a different sort of expression than the textual assertion of facts.

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It is important that these are drawn pictures rather photographs because, as products of the hand, nothing they show is there by accident. Stanley Cavell characterizes a distinction between painting and photography as that between representation and presentation: an emphasis on the identity of the drawn subject and an emphasis on the existence of the photographed subject, the creation of a record of it (Cavell , ). The narrative introduction to the plan makes a factual claim (that the struggles of social movements led to the new constitution, the guarantor of human dignity), but the drawings do not make factual claims about the world as much as they express certain aspirations for a world. Elsewhere, Cavell writes, “The world of a painting is not continuous with the world of its frame; at its frame, a world finds its limits. We might say: A painting is a world; a photograph is of the world” (Cavell , ). The drawings in the plan offer or propose a world in ways that the text, which asserts facts about the world, does not. The drawings, then, are particular expressions of desire. W. J. T. Mitchell writes on this, “‘Drawing Desire,’ then, is meant not just to suggest the depiction of a scene or figure that stands for desire, but also to indicate the way that drawing itself, the dragging or pulling of the drawing instrument, is the performance of desire” (Mitchell , ). The drawn world is a world of desire in a particular way (as distinct from that of photography or constative language uses). The drawer’s desire is not the only issue at stake for Mitchell, who wishes to ask about the desire of the picture itself, a question he phrases in terms of want: a wish for and a lack. It is important to Mitchell that what pictures want has specific pedagogical value. He says, “Images both ‘express’ desires that we already have, and teach us how to desire in the first place” (Mitchell , ). Part of teaching us how to desire is tied to teaching us how to see, “what to look for, how to arrange and make sense of what we see” (Mitchell , ). The pictures in the plan are both carefully detailed and drafted but also, because they do not offer verisimilitude, ambiguous. Just who are the demonstrators in Figure  and which moment is that? The point is that we cannot know. If the drawing stakes a claim to a tradition of democratic struggle, what it teaches us to desire is not one particular moment in that struggle but rather to accept the whole tradition and all its moments as legitimate members of democratic struggle. The associations that these images (drawings and video) and that the NHRC assert work in two directions, then. In a manner comparable to the entwining of human rights and Buddhism, the NHRC does not just claim the tradition of democratic struggle for itself, to enhance its own powers—it

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does that, but that is not all it does. By this gesture of claiming each of  October,  October, and Black May, it also claims that each belongs in the narrative of Thailand’s democratic history. This is no small claim. Thongchai Winichakul argues that there was a sustained and, for a long time, successful resistance to the inclusion of  October within the democratic narrative. As a result, the dead, the injured, and those of  whose lives were dislocated won no honor as heroes or martyrs (Thongchai ). This was most clearly expressed in the proposed construction of a memorial to the dead of . There was, however, an equally sustained if less powerful push to have the memorial stand for those killed in  as well. After decades-long delays, it rose against resistance from agents of the state and the city of Bangkok who still saw the Thammasat students as un-Thai, partially human, communist agitators (Thongchai , –). To deny these individuals acknowledgment of a legitimate role in bringing about democracy and human rights would mean denying the contribution of an important part of the NGO surge in the s and, curiously, many in the MoPH. This would have important implications for the NHRC.

Competing Models for Human Rights Dr. Kai, who in  worked at the MoPH, explained to me that the history of the ministry was unique, saying, In , after people left the Communist Party, coming out of the forest, it was medical school that accepted most of the medical students back. So these people have an inclination towards people-oriented, socialist kind of thing. The director of the National Health Security Office was one of the student leaders in the s. Compared to the Ministry of the Interior, they don’t accept people coming out from the forest . . . the Ministry of Agriculture did not. So, they became entrepreneurs, outside the Ministry. But in the MoPH, if you trace back, some of them used to be part of the underground movement for democracy. Another doctor, Dr. Jacra, explained to me that, at the time of the student democracy movements in the s, medical students were obligated to serve in public hospitals—mainly MoPH hospitals—for three years after gradua-

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tion. All medical students, he explained, were included in the MoPH, regardless of individual political convictions. This was not the case for other students, who did not have an associated ministry or the obligation to work under its auspices. It is clear, then, that the obligation worked both ways. While the students had to serve three years, the MoPH also had to place all medical students and graduates, so that medical students, uniquely among democracy activists, had a ministry that was compelled to take them. (Dr. Kai confirmed that most medical students who took amnesty after CPT involvement were readmitted to medical school if they chose.) The MoPH need not have had any special political orientation in the s, then, because it had to accept students of all political stripes. As the generation of democratically minded doctors filtered up through the ranks of the MoPH, however, they would provide it with a receptivity to leftist democratic ideas and projects. Scott Bamber sharpens the importance of medical schools reaccepting politically radical students, pointing out that particular universities and campuses correlated strongly with politically active (or politically inactive) student bodies. Mahidol University, one of Thailand’s two most prestigious universities, produced many politically active doctors, and its Ramathibodi Hospital was especially productive in this respect, not least because of the close connection between the medical and public health students (Bamber , –). Bamber notes, also, the ethos of reform that developed in the MoPH as doctors with NGO backgrounds have risen to senior positions in the MoPH (Bamber , ). Dr. Jacra made a similar point to me, saying that the MoPH worked closely with NGOs on many initiatives (including HIV/AIDS, antismoking campaigns, and health system reform, to name just a few). He explained that NGOs with leaders from the medical profession have enjoyed a better public image than others, born partly from the history of rural doctors’ movements (on which see also Bamber’s discussion of the Rural Doctors Society in Bamber , ). The expansion of rural health services in the s and s contributed to the positive public perception of doctors and the MoPH, and on the other side, the MoPH was receptive to NGOs working on rural health issues, especially when led by medical practitioners. One of the politically salient aspects of these networks, Dr. Jacra points out, is that NGOs have frequently emphasized social welfare (rather than health in narrowly medical terms) in ways that have diverged from government policies and projects, causing different governments to bristle.

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To say that NGOs and political activists have had friction with governments, however, is not to say that they lack patriotism. Protestors in the s and  (and through to the present) broadcast their loyalty to the nation, monarchy, and Buddhism. These were the symbols they mobilized in order to legitimate their protests. In the case of the NHRC, though, the emblems have been the Democracy Monument as the default site of democratic struggle and the protestors themselves as they fought for constitutional democracy. The sources of legitimacy they evoke, then, are the constitution, democracy, and those (living and dead), who fought for this picture of the nation. A feature of margins is that they can act as frames, and the NHRC has framed human rights along these three lines. I mean by this not that the marginal images frame human rights in the sense of setting limits on the imagination of what human rights might be but rather that this framing animates human rights. Dr. Chuchai, who I introduced in the previous chapter, is in part a product of the MoPH and was the driving force behind the strategic plan. I characterized his approach to human rights as one that fostered cooperation at potential sites of violation. He described this model as arising from his medical training. “The strategic plan is pro-active, for both promotion and protections [of human rights], it has a warning system or a surveillance system. Like, when I worked at the Ministry of Public Health, we set up an active surveillance system to prevent disease . . . we know where there was conflict, where there would be violence. In Thai society we know where and how it arises.” The NGO background of many of the commissioners, he said, impeded this model, because their activist orientation predisposed them to be antistate and antibureaucracy, which made it hard to form cooperative relationships with members of the bureaucracy. The commissioners spent most of their time on case-to-case intervention and so were only reactive. Only  percent of the cases were resolved, and there was a proliferation of subcommissions based on the issues that interested commissioners. Dr. Chuchai proposed that it was better to mediate conflict than to adopt a juridical model that focused on a winner and a loser. The point, he said, was to treat violations like disease: reduce the number of patients through a preventative rather than a curative approach. They would achieve this through a monitoring apparatus that would focus on “hot spots” like prisons (as we saw in the previous chapter), police stations, child welfare centers, or immigration checkpoints. “We would invite retired police officers to accompany us on investigations so that the police would listen and be able to hear our findings.” Thai

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society has a culture of top-down power, he said, but with respect to human dignity, it must be a horizontal relationship, not top-down. This type of relationship must be extended not just to victims of abuse but also to those with whom they would work cooperatively to prevent human rights violations. Dr. Chuchai explained his model at length but confessed that it did not interest the commissioners, and their dispute was curtailed when he was moved to an inactive advisory position. As I showed in the previous chapter, cooperative activities have occurred with lawyers from the Law Society of Thailand, but this still leaves a vague picture of what the preventative or consultative model would look like on a larger scale. These ideas, as Dr. Chuchai himself showed, do circulate in other arenas, like the MoPH, and I turn now to one such example.

Health Reform Assembly In  and , I attended the Health Reform Assembly (HRA) at the Bitec Center on the outskirts of Bangkok. The HRA was the product of three years’ work by the Health System Reform Organization (HSRO), under the auspices of the MoPH, and was formed out of the  constitution. It had as its mandate to develop, through consultation with Thai from all parts of the country and all sectors of society, a Health Reform Act, which it would then present for consideration to the government. The HRA was the culmination of these efforts and concluded on  August  with the presentation of the act to Prime Minister Thaksin. A notable feature of the HSRO was the prominence of members, particularly in the positions of greatest responsibility and influence, who in the past had been dissident activists. As Dr. Kai noted, the medical profession has been well represented in prodemocracy activism (see also Bamber ). Many of the doctors active in  (and some who were student activists in ) were also prominent members in the HSRO and deeply engaged in the HRA. Through a mutual friend, I reached Dr. Anuchat in , and he arranged for Dr. Ugrid to be my host at the HRA. Dr. Ugrid pointed out several times that the HSRO (and, therefore, the HRA) was organized on horizontal rather than vertical principles. “We must reflect the goal of enhanced rights for all in the method of pursuing those rights,” he said. The HRA shared the approach of the Constitutional Drafting Assembly, he explained, which was unsurprising given the

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proximity of Dr. Prawase Wasi to the assembly and the MoPH. The HRA visited each province to convene public meetings soliciting the concerns of as wide a range of Thai as they could reach. There were, however, dissenters. A plan that had recently started, called the ฿ plan, offered medical consultation at public hospitals for a ฿ (roughly $.) fee. At the assembly, a group of around thirty people marched slowly, in utter silence, around the perimeter of the main hall. They wore signs declaring “Health care is a right. We don’t want charity.” As we watched them progress, Arporn Wongsang, a commissioner at the NHCR who was involved with the group, approached us. “Are you a researcher?” she asked me. I told her I was. “I have learned through life,” she continued. “I have fought for rights for over twenty years.” Indeed, Khunying Amphorn made it a point to mention Arporn when we met at the NHRC and told me that Arporn had lived a difficult life but was brilliant and tough, becoming a substantial figure among NGOs advocating for rights. I asked Arporn what the protest was about. Their concern, she said, stemmed from the accusations some people directed at those who used the ฿ scheme of taking charity. They were worried that the HRA would wind up following a charity model when what they needed was respect for their rights. “This sort of peaceful protest, this is the Thai way,” she said before leaving me. It is historically evident that this is not the only Thai way, but I took her to be offering a prescription, or a wish, rather than simply a description of Thai society. There was, however, another aspect to the HRA that argues for Arporn’s statement. In front of microphones, spontaneously addressing meetings organized under a variety of topics by a vast array of groups—from women’s groups to HIV/AIDS researchers, to groups concerned with environmental issues or poverty—were people from marginalized ethnic or tribal groups, from peripheral regions of the country, from poverty. In short, people who had never had the invitation or opportunity to speak to and be heard by the government or by a public now had the chance to present their interests, concerns, and agendas to the HSRO and, in turn, to the Minister of Health, who was present. I watched one man hold forth in a dialect I could not identify for twenty minutes. He was thin, wore rough clothes, and looked prematurely aged but spoke forcefully. Like the protestors in the hall, nobody moved to interrupt him. What the HSRO offered people such as this man was, in other words, the opportunity to present a face to the state, to be acknowledged, probably for

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the first time. The HSRO had seen its task not just as one of producing an act to present to the prime minister but also as setting the grounds for a conversation. Significantly, the HSRO saw that as a task not for those who would come to speak for the first time but a task for itself. The plan, however, had one insurmountable flaw. Although they produced a bill to which all assented and to which Prime Minister Thaksin agreed in principle, there was no way of ensuring that he would sign it into law. In , after the HRA concluded, Dr. Ugrid explained that the prime minister’s priorities had changed, and the bill was never passed.

Adjacent Discourse, Adjacent Strategies We have seen here how particular social struggles produced the conditions under which a thing such as the NHRC could come into being and how the NHRC has, in adopting those struggles as its heritage, revalidated the most radically egalitarian of democracy movements as an essential precursor to human rights in Thailand. This heritage, though, has not been singular but has developed distinct (which is not to say unrelated) trajectories, for example, through the NGO background of many commissioners and through the MoPH that has informed much of the ONHRC approach to human rights advocacy. Part of the importance of student radicalism after , particularly after the amnesty offered to insurgents by Prime Minister Prem in the early s, is that it produced a proliferation of NGOs and a MoPH that was something of a haven for radicals. Kat told me, first, that the NGOs were much like the Marxists of old in that they privilege rural development and approach villagers directly rather than through state agencies. The difference, she continued, is that they are now not seen as radicals. The problem within the NHRC—which, she hastened to add, had both radicals and capitalists—is that when commissioners bring their NGO orientation into the NHRC, they see everything as a human rights issue that needs to be addressed through the commission. The difficulty is that it spreads the staff too thinly, as they try to keep up with a growing list of cases and a growing number of subcommittees. The ONHRC (which absorbs much of this work) had, like Dr. Chuchai, some friction with commissioners, because they see that the NGO (rather than the preventative, MoPH-inspired) approach has sent the NHRC spinning out of control and showing too little progress on human rights education and on the prevention of abuses.

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The curiosity, then, is that the prodemocracy movements of the s and s should bifurcate into two models for pursuing and protecting human rights that are not just distinct but conflict with one another within a single institution. That the discourses and practices of the different moments of the struggle for democracy circulate in different ambits, however, means that a defeat in one locale does not necessarily entail their disappearance in others. Throughout this chapter, I have argued that the claim on  October  as a route to legitimacy for the NHRC simultaneously is a claim by the NHRC for the legitimacy of  October in democratic politics and argues, by extension, for an egalitarian politics (as the inclusion of  October necessarily entails the inclusion of those leftists vilified, wounded or killed, pushed to the jungles, or returned to the fold via NGO activity). The emergence of human rights, then, has allowed Thai to revisit or reimagine old disputations in a different language and so to reanimate political energies committed to egalitarian principles. I reached a compatible conclusion with respect to Buddhism in the previous chapter and propose now that the working out or reworking of these particular disputes, debates, and problems in and through human rights not only offers different approaches to—and trajectories out of—them but also gives human rights in Thailand their particular tenor and range. In the next chapter, I carry this investigation in a different direction, examining how well-established discourses and practices in Thailand can be turned in the presence of the weaker and ill-defined discourse of human rights, becoming simultaneously stable and recognizable, yet oddly disorienting to those who work in them every day. To capture this, however, we move away from the urban, institutional setting of the NHRC and toward practices of human rights in the field.

Chapter 3

Patronage, Face, Vulnerability: Articulations of Human Rights

Late one July night in , heading north on Thailand’s Highway Four, we had pulled our minivan to the shoulder near Prachuap Khiri Khan, a provincial capital at the mouth of the Gulf of Thailand. I was with a group of lawyers and NGO workers from the Law Society of Thailand (LST, สภาทนายความ), the Thai Action Committee for Democracy in Burma (TACDB, คณะกรรมการรณรงค์ เพื่อประชาธิปไตยในพม่า), and the Labour Rights Promotion Network (LPN, มูลนิธิ เครือข่ายส่งเสริมคุณภาพชีวิตแรงงาน). We were on our return to Bangkok from the Andaman coast, where the group had been working on projects to assist Burmese migrants who survived the devastating tsunami seven months earlier. I had met Bo, my initial contact with this group, through Kat at the ONHRC several weeks earlier when he was visiting her in his capacity as the contact person between the LST’s subcommittee on human rights and the NHRC. The NHRC accomplished some of its work through this sort of network, allowing the lawyers from the LST to work under the NHRC’s auspices and, in turn, being able to support the promotion of human rights with respect to specific issues (in this case, Burmese migrant workers) without further taxing the NHRC budget or personnel. (Bo later explained that they received funding by the Asia Foundation branch in Tokyo, Japan.) Kat had suggested that we meet to give me chance to observe ground-level human rights practices, and Bo invited me to join them on their next trip to the tsunami-affected provinces in the south where they were pursuing several projects oriented to foreign migrants’ rights. On this trip, we were six in the back, playing cards and chatting, as we typically did to pass the long drives from the southern provinces Phang-nga,

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Phuket, and Ranong to Bangkok. Showing a healthy respect for police authority, we would stop playing when we neared the checkpoints that were common at that time between southern and central Thailand. The fear was that they would accuse us of gambling, both impeding the lawyers’ ability to work and giving the police leverage if the lawyers wished to investigate police for human rights violations. In the front, Jarat had been driving since dusk, and Chokchai, a senior lawyer from the LST who had joined the group for this trip, offered to trade his coveted front passenger seat—his on the strength of his seniority—with Jarat to take over the driving. The mood was light for the next thirty minutes or so, until we started to smell acrid smoke in the van, the result of the rear brake pads burning through after Chokchai forgot to release the emergency brake. Luckily, Alip, the lawyer heading up the team, knew a family some  km north where we could spend the night. In the spacious, ground-floor living room, we each took a space to sleep on the brightly patterned sheet of plastic that covered the concrete floor. I noted that everyone—despite the initial fear at being in a van trailing smoke, or the uncomfortable sleep that awaited us on this floor, or the inconvenience of delaying our return to Bangkok—had made light of the situation to mitigate Chokchai’s embarrassment. The next morning, while Jarat got the brakes fixed, I had a moment with Bo, who explained, “He is a very important lawyer, and men like that have other people drive them around. They don’t drive themselves. When he offered to drive for Jarat, it showed he had a good heart, that he did not put himself above us (ใจดี ไม่วางมาด).” With this, Bo highlighted a theme that would become important to how I would understand human rights in Thailand and that is central to this chapter. On one hand, he explicated a central feature of how status and face-work function: as subordinates to Chokchai, an important man, members of the team sought to help him save face over an embarrassing situation. At the same time, Bo alerted me to an important modulation of human rights work in Thailand: even while human rights concepts remained difficult for most Thai to describe, they would find expression through and articulation with longstanding, ubiquitous forms of Thai sociality like face-work, the observance of status, and the dynamics of patronage networks. Such articulations of human rights give them a particular shape but also disturb those forms of sociality with which they make contact. A distinction here from the previous two chapters is that, while there are standing debates in religious and political realms into which human rights enable novel entry points, the forms of sociality I consider here do not sus-

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tain such broad debates. I look in this chapter at how social actors’ uses of human rights actively manipulate the conventions and contexts (like social status, face-work, and patron-client relationships) in which they are used and how human rights are in turn themselves formed by or undergo reformation within these social contexts. I show how these manipulations are highly visible in the case of foreign (and, especially, Burmese) migrants, who on the whole remain outside the forms of status, face-work, and patronage in everyday Thai sociality. I argue, finally, that manipulation of these conventions and contexts to mitigate the extreme vulnerability of foreign migrants requires, paradoxically, that social conventions favoring relatively powerful people continue their ordinary functioning in order to aid these most vulnerable groups. In this way, human rights may acquire new force that can put considerable pressure on certain agents of the state, like the police. It is not that the police and military officers or prison wardens necessarily become converts to the cause of human rights but that the pressure of such micro-considerations as saving face vis-à-vis human rights lawyers produces a situation with novel effects, like acknowledging that Burmese migrants and victims of trafficking have access to some rights. The interests of these migrants thereby become connected to relations of status and patronage in which they do not themselves participate.

Extraordinary, Everyday Settings Following the  December  tsunami that devastated Thailand’s Andaman coastline, Burmese migrants in the southern provinces of Ranong, Phang-nga, and Phuket, in addition to wrenching losses of family and home, also lost their claim on legal employment and habitation when their work permits and visas were washed to sea. I look here at how lawyers from the LST, working in coordination with the NHRC, focused on the specific vulnerabilities that the Burmese migrants faced and examine the ways in which the lawyers’ group used human rights as a way to address these vulnerabilities. Significantly, they did not use human rights as if ready-made but articulated them with and through rank, patronage, and face-saving work to provide them with force enough to span the divide between a commitment to human rights principles and the practicalities of action. This oscillation between the novel (human rights) and the familiar (social conventions), as well as its attendant disorienting effects, occasioned political and legal experimentation

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with human rights. This experimentation, through concrete actions and practices around human rights, and the particular discourses mobilized in their aid had a definitive effect on local understandings of what human rights are and can do. One might feel justified in asking why experimentation with human rights (attaching them in novel ways to social conventions) was necessary at all. Part of the answer lies with the nature of the NHRC. The  National Human Rights Commission Act provided the NHRC no coercive legal powers, the force of law, and so, if human rights were to have force, they would have to discover it elsewhere. The very uncertainty surrounding the powers of human rights and the NHRC, though, offered novel opportunities for individuals and organizations lacking the ability to coerce compliance from agents of the state to claim the protection of rights. This is visible in the work of the LST with Burmese tsunami survivors, especially given the heightened vulnerability experienced by this population, unclear as its members were of what rights they had or how to claim them. Vulnerability (to extreme exploitation, arbitrary incarceration, violence, and so forth) is in some ways elemental to their everyday lives. Addressing the most egregious manifestations of that vulnerability through human rights is, by contrast, out of the ordinary. In part, this has to do with these migrants’ vulnerability as Burmese in Thailand, which is to say, as a particularly reviled group facing unusual hurdles to claiming rights (the specificities of which I will address in a moment). This status forced a measure of creativity on the lawyers seeking ways to advocate on the migrants’ behalf, and the experiments they (like others at the NHRC) undertook both constitute what human rights are while also reconstituting in subtle but important ways the existing social conventions through and to which they articulate human rights. Before describing these experiments, it is necessary to account for the special animosity many Thai reserve for Burmese.

Burmese Migrants in Thailand The fact of Burmese migrants in Thailand, both legal and undocumented, is incomparable to the existence of any other group there because of the details of the Thai-Burmese relationship. In their shared history of mutual conquest, a watershed moment was the  destruction of the Siamese capital of Ayutthaya, which has left an important mark on contemporary relations between Thai and Burmese. As Baker and Pasuk put it, following an extended

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offensive, “Ayutthaya was besieged and sacked for a second time by armies from the Burmese capital of Ava. The destruction was so violent that later historical writing portrayed Burma as a constant aggressor, and the defence against Burmese attacks as the central theme of Thai history” (Baker and Pasuk , ). This picture of Thai-Burmese history has embedded in Thai society the idea of the Burmese as Thailand’s arch enemy, a view several Thai scholars take to be constitutive of Thai national identity (Pavin ; Thongchai , ). We will see in greater detail below the dangerous implications that this perception has for Burmese migrants. Despite these dangers, however, there remains a high volume of migration from Burma to Thailand. Although there are many reasons for migrating, among the most significant influences on migration patterns have been the protracted internal wars in Burma since  (Lang , , –). Lang notes that the Burmese army’s first concerted effort to maintain an offensive through the monsoon season, from  to , led to a sharp increase in movement to Thailand from the border provinces. Further, the ability of the army in  to  (for the first time) to hold and establish bases in areas won during the monsoons resulted in a still greater exodus and a large, sustained refugee presence in Thailand (Lang , , ). Before the  to  offensive, the army was unable to mount monsoon-season attacks, and outmigration was seasonal and temporary. People returned to their villages at the end of the dry season (Lang , ff.). Pasuk, Sungsidh, and Nualnoi also note a sustained growth in illegal Burmese migrant workers in Thailand from the early to mid-s, ranging from an estimated , in  to , by  (Pasuk et al. , –). Cross-border migration, then, springs from a range of factors, including increasing exposure to indentured labor, coercive (and arbitrary) taxation, transgressions against person and property, and the forced relocation of villages (Lang , –; Pasuk et al. , ). The proximity of Ranong, Phang-nga, and Phuket provinces to southern Burma and the Andaman Sea has made them major centers for migrants seeking work in various economic sectors, including rubber tapping, construction, fishing, and related industries. Ban Nam Khem, in Phang-nga, had both a substantial Burmese population and was especially hard hit by the tsunami. In this low-lying area, the tsunami clawed its way a kilometer inland, destroying even sturdy, concrete buildings. An immediate result for many Burmese in the area was the disappearance of all of their property, including documents showing them to be working legally in Thailand. The Thai government quickly established DNA testing procedures to identify

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recovered bodies, which it put under the control of the police. Police control, however, left Burmese apprehensive about this program, given a long history of distrust between Burmese migrants and the police that made it difficult for them to place trust in the police now. As the local office of the UN, which had been involved in coordinating relief operations, found, “While Thai citizens were provided with a list of the dead and had opportunities to avail themselves of State sponsored DNA testing for identification purposes, most migrants fearing arrest and deportation have not come forward to identify and care for the remains of loved ones killed by the tsunami” (IOM/UNHCR/UNIFEM/UNOHCHR/WB , ). The project on which the lawyers were working when I joined them was an NGO-run DNA testing facility at the Ban Nam Khem health center. This facility had been organized with Burmese NGO members in Thailand, who contacted the community in Ban Nam Khem and whose presence was intended to put the families at ease. Htoo Chit, the founder of the Thailandbased Burmese NGO “Tsunami Action Group” (TAG), told me in an interview that some of the migrants injured or left homeless by the tsunami were so afraid of contact with Thai officials that they had fled to and remained in the jungle east of Ban Nam Khem. Despite injuries, scarce food and water, and poor shelter, their fear was such that they would not come back to the town. With such acute anxiety, Htoo Chit recognized the need to have a Burmese-staffed NGO involved in DNA testing. He himself had been a student in Burma at the time of the  August  democracy demonstrations in Rangoon and had taken to the Thai-Burmese hinterland to fight the Burmese junta. He had succeeded in gaining asylum and now held a U.S. passport but remained in the borderlands, engaging in NGO work to support Burmese migrants in Thailand. Through this work, he established connections with Burmese communities and organizations in the area. After the tsunami hit, he moved to Khao Lak, where Ban Nam Khem is located, to establish TAG and focus on the needs of migrants harmed by the tsunami. Htoo Chit was our primary contact in Ban Nam Khem, as Alip, the senior lawyer in the group, knew him through work with the Thai Action Committee for Democracy in Burma (TACDB). While this connection facilitated networking with the other organizations involved in the DNA testing facility, it also allowed for amplification of the scope of their work to include human rights. The lawyers’ principal work was meeting with foreign migrants to explain that the Thai constitution provided them certain rights, such as freedom from arbitrary arrest or harassment by the police, or that their

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employers could not restrict their movement or refuse to pay them. The stakes here, however, were especially high, as the tsunami had exacerbated existing and perceived vulnerabilities on just these counts. This lack of trust or sense of threat had a constitutive role in Burmese migrants’ everyday lives.

Vulnerabilities One of the striking features of Burmese migrants’ lives is that their legal status has little bearing on their sense of vulnerability. The absence of trust (with one’s home state, with the state where one has taken asylum, with the citizens of this new state) is a common condition of the refugee (Lang , ; Daniel and Knudsen ). Migrants I encountered described their relationship to Thailand and to Thai in strikingly similar terms. For instance, if a Burmese migrant fell victim to a crime, he or she would not consider going to the police, fearing that any investigation would implicate them in something illegal even if their papers were in order and they had committed no crime. This is why Htoo Chit assumed that the Burmese near Ban Nam Khem would only place trust in a nongovernmental DNA testing program to identify their dead if Burmese NGO members worked directly with them. That the presence of TAG and of the Seafarers’ Union of Burma was enough to convince some sixty families to come on that first day of DNA testing demonstrates that mistrust was surmountable. Even through disaster, a sense of community persisted for these migrants, principally with other Burmese, even over separations of language and ethnicity (Mon and Burmese). Two later meetings with Burmese families shed some light on these conflicting aspects of their lives. On our first visit to Mahachai, an important port  km southwest of Bangkok, on the final bend of the Tha Chin River before the Gulf of Thailand and one of the region’s largest fish-processing cities, I met Un (who worked at the LPN) and a police lieutenant colonel from Bangkok investigating child labor, focusing particularly on foreigners. We went to a low apartment block that backed onto one of the canals running through the city. Taking the cement stairs to the second of three floors, we made our way down a dim, tidy hallway to an open door. Inside the single room there were two men, a woman, and two children. The room was unfurnished and undecorated except for a portable stereo and a poster of Mahasi Sayadaw, a famous monk revered in Burma. There was a small kitchen (possibly leading to a bathroom

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that was not visible) with the only window, off the back of the room, which was roughly  m. Along the wall were the rolled mats on which they slept. The woman, Thong, who was mother to one of the children, told us she had been in Thailand for seven years. (One brother, aged thirty-two, was father to the other child, and the third man was her twenty-year-old brother.) At age twenty-three when, she said, she had no longer had parents and so nobody to raise her, Thong made her first trip with a friend, through Mae Sot, a small city due west of Phitsanulok, at the southern edge of northern Thailand. She spent two weeks and then returned home to Mawlamyine, a Mon port on the Gulf of Martaban, opposite Mae Sot. She came back, though, soon after, this time to Ranong. Her third and last trip brought her to Mahachai. On the first trip, she paid the driver ฿, ($–$), and the final two she paid ฿, ($–$) each time, the trips lasting two or three days. Reflecting some of the pressures cited by Lang (raids, taxation, forced labor, and forced resettlement by the army) and by Pasuk and colleagues (repressive Burmese government policies toward the Mon, Shan, and Karen), Thong explained her and her brothers’ migrations in terms of scarce opportunities to make more money in Thailand than in Burma. Further, the army, which appropriated upward of one-tenth of a household’s harvest, had mandatory service for men at the age of twenty, which her brothers desperately wished to avoid (Lang , ff.; Pasuk et al. , , ). For Thong, the compulsory absence of her brothers and husband would have restricted her to around ฿ ($–$) per month. Thong said she had worked in many provinces in Thailand, doing whatever work was available, from construction to working in industries related to fisheries. For construction, she made ฿ ($) per day, and in the shrimp-processing plant where she worked from five in the morning until four in the afternoon, she made ฿, ($) in monthly wages. She said she was happy working there because she had a good boss, could take her daughter to work with her, and got to eat lunch at work. Thong shared the apartment with her three brothers and her husband, collectively paying ฿, ($) in monthly rent. The building was mostly inhabited by other Mon and Burmese migrants, among whom there were few disputes. The brothers, who spoke only in Mon, through Thong said that their main conflicts were with Thai, who targeted, in particular, Burmese women. If there was a dispute between Burmese and Thai, however, the police would arrest the Burmese, perhaps only jailing them temporarily, without deporting them. It would depend on the officer, Thong added, but

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her implication was clear: she and her brothers feared altercations with Thai because they believed any police involvement carried with it the threat of deportation. If Burmese fought with one another, on the other hand, the police tended not to get involved. Whatever the case, the police were of little help to the Burmese, and if they had a problem with the police, they knew of nobody to ask for help. Although the migrants experience considerable barriers to becoming part of the Thai community and polity in Mahachai, they do rely on community ties created by the presence of other Burmese in the area. Thus, Thong’s brothers did not speak Thai, but because they lived in an apartment building populated largely by Burmese, they could rely on others to help them in times of need. It was clear during our interviews with them that their social circulation was limited to other Burmese or Mon, and they could survive with minimal interchange with Thai people. There is a substantial Burmese population in Mahachai (one LPN worker put it at around , in a city with a total population of ,). One of the markers of that population is the presence on an otherwise unoccupied tract of land in Mahachai of a Burmese-style Buddhist temple (Figure ) that many Burmese used as a staging ground for youth dance recitals, a meeting place to conduct English classes for adults, and a place to practice Buddhism. The prominent display of the Mahasi Sayadaw poster in Thong’s apartment and the importance of the temple for the social life of Mahachai Burmese shows that they remain attached to aspects of their Burmese Buddhist identity (that is, a Thai-style temple and Thai celebrations of Buddhism will not suffice), but it also shows that they could create a community away from home. Thai in Mahachai, furthermore, were not insensitive to the lot of their Burmese neighbors, not least the types of abuse to which they were vulnerable from employers. Late in August , I joined Un in Mahachai again, this time accompanying her as she was undertaking a survey on Burmese labor for the Institute for Population and Social Research at Mahidol University. We visited several fish-processing plants in the area, as they are major employers of Burmese labor. Un introduced me as a researcher interested in studying “Thai life” but made no mention of human rights with respect to my research or her own. She told me later that she avoids talking about rights with employers and focuses instead on questions about the lives of workers. In the context of such an interview, she knew that the language of rights would immediately provoke defensiveness and stall the conversation, and she would learn nothing about the lives of Burmese migrants working in Mahachai.

Figure . Burmese Buddhist temple, Mahachai. Photo: author

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Threats of Human Trafficking A week after meeting Thong in Mahachai, the lawyers’ team went with Htoo Chit and some members of the Seafarers’ Union to meet with a family in Phuket whose youngest boy had died after a tuk-tuk (three-wheeled taxi) hit him when he fled from police. Their home was down a mud track, behind a metalworking shop. It had a single room with a concrete floor partially covered by a patterned plastic sheet and cinderblock walls, the air vents at the top of which were roughly sealed with cement. Light came through a clear piece of corrugated plastic that made up part of the ceiling. Although larger, this apartment bore a noteworthy resemblance to the apartment in Mahachai in that it, too, had a poster of Mahasi Sayadaw and no furnishings beyond a TV and a VCD player in a small cabinet. There was a tiny room holding a kitchen and firewood behind the one in which we met, into and out of which family and friends moved. The lawyers, with Htoo Chit interpreting, interviewed Meo, the older sister of the seventeen-year-old boy. With a dozen friends and family members behind her, Meo told Bo and Alip that she lived with five brothers and three sisters, though only four remained (she did not say which). Their father was dead, and their mother still lived in Dawei, Burma. Meo reported that it costs ฿, to ฿, ($–$) to come to Thailand by boat or bus. They had been in Phuket for ten years, working mostly in jobs related to fishing, earning around ฿, ($) each per month. Ten to fifteen people lived in the apartment, for which the monthly rent was ฿, ($), but because many of the men worked on fishing boats, they were away for weeks at a time. Her brother Zaw, she recounted, had been selling tourist trinkets on a major street in Phuket when, at around : p.m., the police began to arrest all the Burmese vendors in the area, whether they had work permits (as Zaw had) or not. The difficulties foreign migrant workers faced, Meo explained, was that their employer would typically keep the original copies of their work permits and give a photocopy to the worker. If the police officers felt so inclined, they would arrest the workers, claiming that photocopies would not do, and the workers would remain in jail until the employer came with the original permits to secure their release. There was, however, no certainty when the employer would come, and the workers could spend several days in jail with no assurance at all that they would get out. Zaw, therefore, fled when he spotted the police, running into traffic, where the tuk-tuk hit him. The driver took him to the hospital, where he remained in a coma for ten days.

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Meo’s older sister paid the basic ฿ fee, but they were afraid both to go to the hospital and to go to the police. When, on  June, Zaw died, the family gave ฿, ($) to the police in order to get his body released from the hospital. In some respects, both of these families (Thong’s and Meo’s) enjoyed a degree of stability and a number of opportunities. They typically had documents that allowed them to work, they could find fairly regular employment, and they could maintain long-term housing. Thong had been able to give birth in a hospital, they could travel back and forth between Burma and Thailand, and they had both the savings and the means to send or take money to families still in Burma. In other ways, however, their lives were precarious. They could not depend on the police for protection and lived under the constant threat of extortion, arbitrary arrest, and possible deportation, whatever their legal status. The gravity of the threat of deportation became clear the next day when Bo, Alip, and Htoo Chit invited me to talk about human rights at a meeting for Burmese workers, titled “Training Program for the Expansion of Labour Rights and Opportunities Among the Labour Network,” sponsored by the TACDB and the LST, with the assistance of the Migrant Assistance Program, based in Pakarang, Phang-nga. I spoke in English, and Htoo Chit translated into Burmese and Mon. It was clear, however, that he was embellishing on what I said as he saw fit. Toward the end, after a particularly lengthy elaboration, he paused, glancing at me and saying, “I added some things . . . should we take some questions?” One of the workers addressed us, saying that the threat many of them felt was that if they were deported, Thai border police, colluding with Burmese police or military personnel at the border, would sell the workers to a trafficking ring (in which officials on both sides were involved). This was the sort of context Htoo Chit had in mind when, at the DNA testing facility, he told me how devastating it was for these workers to have lost their documents during the tsunami. A new work permit would cost between ฿, and ฿, ($–$), forcing the workers to consider working without a permit until they had enough saved for a new permit, in which case they faced the risks of being arrested without being able to prove they had, until the tsunami, the appropriate permissions to live and work in Thailand. Whatever the opportunities and risks these migrants encountered by staying in Thailand, the tsunami amplified their vulnerabilities by exposing them to increased exploitation, as they fell into more desperate and precari-

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ous situations than they had been with respect to community dislocation; lost savings, property, and housing; uncertain legal status; and diminished job opportunities (as many construction sites, fishing vessels, factories, and plantations had been destroyed). The projects of the network of NGOs that formed after the tsunami were directed exactly at finding social resources to mitigate this vulnerability.

Networks Thus far, I have described the vulnerabilities of the Burmese migrants as they related these to us in the course of the work that the human rights advocates and NGOs undertook. I turn my attention now to the processes through which the lawyers’ group gathered information about human right abuses and the strategies it devised for dealing with these abuses in the Burmese population. One of the projects the lawyers undertook in Ban Nam Khem was the forging of connections with NGOs at work in the area that have close relations with the Burmese communities. TAG introduced the lawyers to Shin, who was a leader of the Seafarers’ Union of Burma, which was active in the region because of the large number of Burmese working on fishing vessels out of Phang-nga and Phuket harbors. The Seafarers’ Union of Burma sent the report below to the lawyers in early August. It describes the sort of abuse to which foreign workers were increasingly vulnerable. The report shows first how networks form and function, the importance of which I pointed out above with the involvement of Burmese NGOs in the DNA testing project. Late in August , the LPN held a training session with Mahachaibased Burmese migrants that provides a comparison with the Pakarang “Training Program.” After some games to set the fifty or so participants at ease, everyone took a seat on the floor, and the LPN director taped a handdrawn poster to the wall and used it to describe the process of claiming rights if an employer abuses a worker (see Figure ). It went clockwise from the left as follows: a worker witnesses or experiences abuse by an employer. She or he goes to the community, within which someone (as an example, the director suggested those at the meeting) will contact the LPN and/or a lawyer. If she or he contacts the LPN, one of its members will contact a lawyer, who will then advise all those involved on how to proceed.

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Figure . LPN poster. Photo: author.

The situation in Khao Lak, Phang-nga province, seemed less straightforward. Rather than being simply responsive, as the LPN would be in this situation, organizations actively sought out contacts within communities, local NGOs, national organizations, and regional groups. The LST group with whom I traveled, for example, sent a member, Yung, to the area for several weeks in May and June to establish contact with the Burmese community through local NGOs like the Seafarers’ Union and TAG. Prior to this, it had approached the Asia Foundation with a funding proposal to support its project to assist foreign migrants affected by the tsunami. It also sought international support with the International Organization for Migration (IOM) for funding and logistical assistance with specific parts of the project. (The IOM facilitated the DNA testing program, for example, but was not involved in the rights advocacy/instruction initiatives.) Alip, the senior LST lawyer in this group, was also a coordinator with the TACDB, which had contacts among the Burmese NGOs, most significantly Htoo Chit, of TAG. At the same time, organizations in Phang-nga, like TAG and Medical Assistance Programs (MAP), drew on established connections, for example, to organizations such as World Vision, which provided much of the medical service received by Burmese migrants in the area (in particular, care associated with pregnancy), and the Seafarers’ Union of Burma, with its

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connections to Burmese labor in Phang-nga and Phuket. The LPN drawing, then, depicts a local state of affairs for the Mahachai region, but the formation of networks around the tsunami was more complex, denser, and more extensive. The second thing the Seafarers’ Union report gives us is a glimpse at the sort of abuse to which workers became more vulnerable after the tsunami, with their compromised legal, financial, and domestic circumstances. I will discuss a particular case of human trafficking with similarities to that described by the report, but first I will turn to a description of face-work because, as we shall see, it triggered motivating affects through deeply embedded ideas of face, rank, and patronage in Thai sociality. This, in turn, provided the force used to bridge the gap between an intellectual allegiance to rights at the level of discourse and effective action at the level of practice.

Status and Face Most scholars acknowledge a deep concern for and attention to social status among Thai, tending to focus their studies on conventional greetings and uses of language (Bechstedt , –, esp. , ). Scholars of Thai society less often address the associated concern with maintaining face. Rank, status, patron-client relationships, and saving face (รักษาหน้า) do not provide cultural scripts that actors follow automatically but do form a constellation of concerns that arise within a particular history (for example, the heritage of social ranks taken as an expression of kamma, as I discussed earlier) and to which social actors in Thailand attend with utmost care. This constellation of concerns rises out of deeply textured relations articulated at many levels of social life involving social power and force, threat, vulnerability, subjectivity, cosmology, social networks, morals and ethics, and conventions of address and speech (Akin , ; Mulder  [], ). I will show below how the lawyers I accompanied made the conventions of facework into a resource for human rights and, in so doing, deftly inverted the usual flow of power and status that face-work preserves. Although I will emphasize the importance of face-work in an official setting, sensitivity to face and one’s relative rank figures in all social interaction (see L. Hanks , ; Herzfeld , –). Smooth relations require that one know if one’s interlocutor is a superior or a subordinate so that each can act appropriately with the other in ordinary exchanges (see, especially,

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Sophorntavy , –). In short, face-work is a feature of everyday sociality. I learned about the ubiquitous, quotidian qualities of face through my own mistakes (rather as one learning a language discovers usage through mistakes as much as or more than through correct speech). When Thai greet one another, each will wai—raise one’s hands, palms together, before one’s face. The greater the difference in status, the higher will be the subordinate’s hands and the lower the superior’s. Further, the subordinate should greet the superior first. I learned this through an error I was, early in my fieldwork, making with sufficient frequency that it was unsettling my friend Alif. I was staying in a hotel near the old quarter of Bangkok and frequented a noodle stall at the foot of a bridge over the Banglamphu canal. I had become friends with Noi, the proprietor of the stall, and with other vendors nearby. An elderly woman lived and worked beside the canal, where she also raised her grandchild, Muk, and so I regularly passed them to get to Noi’s stall. When I saw Muk, I would say hello and wai her. Alif had noticed that I would sometimes greet her before she greeted me. As I was older than Muk, Alif told me I should wait for her to greet me before returning her wai. I was, he let me know gently, embarrassing myself. Thus, can one lose face in ordinary ways. A crucial element of Thai face-work is protecting one’s superiors from losing face. I learned this when I was first in Thailand, staying with a Bangkok family for several weeks, during which time I helped twelve-year-old Tukata with her English homework. The sound made in English by “th” as in “think” does not exist in Thai and is especially difficult for most native Thai speakers to pronounce (a difficulty comparable to that, for native English speakers, of starting a word with “ng,” as occurs in Thai). Tukata had been unable to master these sounds on her own, so we spent a balmy July afternoon seated at a table in the breezeway between the two main buildings at her home, working on developing this facility. She was attentive, working diligently until she was able to pronounce English “th” words with ease, an accomplishment of which she was justifiably proud. The next day, after school, I asked her if her teacher had been pleased that Tukata could now pronounce “that” and other “th” words, like an English speaker. She told me she had not revealed her new capability but had continued to speak as she had before. It seemed that her teacher could not pronounce “th” as a native English speaker would, and so Tukata, as the student, did not want to show up the teacher and did not want her teacher to lose face. While Tukata’s behavior exemplifies the sort of sensitivity to one’s situation that is necessary

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to save another from embarrassment or to keep from showing up a superior, it merits note that under other circumstances, the loss of face can have violent, sometimes lethal consequences. It is, then, both ubiquitous and pressing for all participants in ordinary sociality. The concern with preserving the face of one’s superiors is especially acute in patron-client relationships, which are a feature of many relationships in Thai society. Earlier, I explored some of the common explanations of social inequality that rely on Buddhist articles of faith. Some, however, argue that forms of patronage that characterize Thai society—this basic structure of social inequality, with the form of indebtedness to one’s superiors—begins with childhood socialization into a sense of indebtedness to one’s parents (Bechstedt , –; Mulder  [], –). The concern that one’s inferiors will cause one to lose face begins with the model of parental anxiety over children’s behavior. This picture of social stratification is distinct but compatible with the view that status ideology derives from Buddhist doctrine (Akin , ). To reiterate, the latter idea holds that one’s status reflects kamma, as derived from past lives and actions, so that wealth and power index one’s merit, and poverty or suffering indicates comparatively less merit. It follows, then, that those with power deserve it and deserve respect. One with fewer material and social resources should seek patronage from these individuals, as their temporal power and cosmological merit will offer some security and protection (L. Hanks ). Pasuk and Sungsidh summarize patronage succinctly: “Little people must find a patron and offer respect, gifts and services in order to ensure favor and security. Big people try to build up their clientele in order to maximize the flow of gifts and favors. People in high office must generate enough money to provide resources and protection for their followers in order to maintain their loyalty in the context of keen competition among different factions” (Pasuk and Sungsidh , –). It is important to distinguish between two sorts of loss of face. First, naa taek (หน้าแตก) means literally cracked face and is generally less serious (in both implications and the reaction of the one suffering it) than sia naa (เสีย หน้า) or lost face. Naa taek was explained to me as a joke made at one’s expense. (More exactly, I was told “someone makes a joke about you, but you do not laugh, you are serious.”) On the last day I was with the team, returning from the south to Bangkok, I experienced an example of this directly. We stopped that evening at a beach resort in Prachuap Kiri Khan and stayed up late chatting and playing cards. Early the next morning, Yung went around the bungalow awakening everyone to get us all to go out to the beach. While Jarat

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(the driver) and the younger members of the group went, I, like Alip and Bo, chose to go back to sleep, but I unsuccessfully suppressed my irritation at having been roused. Later, as we were packing to leave, Alip, with characteristic humor, laughed out, “Yung bothered Don this morning, right?” I replied, “Yes, bothered. .  .  .” Yung, obviously feeling snubbed, muttered “bothered” under his breath and remained sullen until we left. Several things are important in this apparently trivial exchange. First, Alip’s position as Yung’s superior in age and in position (as the head of the team) allowed him to make a joke about Yung at which all could laugh, without the threat of impropriety. Second, the joke was one at which Yung himself could not laugh, because within the joke Alip was chiding him for bothering someone older than Yung himself. Third, Alip, in making this joke, and I, in confirming the truth of the accusation within it, embarrassed Yung before his peers and those subordinate to him in both age and position within the team, while at the same time leaving him without the occasion to defend himself against the charge, deflect the embarrassment by joining in the laughter, or follow Alip’s joke with one of his own. He did offer an excuse for his behavior—that he had wanted everyone to go have fun at the beach—but the fact that he felt the need to offer an excuse confirmed his embarrassment. He had not lost face, in the sense of sia naa, and so did not have to defend his honor. He was simply embarrassed. From then on, however, he kept his interaction with me to a terse minimum, showing that suffering naa taek is not without its own gravity. While Thai told me that face depends upon having a position in society, such that peasants, for example, would have little at stake in this regard, I argue that concerns over preserving one’s face do not correlate strictly to holding a high status. Two examples that occurred during the period of my fieldwork demonstrate what I have in mind. The first happened in a city south of Bangkok where I taught English once a week to Burmese children at the LPN office. As in Bangkok, residents of Mahachai depended upon motorcycle taxis for short trips around the city. Like their counterparts in other cities, these motorcycle taxi drivers had found rising fuel prices increasingly stressful as their small incomes remained the same. As a friend from Mahachai told me the story, a group of motorcycle taxi drivers agreed to increase their fare from ฿ to ฿ (roughly $. to $.). One of the drivers, a woman, accused another, in the presence of several drivers, of undercutting them all by surreptitiously going back on the agreement and keeping his fare at ฿.

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He responded by shooting and killing the female driver, driving himself home, and killing himself with the same gun. The second case comes from northern Thailand, in the Fang district of Chiang Mai. A traffic police officer waved down a pickup truck that had just run through a red light. A passenger in the truck, which carried a second passenger and the driver, got into a heated argument with the officer, repeatedly insulting him before a gathering crowd. Witnesses say the passenger was shoving the senior sergeant-major as he wrote a ticket, denigrating his rank while claiming that he, the passenger, had the influence to get the officer transferred. The officer, by accounts without any outward reaction, drew his gun, telling the passenger to stop insulting him. The passenger dared the officer to shoot, and he did, killing all three in the truck. (Two died at the scene, and the other died the next day.) Finally, the officer shot himself in the head, dying the following day. A fellow officer interviewed in the media said that all traffic officers face belligerence as part of their job but that this particular officer “felt so humiliated and strongly insulted that he could not hold it back any longer.” Media coverage also noted that the police station’s superintendent had called a meeting of traffic and patrol police that morning to remind them to enforce traffic laws and provide good service, as outlined by the regional commissioner’s policies. The way that these stories complicate the idea of face-work is that they depart from the presupposition that preserving face is a concern of elites alone. In the case of the traffic officer, it seems crucial both that he was an officer, holding a moderate rank, and also that the passenger tried to demean the officer by exclaiming that he occupied a modest rank—so low, in fact that he would have less influence with his superiors than the passenger would have. The threat to have the officer transferred, then, is both a denial of the officer’s authority and a threat to protection from his superiors. Finally, the fact that it came from someone at best his equal but whom he may well have thought his inferior (he was aged forty-nine, the driver was forty-four, the one insulting him was forty-five, and the second passenger twenty-two) would mean it need not receive the equanimity that such charges would require when coming from a superior. One of the most important features of this scene, though, is that it occurred in public before a crowd of onlookers; the insult and embarrassment could not be limited to the officer and people in the car but was an insult publicly given, a humiliation witnessed by a number of onlookers.

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We may balance the smaller size of the crowd before which the motorcycle taxi driver was accused of undercutting his peers against the fact of the particular gender dynamic (a man being accused by a woman) and that his fellow drivers constituted this crowd. It strikes me as important that both cases occurred publicly, in the presence of people before whom the shamed parties could not tolerate being insulted, and that the insult came from, at best, an equal. Finally, these were not simply jokes made at someone’s expense (as with Yung), causing nothing more than embarrassment. I do not claim that face was the only factor in these men’s reactions to heated confrontations. The point is not that because someone challenges your honor, you must kill that person, as if by programming. Still, though insults to one’s face do not have programmatic responses, neither can one simply ignore them. One must respond somehow, just as one must respond to an apology, even if to decline it, in the face of the implications that accepting or denying it might entail. These cases revise my understanding of face-work because neither one of the men who killed first others and then himself was a member of the Thai elite. They demonstrate that one seeks to save face based on the relative positions occupied by oneself and the one who would initiate, or who actualizes, loss of face. Face-work, then, is a matter not just of elite status but of relative status, or what Sophorntavy describes as status situationality: whether or not you have face enough to lose varies with the specific relationship to those around you (Sophorntavy , –). That is not, however, all there is to say on the subject. In neither case was the loss of face directly a violation of the law (that is, the driver had violated a traffic law, but saying hurtful things to the officer—the proximal cause of his losing face—was not illegal), and so there was no legal recourse to recover face. Indeed, as Engel and Engel demonstrate, even in tort cases where there is a violation of law and so a legal case to be made, social dislocations of urbanization, migration within the country, and forces of globalization produce a counterintuitive decline in inclinations to find justice in the courts (Engel and Engel ). In both of these cases (which, we note, were of sufficient popular interest to circulate in the press and in casual conversation), individuals of limited means responded immediately and with lethal force to the loss of face. We can see that the loss of face was intolerable, but the acts directed against the offender did not recover lost face, hence the ensuing suicide, as the intolerability of lost face remained compounded by homicide.

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In cases of elites confronting the threat of losing face, the tempo of response is often slower and of a longer duration. There is, for example, frequent reporting in the press on members of the political and/or economic elite suing others for defamation. (Importantly, we can already see that this move elevates loss of face to give it a juridical standing.) These can involve two sorts of strategies. One is to sue someone of lesser means who has made allegations against you. (Note, here, that the reverse seldom, if ever, happens because those without resources cannot sustainably marshal the legal system against those who do on these sorts of issues.) If he or she has not got the resources to survive a protracted trial, you can in effect force a public retraction of an allegation. Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra was involved in several such cases, the most famous of which is a $,, libel suit filed by his Shin Corporation against Supinya Klangnarong over a  article she wrote for the Thai Post suggesting a mutually beneficial relationship between the Thaksin government and Shin Corporation (as local reportage called it). This story has been covered extensively in the press, though it is not the only libel suit that Prime Minister Thaksin has initiated. Not long after Thaksin fled to self-imposed exile in , the criminal court dismissed the case, and Shin Corporation (by then sold to Singapore’s Temasek Holdings) dropped the civil suit soon thereafter. The strategy clearly failed in this case, though it is hard to be sure it would have unfolded the same way had Thaksin remained in Thailand as prime minister. The second strategy is to pursue the case, supposing that victory will compel your opponent to make a public retraction. For example, the former national police commissioner, Sant Sarutanond, won a ฿,, ($,) award in a defamation case he filed in . In September , MajorGeneral Kattiya Sawatdipol launched a signature campaign to have Sant removed from his post, alleging that he was corrupt. In October the following year, Sant sued for defamation. The ruling stipulated that, in addition to the fine, Kattiya must publish the court ruling in major daily newspapers for three consecutive days and pay Sant’s legal costs. A more recent case clearly illustrates the first strategy. In July , a newspaper in Phuket, Phuketwan, published a story on the trafficking of Rohingya fleeing Burma. The article quoted a passage from the Reuter’s investigation that would later win a Pulitzer Prize and that asserted the participation of the Royal Thai Navy in this human trafficking. The passage said, specifically, that some naval officers “work systematically with smugglers to

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profit from the surge in fleeing Rohingya,” for which they can expect around ฿, ($) per Rohingya (cited in Human Rights Watch ). The following year, Phuketwan editor Alan Morison and reporter Chutima Siasathian were arrested on charges brought by the Royal Thai Navy of criminal defamation and violation of the Computer Crime Act. The charges carried potential sentences of seven years, as well as fines of ฿, ($,) (see Murdoch , ; Australian Broadcasting Corporation ; Human Rights Watch , ; Dawson ). Organizations like Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, Forum Asia, and ASEAN Parliamentarians for Human Rights applied sustained pressure on the Yingluck Shinawatra and Genera Prayuth Chan-ocha governments to drop the charges, pointing out that the charges contradicted Thai obligations under Article  of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, as well as its own policies, as presented in its  October  national report to the Universal Periodic Review (UPR) process of the UN Human Rights Council. Human Rights Watch quoted this report: The right to freedom of opinion and expression is the bedrock of Thailand’s democratic society. The Constitution guarantees freedom of a person to express opinions, make speeches, write, print and publicize; prohibits the closure, interference or censorship of a newspaper or other mass media; and bans politicians from owning media outlets. Thailand also plays host to numerous international press agencies, civil society organizations and international NGOs, all of which attest to the free atmosphere that is conducive to news reporting and the free flow of information. (Human Rights Watch ) That the Royal Thai Navy chose to respond to its public shaming, having been revealed to violate the Thai state’s international human rights commitments and its stated policy on freedom of expression, reinforces the idea that whole institutions, not just individuals, are prone to loss of face (and specifically that the face-losing actions of individuals within the institution threaten to infect the institution as a whole). Given superior resources, though, the Royal Thai Navy undertook the strategy outlined above: use the courts to exhaust the relatively meager resources of those who have shamed you and force from them a retraction, an apology, and, if possible, acceptance of a fine or incarceration as punishment. In fact, the Royal Thai Navy did succeed in severely depleting Morison’s life savings (Murdoch ) and wearing down

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both Morison and Chutima through two years of prosecution. Ultimately, though, the charges were thrown out, with Morison and Chutima acquitted of all charges. That the prosecution recognized the spuriousness of the charges is partly revealed by the fact that it simply stopped showing up to court toward the end (Dawson ). It is also noteworthy that the prosecution elected to undertake this retaliatory prosecution of a small news agency (Phuketwan), leaving the original authors of the offending passage (Reuters) uncharged (Murdoch ). It is clear from this choice who the Royal Thai Navy, as an institution with face enough to lose, thought it could successfully intimidate and who it would not attempt to coerce into an apology. During the writing of this chapter, Kat brought a similar case to my attention. The Internal Security Operations Command (ISOC), part of the army, brought charges of libel against Naritsarawan Kaewnopparat for publicizing the beating death of her uncle by a dozen of his superiors in the army. After the family of Wichian Puaksom (her uncle) undertook a lawsuit for malfeasance against the Ministry of Defense, the Royal Thai Army, and the Prime Minister’s Office, they were compensated ฿,, (over $,) for his death (Editor ). Naritsarawan, however, discouraged to learn that none of the soldiers involved would face criminal charges, posted the details of Wichian’s torture and death on her Facebook page and told the story to the Bangkok Post (ไทยพับลิก้า [ThaiPublica] ; Dawson ). On  July , the army captain who was the commanding officer of the unit responsible for Wichian’s death brought defamation charges against Naritsarawan, and she was arrested, to be released on bail the next day (Human Rights Watch ; Dawson ). Naritsarawan has chosen to contest the charges, saying that if she is found to be in the wrong, she will happily accept her punishment (“นริศ ราวัลถ์ แก้วนพรัตน์ ระบุพร้อมให้กระบวนการยุติธรรมตรวจสอบ หากผิดจริง ยินดีรับโทษ”), but claimed that if she is found not guilty, she will republicize her demands for justice for her uncle (ประชาไท [Prachatai] ). The stakes, then, are high here for both parties, as they were for Morison, Chutima, and the Royal Thai Navy. On Naritsarawan’s side, if the prosecution prevails, she faces up to five years in prison (ประชาไท [Prachatai] ). If she is exonerated, however, ISOC (and Captain Phuriphek Sophon in particular) will be revealed—as the Royal Thai Navy was—both to have been unwilling to accept responsibility for being criminally in the wrong, as Naritsarawan alleged, and to have lost face doubly. The first loss of face is the public shaming ISOC and Captain Phuriphek have tried to diminish through the defamation charges, while the second will be the (now quite public) revelation that

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they tried to intimidate into silence an aggrieved relative of the soldier who they tortured to death. Certain features of these examples distinguish them from those of the motorcycle taxi in Mahachai and the police officer in Chiang Mai. While these latter cases precipitated immediate, lethal responses from the men who lost face, we find that the libel and defamation cases unfold over years and, in the intraelite examples, effectively invert the positions (when the strategy succeeds) of who suffers loss of face and who recovers face by making the outcome public. In these cases, however, the truth of an allegation or its rebuttal has at best a secondary role. The force of the charge comes from its being made publicly, by one perceived to be of equal or lesser standing, and from the charge being of a sort that would shame the object of the charge. It is less important whether or not the taxi driver was actually undercutting his colleagues, the passenger in Chiang Mai could actually have the police officer transferred, Supinya was right about favoritism between Thaksin’s government and Shin Corporation, or Sant was corrupt. Even in the two current examples, the relationship of the truth of the allegations (of trafficking and torturing to death) to the retaliatory prosecutions by the navy and ISOC is tenuously related to the subsequent persecution. This is not to say that truth in these cases had no importance but only that in cases of lost (or recovered) face, other features of the situation, like the public nature of the allegations, were of much greater significance. In this respect, Bo and Alip’s evocation of face at the Ranong police station worked differently, and it is to this case I can now turn. Several features of face-work make it particularly felicitous for the work of human rights, such as that work the team was doing, but certain felicity conditions must be in place. The first factor, I mentioned above, is the NHRC’s constitutional authority to investigate any agent or agency of the state and to demand access to documents. Human rights NGOs do not have this authority, and so the police may dismiss them because they do not have access to information produced by the state and do not have the authority to investigate the state, making their allegations more difficult to substantiate. The police, in other words, risk little by denying NGOs access to their documents and personnel. This first factor is closely linked to the second, which is that there must be an actual or perceived transgression or negligence on the part of the police. An investigation is most threatening when there is something to find. In the case below, the failure of the police to investigate a reported violation of this Burmese migrant’s rights was a failure to discharge

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their duty. The third condition is the possibility of public exposure that attends an investigation by the NHRC. The fourth factor is a feature rather than a condition. The ubiquity of concern with status is necessary for the implied threat of loss of face to have force. This feature connects to the patronage system that permeates sociality in Thailand in more and less formal ways.

The Ranong Case An outstanding feature of the case at hand was the ability of Bo and Alip to raise without naming the specter of losing face—to do so implicitly rather than overtly—by turning conventional sources of social power into vulnerabilities. Combining (a) the NHRC’s powers to demand documents (in this case, police reports) and the implicit threat of publicly exposing police officers’ failure to perform their duties with (b) the force of conventions around status and patron-client relationships allowed the lawyers to impress upon Ranong police the stakes in their investigation if the police should decline to cooperate. As the southernmost province to share a border with Burma, Ranong is a major center for smuggling and trafficking Burmese persons (Ghosh , –; Pasuk et al. ,–; Siriporn et al. , ). This case involved a trafficked Burmese man whom we went to meet at a business that offered a safe house for victims of trafficking (who otherwise might be held under lock and key at specific locations or on a fishing vessel and receive no pay for their work). He did not come because the business owner feared discovery by the mafia that controlled trafficking in the area (a justifiable fear, especially if we recall Phra Supoj’s murder). This case had, however, been reported to the police. We went to the police station, where the lawyers checked to see if the police had made any progress on the case. It was well known, the lawyers had explained, that police investigations of crimes against Burmese migrants, especially undocumented laborers, often lacked diligence. From my perspective in the minibus with the rest of the team, I could see Bo and Alip talking at the counter inside the entrance to an officer I could not see. While the atmosphere in the minibus remained light with casual chatting, I could see Alip becoming increasingly animated in the station, gesticulating with increasing energy, finally jabbing his forefinger onto the desktop, even while Bo remained reserved. When they returned to the minibus fifteen minutes

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after entering the station, looking frustrated, they said that the police had ceased to pursue the case after a couple of days. Bo and Alip had asked for copies of the police reports to see the state of the investigation, but the police had first refused them outright, saying they could not copy official documents, then added that in any case, the reports were at a different office. At that point, before leaving, the lawyers had told the police that they were there under the auspices of the NHRC and would like copies of the files when they were located. As we drove away, they had begun their explanation of what had transpired with the police when, not five minutes after we left the police station, Alip’s phone rang. The police told him that they had located the files and made copies for him. We returned, and this time Alip emerged from the police station with the copies in hand. I asked him what had changed their behavior. “It is because we told them we are with the Human Rights Commission,” he told me. “We are not just an NGO. The constitution permits us to demand the records [of the investigation]. The police often lose interest when the victim is a foreigner but not a tourist. If she or he’s a migrant worker . . .” he said, punctuating the sentence with a shrug, his palms turned upward. Switching to English, he added that the police treated undocumented migrants “like they’re not human, have no equality with other people.” Be this as it may, Alip said, because human rights are enshrined in the constitution, the police must investigate even when it is an illegal migrant who suffers the crime. NGOs unaffiliated with the NHRC, he went on, would have no success demanding the case reports. I asked, at this point, if the police eventually complied because they were afraid of losing face. Turning to Bo, Alip laughed, exclaiming, “Oh, he gets it!” then said to me, “They’re afraid of the Human Rights Commission.” The threat, he said, was not what the investigation might find but that the fact of an investigation by the NHRC might expose them publicly as having neglected the duties incumbent upon their position. The seriousness of this exposure for the police is that the investigating officers’ loss of face would also lose face for their superiors. The novelty of this moment—an inquiry into police practices in cases with Burmese victims—is that the police are, as for the first time, asked to consider if they should excuse their disinterest in protecting Burmese migrants’ rights. More starkly, Bo and Alip raised for these officers the idea that such neglect requires excuse and that the inability to justify it (for example, because the constitution denies justifications for ignoring human rights violations) would have consequences that may implicate their superiors.

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In an  August  speech entitled “Thai Love Burma,” Thai historian Thongchai Winichakul, on the anniversary of the  August  Burmese democracy uprising, characterized the Thai view of the Burmese as the picturing of an arch enemy, a view that he traces to the  Burman sacking of Ayutthaya. A revealing statement by the Ranong chief of police, Pol. Lt. Gen. Sudjai Yanrat, on why he turned a blind eye to the trafficking of Burmese women into brothels in his city corroborates this claim: “In my opinion, it is disgraceful to let Burmese men frequent Thai prostitutes. Therefore, I have been flexible in allowing Burmese prostitutes to work here. Most of their clients are Burmese men” (Nation,  July , cited in Montgomery a, ). These utterances give us a good clue to understanding the tendency of Thai police to ignore crimes against Burmese migrants: regarded as the ageold enemy, the police surely need not protect the Burmese. For this reason, police neglect of such cases had fallen into the realm of justifications—they are entitled to overlook, justified in overlooking, abuses of the nation’s arch enemy. This is a sentiment Thong noted in the Mahachai police disinterest in violence against Burmese or Mon migrants. That Bo and Alip could call on human rights to question the accepted justifications of such neglect does not show that the police have lost their status but rather shows a modification of that status. The status remains in place but now hinges on a performance of its attendant duties that can withstand NHRC scrutiny. The relationship of face-work and human rights did not, however, arise only in this disciplining way.

Takua Pa Prison In an earlier chapter, I discussed the promotion of human rights in the education program that Bo, Alip, Chokchai, and Pinyo undertook at Takua Pa Prison with the assistance of Phiphat Samphaonoi, the warden. The lawyers, with the core team of five members expanded to include Chokchai, Pinyo (who worked on HIV/AIDS prevention), and Madawi (a translator), had arranged with Phiphat to talk to foreign migrants held there. Recall that, once the inmates were seated, Phiphat took the floor first, to introduce the lawyers, and Chokchai, the most senior lawyer, followed him. Chokchai described the inmates’ rights in the language of human rights before passing the microphone to Alip, the senior member of the team with which I traveled. After his explanation of the rights afforded foreigners under the Thai

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constitution, he ceded the floor to Bo, the remaining lawyer on the team, who preceded Pinyo, there to explain HIV/AIDS prevention. Pinyo’s talk brought the presentation to its conclusion, after which the team dined with the prison officials. The meal was lighthearted, but key features of this congeniality were the observance of rank and face-work, manifest in the careful positioning of Phiphat between Chokchai and Alip at the head of the table. Such attendance to rank was similarly evident in the order of speakers—starting with the warden and moving through the lawyers in order of seniority—but also in the quiet attentiveness shown by the inmates during the talks and the question period. The idea of a prison warden as a promoter of human rights is comparably unexpected as the prestige of one’s station becoming turned into a vulnerability, but the critical feature at Takua Pa is that cooperation between the warden and the human rights lawyers in the interests of, particularly, Burmese migrants was secured in no small part by careful face-work, the observation of rank, and shows of respect for status. While the warden was concerned of his own account with the preservation of human rights, the ability of the lawyers to include elements of the prison bureaucracy within its network was predicated not just on a meeting of minds over rights and human trafficking but also over careful observation of conventions around rank and face-work. By comparison, Duean, the antitrafficking lawyer at the center of Frank Munger’s work in northern Thailand, though not working under the NHRC umbrella, built and maintained networks in highly comparable ways, attending to bureaucrats’ deference to “personal ties, hierarchical loyalties and clientelism” (Munger a, ).

Articulations of Human Rights Experimenting with human rights to address the police declining to investigate human trafficking in Ranong involved a sort of involution of conventional sources of social power. We saw earlier how Pim experienced the conventions of rank as an obstacle to the work of human rights promotion, in the inaccessibility of commissioners to those, like her, working on educational projects originating in the ONHRC. By contrast, Bo and Alip’s implied threat to expose the police as negligent articulated with regimes of status, patronage, and face to turn these sources of social power back on themselves. Earlier I stressed the seriousness with which Thai take face-work, how it connects to status and

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patronage, and how these operate dynamically and ubiquitously in everyday life. The police embody the authority and threat of the law, but the law exists within the social relations of patronage that frame concerns of face. The officers would not face prosecution as a result of an NHRC investigation, but it was the investigation the police feared, because this would expose their neglect of duty to public scrutiny. This is not a case of shaming but carries the threat of shaming. The status of the officers as officers of the law is what endowed them with face enough to lose, so that their source of strength was simultaneously their vulnerability because one’s own loss of face infects one’s superiors. The position one has within patron-client networks is then at stake, as losing face makes one a liability to one’s patron or superior. In this way, the interests of those with face enough to lose become, through the mediation of human rights embodied by the NHRC, subordinated to those who, in the Thai context, are virtually without face. Of analytic interest here is that, while these longstanding forms of sociality—face-work, rank, and status—provide unexpected resources for human rights, they do so only by virtue of their ordinary functioning. They provide the novelty of human rights with opportunities for articulation only by remaining ordinary. I have shown this here by aligning three things: a vulnerability to abuse and exploitation particular to Burmese migrants in Thailand, the work of Thai lawyers and NGOs employing human rights to protect these migrants, and the standing social conventions of face-work, status, and patronage networks that provide resources for human rights advocacy in Thailand. These are not, to be sure, the only variables, much less the only configuration, that allow us a way to understand the emergence of human rights in Thailand; Buddhism and the history of democratic struggle have already shown two other modalities in and through which human rights have emerged. This alignment shows that human rights, while still amorphous to those using them, here, to protect the most vulnerable in Thailand, transfigure the social conventions from which they gain force. On one side, human rights take on a particular character through their articulation with rank, face-work, and status. As the examples from Ranong and Takua Pa demonstrated, the work of human rights may be indirect—the specter of public shaming, with its consequences for patronage relations, or else lodging cooperation in an acknowledgment of rank and status that preserves face—where direct accusations or confrontation under a violator/victim model might fail. In large part, this is the consequence of human rights attaching to face-work, which is itself mostly implicit and seldom explicit in social interaction.

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On the other side, while human rights depend on these social conventions unfolding in ordinary ways, so that they retain their social force, we have also seen that the contact with human rights may produce a certain paradox if the direction of power reverses (lending Burmese migrants or their advocates social resources). If human rights are only available to the extent that you can claim them, then what you can claim is a function not of what human rights are in the abstract or in principle but of how they gain affective force by their articulation with and through everyday social conventions. Such articulations need not lead to a revolution in social relations and conventions in their entirety. On the contrary, what the emergence of human rights in Thailand shows is that it is the stability and ubiquity of conventions of face-work, status, and rank—conventions geared to the discernment and maintenance of inequality—that allows them, in face-to-face interaction, to lend force to human rights.

Chapter 4

“Kat Mai Ploi”: Motherhood and Pursuits of Justice

Over the decade preceding the  coup d’état in Thailand, it was common to see parts of Bangkok awash alternately (and sometimes simultaneously) in yellow shirts and red shirts. Since the s, large-scale rallies have punctuated Thailand’s political history with a frequency matching that of its coups. Political demonstrations took on qualities of mass movements in the s (Ockey ) and came to define their political moment from the s, corresponding with regime change in , ,  to , and again in  and  through . Such rallies typically have male leaders and frequently mobilize thousands of men and women. They usually adapt their stated goals and their strategies to changing circumstances and follow patterns of escalation and brinksmanship. Violence—often, but not exclusively, by agents of the state—follows escalation in some degree. The struggles of the two women I will examine in this chapter, Yai Hai Khanjanta and Rattana Sajjathep, contrast on each point—the development of mass rallies, led by men, marked by physical violence, with sharp escalation—despite the fact that they became well known and broadly supported both materially and morally throughout the country. Yai Hai (that is, Grandma Hai) and Rattana undertook prolonged struggles with, respectively, the Thai state (over land flooded by a dam project) and the city of Bangkok (which ordered Rattana to demolish her recently built house). They became well-publicized exemplars of mothers willing to fight for justice, Yai Hai fighting for twenty-six years and Rattana having forestalled the demolition of her house for over a decade, when I met each of them in . Although I had read about each in the press, it was through my

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research at the NHRC that I met them, despite the fact that neither one initially or exclusively framed her struggle in terms of human rights. Significantly, such a connection did develop toward the resolution of their conflicts in large part because they had, in , turned to the nascent NHRC for assistance. The NHRC, then, was important for its ability to mediate negotiations and to do evidentiary research within the relevant government bureaucracies but was just one resource coordinated with others in part of a larger field of forces and vulnerabilities for Rattana and Yai Hai. This larger field, which inspired such distinctive protests, is the main preoccupation of this chapter, especially as it informs Rattana and Yai Hai’s eventual access to and claim on human rights. Their status as Thai citizens situated them and affected responses by the public and authorities to their actions in decisive ways. The chapter examines the salience of their Thai citizenship at the outset, before turning to the two main themes that distinguished their protests: motherhood and gesture. Given a context in which their moral standing and their perseverance are deeply informed by the fact that they are mothers (and at the time, Yai Hai was, as the term Yai denotes, a maternal grandmother) and in which their articulated protests go largely ignored by Thai officials, they turned to a series of gestures, performed as mothers, to show their outrage and dismay where their utterances could not. The argument of the chapter is that these gestures, performed explicitly as mothers and underpinned by their status as citizens, have profound moral and historical roots and cultural resonance in Thailand, which allowed them to sustain their lengthy fights, gain public support, and ultimately secure negotiations with officials who, through NHRC intervention, could no longer ignore them.

The Privileges of Citizenship In previous chapters, I looked at some ways that human rights were valuable to foreign migrants. In the struggles of Yai Hai and Rattana, while both found themselves for many years unable to gain acknowledgment from authorities of their suffering or, by extension, their rights as Thai citizens, their citizenship figured as an important facet of their tactics, distinguishing their powers and vulnerabilities from those of foreign migrants. If it is tempting to present human rights as a dominant mode of justice seeking, either because of their global sway or because of the distinctive ways that they can shape disputes,

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then what we find here is that they were one among a variety of ways of demanding justice. Human rights here help citizens gain recognition of their rights but help by articulating with a range of readily available tropes, symbols, and beliefs, which in turn shape how rights become claimable. Hannah Arendt famously argued that those who most needed human rights—stateless persons—were precisely those who could not claim them because they were not citizens of the states in which they lived. She went on to say that the surest (perhaps only) way they could become recognized as legal subjects was as criminals (Arendt  [], , ). Yai Hai and Rattana’s cases follow the track that Arendt, albeit with dismay, laid out, but the reason that they found support in human rights is exactly because they drew on the institutional presence of the NHRC to claim their rights as citizens. Furthermore, they did so through acts that transgressed the law, provoking authorities to call their actions illegal, in order to draw the spotlight to the justness of their protests, which allowed the NHRC both to investigate their cases and to mediate settlements. Yai Hai and Rattana, finding that employing discourses of right did not secure acknowledgment of their rights, mobilized national mythologies, the moral force of motherhood, spiritual beliefs, and symbols of death or mourning, but they did not do so strictly discursively. After decades during which their protests had gone unheard, it is how, practically, they undertook these evocations that interests me here. On the whole, their struggles combined gesture and motherhood with unexpected forcefulness. Gesture invites a helpful distinction between saying and showing, and it allows for a picture of social action that may be strategic or tactical but is not exhausted by these terms. The expressiveness of showing, of course, may include showing with or in language. To this end, in those passages of Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations that discuss pain, he moves from a picture of language as referential to one of language as expressive, so that saying “I am in pain” is not a report about myself but is a request for acknowledgment of my being in pain, just as a moan would be: a moan and “I am in pain” comparably express pain, comparably request acknowledgment (Wittgenstein  [], §§–, , p. ). To say that these are similar or comparable ways of seeking acknowledgment and that they are expressions (as distinct from representations) of pain speaks to the cases of Yai Hai and Rattana in that both, when I met them toward the end of their struggle, sought acknowledgment of their suffering injustice when all previous attempts had failed. Their expressions of rage, despair, anguish, betrayal, or pain seek

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acknowledgment as the ground for a conversation in which their entitlements to citizens’ or human rights are given, not contingent or vulnerable to the whims of authorities. My stress on gestures, then, emerges from Yai Hai and Rattana employing gestures that express their suffering and resilience because they had as yet found, so to speak, no official home for a description of the wrongs done them. My emphasis on motherhood (rather than gender alone) comes first from a particular moment in my contact with Rattana that made it clear that motherhood was in no way tangential to their struggles. There is an unexplained haste in much of the scholarship on movements like the Mothers of the Disappeared in Argentina or El Salvador or the Saturday Mothers of Turkey, among others, to shift to a gender analysis of women’s political activism at the expense of a consideration of the specific moral, ethical, and social purchase of motherhood within these struggles. The crucial moment with Rattana, which I will revisit below, came when I first met her and puts a brake on this haste. She and her daughter had painted the façade of her house black several days before, dressed it with banners, and held a press conference to demand that the city of Bangkok cease its effort to remove her house and that there be a full investigation into the bureaucratic corruption that led to her house being built on land reserved for a turnabout. (I will describe the case more fully below.) I had gone to the NHRC for another meeting, after which I was chatting with Kat, the ONHRC lawyer introduced in previous chapters. Kat asked me if I had heard about the woman who had blackened her house, which I had, because it had been prominent in the press for several days. She asked if I would like to meet her, as Kat handled Rattana’s NHRC investigation (which Rattana had initiated before painting her house), and Rattana was coming in presently. I had met Yai Hai on  March, just a few weeks before, and commented to Rattana that both she and Yai Hai had maintained their struggles for a long time. (Yai Hai had achieved national renown by that point, and I was quite sure that Rattana, who had been fighting Bangkok for a decade, was familiar with Yai Hai’s prolonged struggle.) “It seems that the struggles headed by men do not last as long,” I said. “No, it’s true, they are shorter.” “Is it because you’re women that you have sustained your fight for so much longer?” I asked. “No,” Rattana corrected, “it’s because we’re mothers.” The common features of Rattana and Yai Hai’s struggles include, among other things like the participation of family members and enlisting the help

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of the NHRC, their position as mothers and their use of dramatic gestures of dismay, anger, and frustration at crucial moments to generate widespread discussions of the injustices they faced. I will turn next to consider Rattana’s claim that motherhood offered them certain moral resources and sustained their determination to fight for justice.

Motherhood Motherhood has a close link to political mobilization in, among other places, parts of Latin America, where the disappearance of political activists or the deaths of soldiers of state or guerrilla forces have accompanied armed struggles. The Madres de Plaza de Mayo in Argentina and the COMADRES in El Salvador became powerful, enduring critics of state practices of “disappearing” dissidents (Abreu Hernandez ; Bosco , ; Burchianti ; Stephen ). Scholarship on mothers’ activism under the banner of motherhood tends to move directly to a gender analysis of this activism. As important as it is to recognize the gendered aspect of mothers’ activism, this move obscures the particularity of motherhood in each setting. There are, however, exceptions. Margaret E. Burchianti, for example, notes that the Argentine Madres de Plaza de Mayo movement derives its moral force from the fact and symbolic display of the participants being mothers seeking justice for their disappeared children. Arguing that motherhood provides a “powerful political foundation for challenging a hostile state” in many societies, Burchianti finds that motherhood often draws its cultural power from “meanings and representations attached to maternal suffering,” concluding that “in Argentina, the Mothers’ testimonies are politically powerful because they are performing their culturally appropriate role as ‘good’ mothers and bearing witness to their own maternal suffering. The Mothers produce this social force through an ‘embodiment of emotion through social action’ (Aretxaga, : ), through bearing witness as mothers to the disappearances of their daughters and sons” (Burchianti , ). Aretxaga () and Bayard de Volo () agree that mothers derive the moral force that underpins political movements (the Relatives Action Committee in Ireland and the Mothers of Heroes and Martyrs of Matagalpa in Nicaragua) from maternal suffering and more specifically from its symbolic connection, within their largely Catholic milieus, to the suffering of the Virgin Mary.

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The idea of the mother as suffering for her children, particularly in birth, is also familiar in Buddhist settings and in Sri Lanka was deployed under conditions of large-scale violence and widespread disappearances. Like Argentine mothers, Sri Lankan mothers participating in the Mothers’ Front were able to draw on the “seemingly unquestionable authenticity of their grief and espousal of ‘traditional’ family values” to create a viable space for political protest that was otherwise unavailable to critics of the state (de Alwis , ). In part, de Alwis notes, the ability of the Mothers’ Front to sustain their protest derived from their posing it within the given patriarchal structure of Sri Lankan society, which interpellates mothers as “moral guardians, care-givers and nurturers” (), descriptors that apply to the Latin American examples as well as Yai Hai and Rattana. Among their central repertoire of expressions of grief, rage, and suffering, as mothers, were tears and curses. The state took the former as authentic and just, the latter as effective and fearsome, and together, within the “context of violence and terror, it was the tears and curses of the mothers that finally stirred a nation and shamed a government” (). Importantly, for those who believe that the curse can involve deities in worldly affairs, no longer just the body but also the soul is at stake. One quality that the Mothers’ Front shares with the Madres de Plaza de Mayo or COMADRES is that mobilization under the rubric of motherhood provides a narrow, highly specific repertoire on which the individual mothers can draw to express their criticism of the state. It is unsurprising, therefore, that there seems to be a high degree of uniformity to these expressions: curses and tears. While both Rattana and Yai Hai present themselves as mothers struggling for justice, and while tears and curses punctuate such struggle, they nonetheless embody motherhood in contrasting ways. I will outline some of the general contours of Thai motherhood that bear on Rattana and Yai Hai’s struggles before turning to specific differences between them. There are two directions to follow with respect to motherhood here. One is the way it supplied Rattana and Yai Hai with the determination or even compulsion to fight on behalf of their children as well as themselves. The second is how it offers them, like the Madres de Plaza de Mayo or Mothers’ Front, a special kind of moral authority. If suffering is the aspect of motherhood that calls on the figure of the Virgin Mary in Argentina, Ireland, and Nicaragua, what particular resonances does motherhood have in Thai society? While Pranee and colleagues (, ) justifiably lament the relative paucity of scholarship on Thai motherhood (compared, for example, to the

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abundant writing on gender and sexuality), the pertinent feature shared by scholarship that does address it is recognition of the moral authority and responsibilities that attach to motherhood, not least through an idea of selfsacrifice. William Klausner, for example, explains that the mother-child relationship centers on the child holding a debt for his or her birth and upbringing, which becomes a major reason for boys to enter the monkhood, as it allows them to transfer merit to their mothers in partial repayment of this debt (Klausner , –). Girls, having no opportunity to enter the monkhood, must find other ways of repaying this debt (). Heather Montgomery explains that debt to one’s mother plays a large role in children’s decisions to pursue prostitution in Baan Nua, where she did fieldwork. Like Klausner, she writes that “through his ordination, [a son] repays his mother the debt of gratitude that he owes her for giving him life, while his sister has a lifetime commitment” (Montgomery a, ). Montgomery notes the prestige and status motherhood offers, adding that the same is not true of fatherhood, which seems “to imply fewer of the burdens of reciprocity and filial duty” (–). The reciprocal relationship between mother and child is an aspect of motherhood that bears out specific features of its social nature. As Jane Hanks’s work on maternity in the central Thai village of Bang Chan demonstrates, the rigors of becoming a mother are significantly ritual in nature, which is to say that becoming a mother is a deeply social process, irreducible to parturition alone, involving a change in status through the observance of rites (J. Hanks , ). The birth of a child conferred status on the mother as a ritual feat in which the mother passes “toward the fulfillment of her long adumbrated female office of nurturer” (J. Hanks , ). This fulfillment began with the mother’s attentiveness to the fetus by disciplining herself with respect not just to physical care but also to good speech, pleasant thoughts, and what she would see, touch, smell, and eat as “every thought and action reacted on the child” (J. Hanks , ). The dominant notion of care (เลี้ยง, liang) relates directly to the idea, noted in Montgomery, above, that children take on a debt to the mother. A central metaphor capturing this relationship of care-debt between mother and child is breastfeeding, which is not modeled on straightforward altruism but on a careful calculation of costs to the mother, which she should recoup in later life by a son’s ordination (and subsequent transfer of merit) or a daughter’s tending to her mother in old age (see Van Esterik , –). The moral aspect of this reciprocation finds further cosmological elaboration in the

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observation that deities occupied with spiritual and physical well-being and nurturing, to which people incur the greatest debts, are maternal, bearing the prefix แม่ (mae, mother), rendering Rice Mother, Water Mother, Earth Mother, Mother-Goddess, and so on (Textor , , cited in J. Hanks , n). A final way in which motherhood knots into elevated moral standing derives from Buddhism, according to which compassion derives from suffering, not least from pregnancy, childbirth, and laying by the fire. The compassion a mother develops in this way makes her “the guide-line for moral behavior” (J. Hanks , ). Niels Mulder is still more explicit in his characterization of both the responsibility and the moral positioning of the mother: “The prime symbol of moral goodness is the phrakhun, or pure bunkhun (บุญคุณ) that the mother has to her children. She cannot but be good, she cannot but give and care, she is always benevolent and forgiving, she feeds, loves, and gives without expectation of return; she gives without asking. . . . She sacrifices herself for her dependents. . . . She is a refuge, a haven of safety, and the source of the moral identity of her offspring” (Mulder  [], ). Elsewhere he writes that the “primary symbol of moral goodness is the self-sacrificing attachment of a mother to her children” (Mulder , ) and, echoing the writing on mothers of the disappeared, that the mother gives life to, feeds, and suffers physically and psychologically (through worry) for her children (). He captures the moral force of motherhood succinctly: “The mother image is inviolably sacred. Having been virtually canonized, the ideological fog surrounding her position seems to be particularly dense. By becoming a symbol of Thai morality, she is placed beyond the ordinary world of men and everyday life” (). Crucially, the mother is the only way that boys can enter the world, and so the mother is the only source of future monks. All of this amounts to an account of the mother as a moral exemplar and, therefore, as laboring under the sway of powerful social expectations that place great responsibilities on her. The figure of morality, however, may express herself in a number of ways, to which I will turn below.

Gesture The vast majority of scholarly writing on gesture frames it within relationship to speech—as a precursor to speech, as a subset of spoken language, or as a distinct part of a shared system—and all take gesture to involve bodily action

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(Bremmer and Roodenburg ; Haviland ; Kendon ; McNeill ). Posing the latter, bodily action as an aspect of gesture seems to be inescapability compelling (though I prefer “gesture as bodily expression” to “gesture as bodily action”). What I do not see in this literature, however, is a notion of how one might stake one’s body through gesture. Connected to this staking of the body, in ways I will describe next, I argue for a description of gesture that poses the possibility of gesture working exactly where speech fails. I argue that gesture may initiate or establish conditions under which conversation can occur when an appeal for conversation posed in speech has failed, where speaking has not allowed one to have a say. Further, where speech can gain no traction, I also understand the possibilities of gesture to include moral or ethical suasion without necessarily aiming for the (re)establishment of conditions under which speech can take place. An illustrative example will set the stage for a discussion of the staking of the body through gesture. In conversation with Achille Mbembe’s thesis on African self-writing (Mbembe ), Das describes a scene of self-creation from a position of victimhood. After the violence following the assassination of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi in  by her Sikh bodyguards, a group of women in Sultanpuri sat in mourning outside their houses without bathing, cleaning their houses, combing their hair, or breaking from the groups they had formed in sitting and sleeping in the street (Das , ). Das writes, “The women who had been sitting in mourning did not engage in any conversation—but they simply refused to present a clean façade. To one schooled in the cultural grammar of mourning, the women were presenting their bodies as evidence of their grievous loss. On the one hand, they could not make their bodies speak to bring forth the traditional laments. Yet, on the other hand, the pollution they insisted on embodying was ‘showing’ the loss, the death, and the destruction” (). These women’s silent expressions of rage, grief, and loss constitute a gesture of mourning. That it was not a conventional gesture of mourning (vocalized laments), which Das describes elsewhere (Das , ff.), does not mean that it was unconnected to a long-established, virtual repertoire of gesture. She cites Draupadi, a powerful figure from the Mahabharata, whose husband had wagered her in a gamble with the king. Brought to King Duryodhana’s court and stripped, during menstruation, “for  years she wore the same cloth stained by her blood and left her hair wild and uncombed” (Das , ). Das’s point is not that these women embodied pollution to mimic Draupadi or

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that this was a deliberate, reasoned-out model of protest of the state’s official denial of the extensive killing of Sikhs. Rather, she argues that “their testimony can be constructed from the new way in which they occupied the space of symbolic representations in the collective imaginaire. .  .  . What the women were able to ‘show’ was not a standardized narrative of loss and suffering but a project that can only be understood in the singular through the image of reinhabiting the space of devastation again” (). Staking the body in gesture was thus a way of generating the possibility for an acknowledgment of injustice that was unavailable through speech (“possibility” because showing grief or rage does not guarantee such acknowledgment). There is an ambiguity to gesture that denies it either from certain meaning or certain expression (Schmitt , –). Part of the staking of the body in gesture, then, lies in the ambiguity of what one’s gesture will come to mean, in how others will take up or respond to the gesture. G. H. Mead approaches gestures as taking place as part of a social act, only later to become a symbol (Mead , ). He considers gestures as stimulus and response, taking the example of someone shaking his fist at you. “You assume that he not only has a hostile attitude, but that he has some idea behind it. . . . When, now, that gesture means this idea behind it and it arouses that idea in the other individual, then we have a significant symbol” (). We can see here a progression from expression to meaning. Further, the example above shows that the very uses of the body in gesture can stake it not in the sense that it is something that one can wager, as for a bet, to be recouped later but in the sense that, whatever the outcome, one might never recover. Rattana’s protest, of which blackening her house was just one stage, staked her body in such a way.

Stationed at the Gate The protest that interests me here came after the blackening of her house, when Rattana and her daughter took up a vigil in front of Bangkok City Hall. On one hand, their struggle still relied on media coverage, but on the other, they drew on a long and venerated history of appeal to authority that dates to the kingdom of Sukhothai, which holds a mythic position with respect to Thai nationhood. As the Sultanpuri women depicted above engaged a collective imaginaire that included the figure of Draupadi, Rattana stationing herself at, as it were, the gate of Bangkok City Hall gains its force in evoking King Ramkhamhaeng’s reign over Sukhothai.

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Ramkhamhaeng, the thirteenth-century king of Sukhothai, is credited with posting a bell at his palace that his subjects could ring in the case of a grievance, summoning the king to adjudicate the conflict. The story of Ramkhamhaeng’s bell comes from an inscription attributed to him, the authenticity of which has been the subject of heated debate (Chamberlain ; Munkhom ; Wyatt , –). The importance of the Ramkhamhaeng inscription here is the role it takes in Thai society and politics rather than the details of the debate surrounding it. Thongchai explains that “doubt over the authenticity of the Ramkhamhaeng inscription, the earliest inscription of Thai history, raised a crucial issue for the survival of Sukhothai as the Golden Age of the Thai past. So far, however, both the inscription and the Golden Age have survived the scrutiny” (Thongchai , ). Anthony Diller says, of the widespread interest in this debate in Thailand, “What started out as a rather academic debate on philological detail relating to this inscription has aroused an astonishing degree of public concern and comment. Even the popular press has reported on parts of the debate” (Diller , ). This widely held notion of Sukhothai under Ramkhamhaeng as the Golden Age, an ideal for Thai society, is important here insofar as it shapes ideas of political legitimacy, as well as providing a specific, potent part of a virtual repertoire for subjects to demand justice from their rulers. Seni Pramoj, a powerful influence on Thai democracy since the s when he and his brother Kukrit helped found the royalist Democrat Party, claims the Ramkhamhaeng inscription to be no less than the original Thai constitution, hence arguing that Thailand’s democracy predates England’s and anticipates the American Declaration of Independence (Connors , –; Seni , , ff., , ). He poses Sukhothai as, therefore, nothing less than the model of modern democracy. The inscription “describes an implicit social contract between the king and his subjects that guarantees liberties, equality and fraternity. The idea [Seni Pramoj’s] of a social contract here refers back to the idea of a just king who must provide for the welfare of his people” (Connors , ). At the heart of Seni’s picture of an ideal Thai politics is a ruler’s responsiveness to subjects (or citizens) that is at once contractual and parental. He writes, Modern Constitutions stress the principles of liberty, equality and fraternity. These same principles were upheld in Sukhothai. Liberties were unconditionally guaranteed and all were subject “equally in accordance with the law.” Fraternity is demonstrated by the fact that

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slavery did not exist in Sukhothai and fugitive slaves from other countries were set free. The stone inscriptions generally describe Ram Khamhaeng as father of the land . . . that if the folk of the realm rang a bell hung by the palace gateway, Ram Khamhaeng would have to grant them audience. (Seni , ) Seni is not alone in seeing the enduring force of Ramkhamhaeng in Thai politics and, like other commentators, depicts the Chakri dynasty (– present) as the restorer of the Sukhothai ideal, after the intervening, overly Khmer model of kingship in Ayutthaya. He takes, for example, King Mongkut (–), who is among the most revered of Chakri kings, to have embraced Ram Khamhaeng’s bell: The custom of ringing a bell for one’s King became something of a precedent. In the time of King Mongkut,  years later, when an absolute monarch reigned, the custom was revived. A Royal Proclamation of King Mongkut commanded that a drum . . . be hung at the gate of the Grand Palace. Any loyal subject who wished to submit a petition may sound the drum and His Majesty would appear to hear the petition. The bell-ringing custom is also the basis for later laws regarding appeals in litigation which went directly to His Majesty or to the Appeals Council sitting as a supreme court. (Seni , –) The importance of Seni’s enthusiasm for Ramkhamhaeng’s “constitution” is not just that he and his brother, the popular novelist Kukrit Pramoj, helped found the Democrat Party (which has consistently formed the government or the opposition since ) but also that both he and Kukrit were prime ministers in the s. Ramkhamhaeng was, however, influential beyond democratic politics in Thailand. Aside from influencing the current dynasty as far back as King Mongkut (Munkhom , ), Mukhom Wongthes and Thak Chaloemtiarana () show that Ramkhamhaeng also provided an inspirational model for despotic civilian leaders, in particular Phibun Songkhram (–, –) and Sarit Thanarat (–). It is certain that the Ram Khamhaeng Inscription has become the most famous historical symbol of national pride, the royal legacy, and Thai cultural identity. The glorification of the Ramkhamhaeng Inscription

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probably reached its pinnacle during the civilian-military regime of Field Marshal Phibun Songkhram and his supporter, Luang Wichit Wathakan. This glorification created a deep-rooted and lasting impact on Thai nationalistic mentality in general. . . . In a way, it has become the landmark of the birth of the Thai nation. The first great king that comes to mind for probably even the least educated Thai is definitely King Ram Khamhaeng of Sukhothai. (Munkhom , ) Stationing oneself before one’s ruling authority as Rattana did at City Hall, in order to express or profess one’s grievances, recalls an idea of just rule attributed to Ramkhamhaeng, an idea that has had a sustained life in the political imagination—the imaginaire—of different leaders (democratic royalists or despotic paternalists) and of a wider public (in popular debates about the inscription and in popular history). The breadth of appeal of this idea, as well as its prominence in the national mythology of origins, lends Rattana’s form of protest symbolic force and popular appeal, though neither it nor motherhood constituted her only sources of symbolic force.

The Black House On  April , Rattana Sajjathep made headlines in Thailand by blackening the façade of her Beung Kum district house to protest a city of Bangkok order to level the building. She had purchased the townhouse on Bunsonsophit Lane in  from Thai Erawan Land and House Inc., a contractual purchase approved by officials in Bangkok’s Land Department and in Beung Kum district. The NHRC report on Ms. Rattana’s case (Report /) explains that she and her daughter filed a lawsuit against Thai Erawan and Bangkok officials at Lat Phrao Metropolitan Police Station on  April , but her problems had begun shortly after she bought her house. Additions that her neighbors built to their houses were causing her own to form cracks, and she had appealed to local authorities to stop any further construction. When Beung Kum authorities looked at her complaint, they told her that the law stipulates that for every twenty row houses, there must be a four-meter space to allow vehicles to turn around, and her house stood at this twentyhouse interval. Despite the fact that both Bangkok’s Land Department and Beung Kum district authorities had approved Thai Erawan’s sale of the property to Ms. Rattana, they ordered her house destroyed.

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Rattana took her case to the NHRC herself. At that time, it was possible to contact the NHRC by phone, mail, email, or in person, and the convenience of the Phayathai Road location, steps from the National Stadium, a string of shopping malls, and a Skytrain (elevated metro) station allowed Rattana to come in of her own accord. Kat was working at the Subcommittee for the Protection of Human Rights and received the complaint herself. She said the case was initially quite puzzling because it involved the purchase of a house from the proprietor of the subdivision to whom Rattana was already paying installments through her bank. Kat visited the location and began gathering evidence that ultimately uncovered the malfeasance of the very officials who ordered the house destroyed. The NHRC investigation did not initially result in any consequences for these officials, which drove Rattana to blacken, then abandon, her house, encamping in front of City Hall. The NHRC, however, at that point turned over their findings to the National Legislative Assembly, which presented the case to the Consumer Protection Board. Kat attended the meeting at the National Legislative Assembly, whose review of the case resulted in an award of ฿,, from the city of Bangkok and developers to Rattana. As Rattana retold this story to me at the NHRC, tears crept down her face. The same happened when I visited her tent in front of City Hall, and I was to discover that she was often in tears when she talked about her house. Along with her tears, however, her teenage children (in particular her daughters but often her son as well) were always present at publicized stages of her struggle, appearing in the photos and television coverage. It was, for example, her daughter Patjanapa who lived with Rattana in the tent at City Hall. This combination pushed into the foreground Rattana’s suffering as a mother. The idea of the self-sacrificing mother mentioned above (Mulder , ) not only renders Rattana’s tears as symbols of a mother’s suffering but, in combination with the tears, also endows her struggle with an aura of selflessness, a sense that she was not pursuing personal gain. There are, to be sure, other routes to such an end. During a  strike by female textile workers in Bangkok, several of the leaders shaved their heads as a way to give expression to the justness of their demands: “Within Thailand’s Theravada Buddhist society the shaved head signifies a rejection of worldly desires and attachments; strikers used this symbol in their public protests to emphasize that their demands were moral and fair, in contrast to employers’ assertions that strikers were acting out of greed or selfishness” (Mills , n). Mills notes, further, that the striking women “threatened to write a letter to the

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Figure . Ms. Rattana Satjathep’s house, with a banner urging viewers to attend a meeting at Thammasat University on  April . The lower banner says “Official Corruption Puts the Blame on the People.” สํานักงานพัฒระบบข้อมูล ข่าวสารสุขภาพ (Health Information System Development Office).

Thai prime minister in their own blood” (Mills , ). This symbolism resonates with de Alwis’s writing on mothers’ tears, where she discusses the trope of a mother’s “bloodmilk,” “an evocative word assemblage that concisely articulates the nurturing as well as the sacrificial qualities of a mother’s milk; it is her blood that is transmogrified into milk” (de Alwis , ). According to the influential Thai Buddhist tract, the Traiphum Phra Ruang, dating to Sukhothai, “once the newborn baby has left its mother’s womb, her love causes the blood in her breasts to become milk, and to flow out from her breasts so that the child can suck it and be nourished” (Reynolds and Reynolds , ). The symbolism of blood and milk, then, projects in more than one direction. It points to the moral attributes of mothers (nurturing, self-sacrificing, bearing suffering), so that the strikers’ threat to spill their own blood to address the prime minister also bespeaks a moral disposition toward self-sacrifice, hence of selflessness and moral rectitude. On the other hand, it points toward the shadow of death lingering at the edges of all large-

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scale demonstrations since the massacres of the s and so suggests that the strikers are willing to wager their lives. That Rattana chose black to paint her house already evokes the funereal, with black being associated with mourning in Thailand. As a form of gesture, therefore, painting her house black already intimates a scene of death and thereby points to the stakes that Rattana was prepared to wager. It is worth noting that other women with grievances over consumer rights may make dramatic, public gestures without including their bodies and lives—either symbolically or materially—among the stakes. An example that took place during Rattana’s demonstration exemplifies this sort of difference from Rattana’s form of symbolism and wagering. On  January , Duenpen Silaket parked her Honda CRV outside the Bangkok dealership where she had purchased it three months to the day earlier. She shrouded it with banners proclaiming its faults and then pummeled the car with a sledgehammer and a spade. “Let us mourn for Honda,” one of the banners said on the car she then “killed” (Ping ). A substantial crowd, including police and members of print and television media, had gathered by the time she was done smashing her car, at which point she explained through her tears that Honda had evaded repairing a growing number of problems the car had (pulling to the left, failing to start, making an odd squeak), eventually telling her she had to address the problems herself. Feeling disregarded by the dealer, she chose this drastic act to publicize her claim and to try to force Honda into refunding her for the car (Varghese a). Her ploy worked, and Honda Automobile of Thailand’s president Yoichi Aoki quickly offered an apology and refund (Varghese b). There are clear similarities between Ms. Silaket’s and Rattana’s gestures, from the language or symbolism of mourning to the public display of tears, both oriented, in part, to mobilize a sense of shame in those they felt had wronged them. There are, however, important differences. Ms. Silaket wagered her property, not her body or her life, and she invoked none of the moral force of motherhood. It is clear that she suffered, but no sense of self-sacrifice attended the demolition of her Honda. There is a further stake Rattana wagered while stationing herself at City Hall. She frequently said she was willing to die there, but on the occasion of my visit, she made an important addition, one I had not previously heard or read of her making. She said that she had not thought about coming (to City Hall) but had just come to die and to haunt (ตายและสิงอยู่). She had just been talking about the governor, Mr. Apirak, eating and staying in an air-conditioned

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room while she and her daughters, son, and granddaughter remained out in the heat. It was not clear, therefore, if she meant that she would haunt him, the officials and contractors who had duped her, or the land on which she was now living. What the statement did, however, make clear was that she was staking not only her body and life but also her soul on this protest. The cursing that de Alwis mentions Sri Lankan Mothers’ Front members hurling at the state have their analog in Thailand. As the Krungthep Post reported on  January , when the new prime minister, Abhisit Vejjajiva, had arrived at the Teachers’ Council the previous day to meet its members, awaiting him was the Sanam Luang Democracy Group, who were performing a cursing ritual by roasting chilies and salt, which produces an acrid, suffocating smoke (Krungthep Post ). In , protestors directed the same ritual burning of chilies and salt, as well as inverting ritual objects like monks’ bowls, at Prime Minister Suchinda and other officials who made themselves inaccessible by ordinary means (Van Esterik , ). Rosalind Morris describes a similar scene in Chiang Mai, also employing inverted symbols of merit making (like begging bowls and joss sticks) and involving an incantation to spirits to rid Thailand of Suchinda (Morris a, ff.). She explains the ritual thus: The forms of the phithii saab chaeng are those of ancestor worship turned upside down. Invoking the powers of the spirits to carry out a deed of such violence involves the penetration of all that is other, and the inversion of forms is a poetic enactment of this encounter with alterior [sic] power. A local specialist in the arts of benevolent sorcery described it to me as a complete inversion of the remembering rites normally carried out for loved ones. Thus, instead of the image of a revered deceased relative, there is the image of the intended victim. Instead of construing him as part of a lineal tree, his image is covered with dead and withered leaves, which burn and separate him from the living. Rather than white flags of purity and rebirth for the dead, there are black ones signifying evil and continuous death. Instead of feeding the victim, chili and salt are burned to create a caustic, bowelripping meal whose consequences are described as much like those of witchcraft . . . a feeling of being devoured from within. () When Rattana spoke of haunting, she did so with a neutral expression and not with the passion approaching frenzy that these descriptions provide.

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She spoke of haunting almost as a matter of fact or of fate, as something that fell, inevitably, to her to do. She finished her thought by saying, “I just thought ‘there is no justice’ (ก็ไม่มีความยุติธรรม). We have to change them (ต้องทําให้เปลี่ยน). The law must be the law (กฎหมายต้องเป็นกฎหมาย).” Getting people behind her was important, she said, and noted that up to , people had come to visit her in the month she had been in the square before City Hall, Lan Khon Muang. Everything around her, she pointed out, had been given to her by strangers (see Figures  and ). Axiomatically, an important part of shaming individuals or institutions is the public exposure of wrongdoing. To this end, Rattana adorned her tent with banners (a tactic reproduced by Duenpen, the Honda owner mentioned above), alleging corruption, albeit without naming names (see Figures –). In Figure , we see that Rattana has arranged the majority of her banners so that they are in view from City Hall. Across the top, the first banner reads, “[One] discovers no responsibility for ‘cheating’. Shame-faced indeed. Ha!” The long, black banner beneath it has Rattana’s name and, in smaller lettering, a brief explanation of her “moving house” to City Hall. The white banner with red lettering on the left says, “Admit you are wrong! You know what they do, ‘dupe.’” The following banner (red on white) continues in this vein, asking the “authorities” (presumably the governor) whether or not they have gotten the seller to give his word. Continuing to the right, the small black placard says, “Cheated for  years. The authorities say the case has no grounds,” while the final placard (on the far right) asks the reader to “mourn for (the) corrupt officials, even though they have not done even the slightest wrong!!!” The detail of Figure  was written by a member of the ONHRC and says: “We are Thai, we live in Thailand, we love Thailand. We must help to search for fairness. Please give Ms. Rattana spiritual support to fight for justice. Developers [or elites, officials] intimidate and remain in the same position. If (we) cannot find fairness ordinary people are in trouble. (We) must pursue justice for the people from the authorities” (Figure ). We may notice throughout that these banners and placards, including the one that proclaims that Thailand lacks even basic human rights, accuse and admonish officials and developers, while positioning Rattana as a victim—a victim who perseveres for eleven years but a victim all the same. This positioning remains of a piece with the trope of the mother whose moral value derives from her suffering, but it is only one way to embody motherhood. Yai Hai, to whose case I now turn, presents a distinct style of motherhood, one captured by a phrase Rattana used with me. Recall that when I met Rattana at

Figure . Rattana at her desk in her tent outside City Hall. Photo: author.

Figure . Rattana pointing to the furniture and gifts she accumulated in the month of her City Hall protest. Photo: author.

Figure . Rattana’s tent at Lan Khon Muang, before City Hall. Photo: author.

Figure . “There is no honesty these days.” Photo: author.

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Figure . Rattana’s tent viewed from City Hall. Photo: author.

Figure . Rattana’s tent, east end. Photo: author.

the NHRC, I asked her why she and Yai Hai were able to sustain their fights for so long. I wondered aloud if it had something to do with their being women, as I knew most political demonstrations headed by men had a shorter life span. Rattana had a different theory about Yai Hai and herself: “When protecting our children women become as dangerous as the king cobra (งูจงอาง). You sink your teeth in and don’t let go (กัดไม่ปล่อย, kat mai ploi).

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Figure . Detail, Rattana’s tent, east end. Photo: author.

If I had no children, I probably would not have fought so hard.” The image of the cobra and familiar figure of speech (bite and don’t release) capture Yai Hai’s distinctly fierce, protective approach to motherhood.

Living for Land Given the moral significance of motherhood, it is unsurprising that Yai Hai made much of her role as mother. Yai (ยาย) means mother’s mother and is a position of special authority and respectability. Although she became known in the media, as in a gesture of respect, as Yai Hai, she called herself “mother” (แม่). When I met Yai Hai and her daughter, Khemphon Khemsida, Yai Hai was being honored in a celebration of International Mother’s Day held by the Department of Women’s and Children’s Affairs. Khemphon told me that Yai Hai’s parents had been respected herbal healers in their region (Natan district) of Ubon Ratchatani province and owned the land they had left to Yai Hai that had subsequently been flooded. Khemphon spoke through tears as she recounted how the family (including ten children) had had to sell off livestock after losing the land, eventually taking work on others’ fields when they could get it. Shortly thereafter, my friend Eid, whose palm Yai Hai had

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been reading, introduced me to her. I asked her to tell me what had happened with her land. Her response was animated: Yai Hai: For  years Mother fought (แม่สู้) to recover land taken to build a dam. The government claimed it was government land, but Mother fought for it. Mother went to all levels of officials, from the village headman (ผู้ใหญ่บ้าน) to the Prime Minister. When they offered money, Mother said “No!” [which she supplemented by shoving my shoulder with alarming force]. When they built the dam, they never said anything about flooding the land. We went everywhere, the children even went to the Ministry of the Interior and the Prime Minister, but there is no fairness (ไม่มีความเป็นธรรม). Mother quit going, there were no more doors, so Mother went to live by her land, to fight to live there, to die there. Don: When did you go the NHRC? Yai Hai: Last year. Don: Did it help that human rights are protected in the constitution? Yai Hai: We have had rights for  years. It is not a matter of the constitution, (บ่ใช่เรื่องรัฐธรรมนูญ). Mother took the names of all the family, from babies up, to the NHRC. Now we have the land, but we cannot grow anything. Yai Hai explained that they had a plan to go to the prime minister seeking compensation for the twenty-seven years they could have been farming the land, a plan that Eid has since told me was successful, though she did not say how much the state paid. Khemphon then talked about what, for her family, was the galvanizing event of their struggle for their land. In , having appealed with no success to officials from the village and district levels (ผู้ใหญ่บ้าน, กํานัน), all the way to the prime minister’s office, the family collectively chose to destroy a part of the dam that had led to the formation of a small lake over their property and that of two other families. (These families accepted state reimbursement for their lost land, while Yai Hai did not—though some of her neighbors believe she did.) It was a slow process, as it involved breaking through concrete at a point over a sluice using hand tools.

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Khemphon: For two or three days, the weather grew worse and worse, with rain and wind that nearly blew down the canopy (โจม) where we lived. We all stayed there together, even our children [Yai Hai’s grandchildren]. Mother Hai (แม่ใฮ) prayed for days to grandfather and grandmother (ปู่พึ่มย่าพึ่ม) the earth mother (แม่เจ้าธรนี), and the spirits, (ผีอ้ายคํา). The day before, we invited monks from the temple to make merit (ทําบุญ) for the water. On the final day, when Yai Hai removed the last bit of earth holding back the lake, the weather cleared completely. As the water flowed into the sluice, family members floated offerings of jasmine garlands and food along with it. The community and the police, who had observed the destruction the previous day, making threats to arrest Yai Hai, were not so easily placated. While some community members supported the family, but others did not, fearing that draining the water would lead to drought or that it might void the agreements they had signed ceding their land. (Of the twenty-one households whose land was affected by the construction of the dam, eighteen signed away the rights to their land, while Yai Hai and two other households did not.) Over the protests of Yai Hai and her family, the police arranged to plug the hole. By this time, however, Yai Hai had done two important things. She had made contact with groups protesting the construction of the Pak Mun dam in the late s, in particular the Assembly of the Poor (perhaps the most significant and oldest grassroots organization in Thailand [see Missingham ]), which invited her to learn from Pak Mun protestors like the NGO Living River Siam (โครงการแม่น้ําเพื่อชีวิต). As Kat, at the ONHRC explained, “Yai Hai is very strong, and not shy [about expressing her opinions], and so she did not work long with the Pak Mun people. They focused on Pak Mun, and said the Laha dam was too small. They knew people in the media, though, and they got well-known TV documentarian Prasan to come to Natan district to cover Yai Hai’s story.” He came during the days leading up to their puncturing of the wall, and, Kat said, the airing of the piece brought Yai Hai national attention. It was the same network of allies who helped direct media attention to Yai Hai who also helped her present her case to the Law Society of Thailand and, through them, to the NHRC (Chinnaraj ). When Yai Hai and I talked in , she spoke of May , saying, “I took a list of all my children, from grandchildren up [to the NHRC]. It is for all of us.” (The list included ten children and fifty-four grandchildren.) Eid explained

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that for years, Yai Hai and her children had to work as day-laborers on other people’s plots, after having sold off the buffalo herd she had inherited. She also inherited from her parents knowledge of healing herbs and massage, as well as the ability to read palms. Her relation to her land, then, was not simply one of property but also of her ability to heal—an important role in her community—in addition to a spiritual relationship, exhibited by her prayers before breeching the dam. For these reasons, when, on  April , Mr. Sunsi Kotlanawin from the NHRC mediated a meeting at City Hall between Yai Hai’s family, government officials from the subdistrict of Natan and the district of Natan, the provincial governor, and Yai Hai’s neighbors, Yai Hai flatly refused the governor’s offer of monetary compensation. This was when, to demonstrate how emphatically she refused this offer, as she said “บ่เอา” (“I don’t want it”) and shoved me firmly. “I want my land,” she said, “I want to die there and stay on our own land.” Her phrasing is interesting—ตายอยูท่ น่ี ่ี บนทีด่ นิ ของเราเอง—because it bespeaks remaining on or with the land beyond her death, and it speaks of the land as “our own” land. She has been clear, both in our interview and in the media, that she wants the land to pass it to her children and grandchildren, but I recall her prayers to her deceased parents, which she performed at the same time that she prayed to the earth mother and the spirits in the water and land. In an area where ancestor worship is strong (the northeast) and intertwined with Buddhism (Keyes , ), the idea of “our land” references not just the property relations of the living and inheritance by the young but also relationships with the dead whose spirits inhabit the land. Yai Hai’s desire to die and remain on this land, then, is also a spiritual claim to belonging that does not lend itself to commodification. Offering monetary compensation, therefore, could not meet her attachment to the land or her related sense of a just resolution.

Beyond Translation Some, like Sally Engle Merry, find an idea of translation to be especially helpful in understanding how global discourse—her example is human rights— gains purchase as global discourse in specific locales (Merry a, b, , ). Merry receives sharp criticism from Marianne Constable on several charges, including the translation of human rights, each of which Merry contests directly (Constable ; Merry , ). My task here is not to reproduce their debate but rather to call attention to the difference in

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the direction Yai Hai and Rattana take us. The question is not whether global human rights discourse is imposed on unwitting or unwilling locales or whether forms of vernacularization succeed in making human rights vital within specific cultural terms but rather how we understand human rights (or justice, protest, demands for acknowledgment) within nondiscursive practices, instances in which it is possible for authorities simply to ignore the deployment of (human) rights discourses by particular individuals. I dwell here on gesture as a way of approaching this question. Allowing for gesture as detachable from speech (indeed, as arising, in certain circumstances, exactly where speech fails, is impossible, or goes unacknowledged) and as a specific way that Yai Hai and Rattana produced conditions for conversations about the injustices they experienced, translation loses the purchase it has in discourse-centered analyses. Further, the ways that Yai Hai and Rattana showed their defiance, dismay, moral authority, and resolve through gestures like encamping at Lan Khon Muang or praying to the water spirits and ancestors before puncturing the retaining wall drew on an imaginaire in which human rights were part of an assemblage. That they could deploy motherhood as a crucial member of this virtual repertoire in such distinct ways—Rattana as the self-sacrificing, suffering mother, Yai Hai as the epitome of the cobra who bites without release to protect her family— reveals the different, flexible ways that motherhood can articulate with other figures, practices, and tropes (like human rights or justice) through gesture. For this reason, I have promoted an idea of gesture that does not reduce either to bodily action or to a bodily accompaniment to speech but that is expressive. Gesture in Yai Hai and Rattana’s examples gains its social force not from being bodily action but from the profound resonance it has among Thai who value, in particular ways, the fierce or sacrificing figure of the mother or the disciplined patience of awaiting responsiveness from one’s authorities. There is a ferocious perseverance to Yai Hai’s struggle, one that would accept as justice no substitute for the return of her land. Ultimately, that is what she got. On  June , the prime minister ordered the army to destroy the weir, and the government entered into negotiations to compensate her for the years during which her land was flooded and for the rehabilitation of the land’s fertility (Nation,  June ). She was not, however, alone in this struggle. Beyond her family, the NGOs and grassroots organizations that connected her with the media, with lawyers, and with the NHRC offered a crucial network of support. Without the NHRC mediating negotia-

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tions after she punctured the wall and without media coverage of the puncturing by Burapha, it is not clear that this particular gesture, nested though it was among others to garner merit and honor the spirits of ancestors, land, and water, would have created conditions for negotiation. Rattana, on the other hand, chose to accept a financial settlement in November . In this instance, the chair of the NHRC, Saneh Chamarik, negotiated with Rattana on one side and Apirak Kosayodhin and Thai Erawan on the other. On the condition that the monies offered by the city of Bangkok (฿,,) and by Thai Erawan (฿,,) were not donations but rather compensation (hence, an acknowledgment of wrongdoing), and with Saneh’s assurance that there would an investigation of official corruption, Rattana accepted the offer. I began with a contrast between the way that Yai Hai and Rattana carried out their struggles with the mass movements that have been such an important feature of Thai politics. I wish to conclude by recalling that what the polluted, mourning Sultanpuri women Das studied showed “was not a standardized narrative of loss and suffering but a project that can only be understood in the singular” (Das , ). On one hand, it is only because they drew on repertoires of images, myths, beliefs, and affects that are generally available and recognizable that Yai Hai and Rattana were able to provoke an acknowledgment of their claims. That is to say, part of the condition of these repertoires’ affective resonance was their ordinariness: others may also deploy them just because they are common. The fact that Yai Hai and Rattana became, in the media and in popular opinion, exemplars arose partly from their remarkable fortitude. A significant feature of their broad appeal and the force of their demands, though, came from the ways that they embodied especially potent tropes and symbols that are in principle generically available. They demanded justice as mothers (taking on that authority and motivated by the accompanying sense of duty), as citizens bearing rights that harken back to distant monarchies, as consumers (in Rattana’s case), and as owners of land by legal contract (Rattana) and by inheritance (with all that implied for Yai Hai in terms of duties to her ancestors and her descendants). Each of these holds broad appeal, and a wide range of Thai could identify with any one, which accounts for a large share of the support Rattana and Yai Hai’s struggles received. On the other hand, understanding these struggles as singular cautions us that they offer no sort of model for successful political protest or demands for justice. The ambiguity of meaning in gesture is powerful, because it allows

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gesture to remain open-ended and available for articulation with a variety of items in various repertoires or various figures in the collective imaginaire as it shifts (on Mead’s analysis) from expression to meaning. This nebulousness, however, also leaves gestures vulnerable to the abyss. I do not mean that they will be misunderstood or understood in ways other than a gesturer planned. That, after all, is the condition of language as such, and in part, it is my argument that aspects of gesture that do not reduce to language and do not register only as meaning are what provide their affective force in these two cases. The vulnerability is that the gesture will go unrecognized, unacknowledged, or have no affective resonance. If Thai politics continues to be characterized by cycles of elections, mass demonstrations, and coups, it would seem that no one of this triad has been able to eclipse the other two in any enduring way. The importance of Rattana and Yai Hai’s struggles is not that they offer a sea-change in relationships between citizenry and authority in Thailand but rather how they reveal that struggles for acknowledgment as rights-bearers can show themselves through alternative forms of expression. It is not a question of how Thai citizens are represented (by politicians, rally leaders, or state organs) but how alternative expressions of demands for justice can gain force and provide political resources at precisely those moments that representation fails. How these expressions and all that they evoke make contact with human or citizenship rights and resonate through the Thai polity will shape and inform the fate of rights claims in Thailand.

Chapter 5

The Return of Coup Politics

As mentioned in Chapter , Kat had told me over lunch one day that the long era of the coup had come to an end in Thailand. The military, populated by “hawks” and “doves,” had fallen decisively under the control of the doves since , who were committed to professionalizing it and removing it from domestic politics. At the time, I took her to be making an observation or a claim about how things had changed, but on reflection, I cannot help wondering if it was a straightforward expression of optimism, given the seachange in politics after the May  massacre. She was not alone in telling me that coups belonged to the past, and so she was not alone in being mistaken and disappointed when, in , the optimism she and others may have had was betrayed. In this chapter, I will discuss the political upheaval that has left Thailand reeling from only a few months after the end of my fieldwork through to the present. My discussion gives an account of the political changes, with their dramatic, conservative shift; explores some implications this shift has had for human rights; and defends the notion that the period immediately before and throughout my fieldwork (from the mids to , the period of optimism in which there were unprecedented room and possibilities for human rights) was exceptional, and that while the specific reasons for the  and subsequent coups were distinctive, the return of succession-by-coup was a return to well-worn political ruts. The implication of this claim is that such things as human rights could only emerge under the historically specific and aberrant conditions following from Black May but that this period of social-moral-political experimentation came to an end with uncertain but not promising implications for human rights and their advocates. In this chapter, I briefly describe the political upheaval that has characterized the past decade in Thailand, a turmoil that marks a return

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to normal politics. I argue that the return to coup politics (the cycle of election, public or elite dissatisfaction, coup, protest, restoration of democracy, election, dissatisfaction, and so on) has raised specific tensions around human rights but has not done away with them. I will discuss this with respect to the dramatic enhancement of lèse-majesté laws and accusations, constitutional changes affecting the NHRC in the  and  constitutions, and the move to subsume the NHRC into the Office of the Thai Ombudsman, all of which are direct products of the return of the coup.

The Cycle of Politics As I explained in previous chapters, there is a widely held conviction that Thailand has been governed by constitutions since the reign of King Ramkhamhaeng in thirteenth-century Sukhothai (Mukhom ). Indeed, one could argue that the modern dawn of constitutional monarchy in Thailand, the  coup that overthrew the absolute monarchy, was more about constitutionalism than democracy (Ferrara , ). The role of the constitution, though, is somewhat paradoxical. On one hand, the constitution, like democracy, has failed to gain the sort of profound dedication and sacred status that the three pillars of the Thai state—monarchy, religion, and nation—have. This is largely the crux of the matter: the tensions between the monarchy-religionnation triad on one side and the constitution (and now, by extension, human rights) and democracy on the other. Since the  coup, the first trio has consistently prevailed over the latter (Hewison , ). On this basis, “monarchy” rather outweighs “constitutional” in this pairing, leading scholars like Thongchai to prefer “royalist democracy,” as it emphasizes the historically conservative, royalist bent of the major political institutions and polity in Thailand (Thongchai b). On the other hand, though, the proliferation of Thai constitutions (the  constitution is the twentieth since ) suggests both the dismissiveness of royalist democracy toward constitutional law and a kind of regard for constitutions. Why else would each new dispensation draft a new constitution? There are several answers to this. First, a coup is by definition treason, and so new juntas must invalidate the existing constitution to invalidate its laws and produce a new one that provides amnesty for the putsch. Second, it provides the new regime with the opportunity to reorder political life, which we will see has had significant implications for the use of lèse-majesté laws since . In broad strokes, this has taken the

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form either of more administrative constitutions that give the military greater powers and access to government (for instance, generals being able to occupy the premiership), as well as concentrate governmental power in the hands of the prime minister at the expense of parliament, or of more democratic constitutions with a more representative bent (Harding and Leyland , ). The existence of a constitution is not an obstacle to a coup as much as it is a problem coup-makers must solve and an opportunity to promote specific (for example, military or monarchist) interests. There is a sense, then, that one cannot govern without a constitution, even if it is not this one. Because each democratic constitution (accompanying the return from military governance to electoral democracy) tends to discourage authoritarianism; enhance individual rights; promote freer expression of a wider range of political, religious, and social convictions; and reduce royal powers, they necessarily test the tolerance of conservative, royalist groups who see any questioning of the military state or the role of the king as an attack (increasingly in this order) on the monarchy-religion-nation (Harding and Leyland , –). Any constitution that offers guarantees of free speech, for example, pits individual rights against the sanctity of the royal family and renews the tensions that push the pendulum of Thai politics back and forth between the competing interests of royalists and democrats, conservatives and champions of individual or human rights. As Thai, especially rural Thai, have become more and more comfortable claiming rights for themselves, this basic tension in the Thai polity between monarchy-religion-nation and constitution–human rights–democracy has become more pitched, intransigent, and unavoidable. The Yellow Shirt/Red Shirt conflict is a particular manifestation of this tension.

Yellow Shirts and Red Shirts The political impasse Thai currently experience did not begin with a coup but rather progressed into one. As the timeline at the beginning of this book illustrates, Thaksin Shinawatra in  was the first elected Thai prime minister to complete his term in office and the first to win immediate reelection, but he did not do so without controversy. A telecommunications billionaire, Thaksin did not come from a conventional political background (Pasuk and Baker ; McCargo and Ukrist ), and his relative independence allowed him, first, to form his own party, Thai Rak Thai (ไทยรักไทย, which translates as “Thai love Thai”; it is not obvious if it is an imperative or a descriptive, but the

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nationalistic populism is unmistakable). Second, it allowed him to pursue a kind of populism somewhat unencumbered by traditional patronage networks and that tapped into the growing discontent and burgeoning aspirations of rural Thai, especially in the north and northeast, which have typically experienced political neglect. This allowed him to exploit a shift in social structure that was increasingly at odds with the conventional political elite in terms of economic goals, social networks, and ideas of the nation (and, therefore, of citizenship). These features of Thaksin’s political successes (independently of a certain hubris) go a long way to explaining the virulence of the opposition that rose against him, as well as the countermovement that rose, initially, against the opposition to him. (That is partly but not entirely to say “in support of Thaksin,” because the Red Shirt countermovement to the Yellow Shirts who opposed Thaksin also generated political agendas significantly beyond a defense of Thaksin.) During his first term in office, Thaksin launched policies meriting severe criticism. Two prominent examples include his approaches to unrest in the four southernmost, predominantly Muslim provinces and his war on drugs. In response to what the government, regarding conflict in the deep south, described to Amnesty International as “no public emergency but only disorder circumstances [sic] for some period of time,” Thaksin authorized martial law (Amnesty International , ). Against drug trafficking, in  Thaksin introduced a program in which he granted police impunity for extra-judicial killings of suspected drug dealers, leading to somewhere between , and , killings between  February and  April, though the campaign extended through  (Amnesty International , –; McCargo and Ukrist , –). Notably, these sorts of policies were not what damaged his popularity and instigated the Yellow Shirt protests against him (Aulino et al. ). The claims of corruption and antimonarchism leveled against Thaksin by the People’s Alliance for Democracy (PAD, or Yellow Shirts) stem from tensions around the relationship between the nation and the monarchy that date at least to the reign of King Chulalongkorn and to more recent changes in Thai social structure. Since the s, Thailand has undergone dramatic economic growth, especially in the s and s, when its economy was the fastest growing in the world (Ferrara , ; Aulino et al. ). Two connected changes occurred in this respect. One was a significant drop in poverty, particularly with the emergence of a rural middle class, and the second was increasing inequalities in wealth. The rural middle class relied less on patronage rela-

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tions to come into contact with national politics and started to develop networks that better served its political and economic interests, endowing it with a sense of agency that was previously uncharacteristic of rural Thailand (Walker , ). Arguably, what distinguished Thaksin was less an antimonarchical stance than (by recognizing a political opportunity in urging rural Thai to cultivate ideas of a different, better future for themselves) an opposition to the network surrounding the monarchy—what Duncan McCargo calls the network monarchy (Ferrara , –; McCargo ; Walker , ). On this view, the PAD vilification of Thaksin is a response to the weakening grip traditional elites hold on the political process, exemplified by rural Thai valuing democracy as a vehicle for promoting their own interests (and voting Thaksin to two premierships) rather than the interests of their patrons, of taking the political process as their own instead of one from which they stand at a remove (their access mediated through patrons). One way this may be clear is in the Red Shirts’ (United Front for Democracy Against Dictatorship, or UDD) adoption of the feudal term prhai (ไพร่) or serf, which many print on their T-shirts, as a rebuttal of stereotypes about them as ignorant peasants easily manipulated by political figures like Thaksin and a critique of the political machinery that seeks to stifle their political agency by restricting the role of elections in Thai governance (Elinoff ; Ferrara , ). The political forces and stereotypes the UDD resists in this way is nicely captured by Federico Ferrara: The PAD .  .  . was joined by military generals, royalist academics, Democrat Party politicians, and parts of the national press in appealing to the sense of moral superiority of middle-class voters, playing up crude cultural stereotypes such as the notion that the provincial electorate’s ignorance, credulousness, and moral corruption required the derogation of majority rule, and the placement of the majority of the population under the tutelage of the usual set of “good men.” According to royalist rationalizations of the coup, the problem was not just Thaksin, but those who elected him. (Ferrara , ) The “hyper-royalism” of the PAD (Pavin , ; Thongchai a, ) found expression in the “new politics” it espoused, advocating, for example, a reduction in the proportion of elected parliamentarians to  percent (the other  percent being appointed), effectively frustrating the democratic

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aspirations of rural Thai (Nelson , ). The PAD, advocating “royalist democracy,” sees this as a way of honoring and protecting the monarchy— Thailand as a “democratic regime with the King as the Head of State” (Thongchai b; see also Haberkorn ). It is worth noting, in this respect, one potential but unintended consequence of hyperroyalism as it pertains to the color-coding of the movements. The PAD initiated this identification of its movement with the color of the king, selecting one of the pillars of monarchyreligion-nation and emphasizing it. We will see in the discussion of lèsemajesté that the hyperroyalism of the junta rendered any perceived insult to the junta a slight against the monarchy, collapsing the nation into the monarchy. By contrast, the UDD, in opting for red, has chosen potent symbolism from another leg of the triad. Red, deriving from the red in the Thai flag, connotes the blood spilled (or that Thai should be prepared to sacrifice) on Thai soil in defense of the realm (Baker and Pasuk , ; Thongchai a, ). This dual association—sacrificial blood and soil—is the flag’s evocation of the nation. I have noted in previous chapters that historically, nation-religion-king were taken as elements of a single unit, the king standing as representative and protector of his subjects, the nation, and Buddhism, with Buddhism serving to sanctify the king as intrinsically righteous (see also Baker and Pasuk , –; Thongchai , –; Thongchai a, ). What we see now is an unprecedented fission of nation-religionmonarchy, with monarchy and nation pitted against one another, both symbolically (yellow and red) and conceptually (an insistence that the nation is for the king—more subjects than citizens—versus a conviction that electoral democracy is a constitutive element and expression of a nation made up of citizens, not subjects).

Lèse-majesté In a passage of which the citizen/subject opposition is a recent echo, Sulak Sivaraksa claims, The monarch must be, in Buddhist terms, a dhammaraja, or righteous ruler, not a devaraja, or god-king. But even though our monarchy is not absolute, the military and people treat it as if it were. . . . I argued that the king should separate himself and the royal family from the military and from any economic base such as the crown properties.

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To preserve the monarchy, the king must be entirely separate and beyond reproach. I considered it my role to offer this constructive criticism. Unfortunately, I was too vocal about it, and said it perhaps too often. (Sulak , ) Although this passage (referring to the early s) gives a helpful indication of how long and entrenched are many of the conflicts boiling over now, to say nothing of Sulak’s prescience, I cite it to a different end. He is reflecting here on events that immediately preceded his being charged with lèsemajesté. Sulak is clear that, while loyal to the monarchy, he was also critical of it (as criticism, he argues, is a requirement, not a contradiction, of loyalty), and so he was not terribly surprised at the charge, though it was comparatively rare at the time. For several decades after the establishment of constitutional democracy, the number of arrests for lèse-majesté hovered between zero and ten, jumping around  (with the Thammasat University protests of the return from exile of Thanom and Praphat). The rate of arrests dropped shortly after, returning to the low teens by  and remaining in the zero to twenty range through . Indeed, up until Thaksin’s ouster, lèse-majesté was deployed primarily by politicians against politicians, containing its use within elite contests for power. After the  coup, the number of new cases skyrocketed into the hundreds (Streckfuss , ). Streckfuss notes that in , there were  charges brought before the Court of First Instance, while (following the  coup) in , the number of charges had blossomed to , then jumped to  in , and  by  (Streckfuss , ). An important feature of this explosion of charges is that it was now a weapon directed at Thai (and several foreigners) from all walks of life. In a way, then, the central tension between constitutional guarantees of human rights like freedom of speech and the maintenance—or enhancement—of Article  of the Criminal Code (which mandates punishments for anyone who defames, insults, or threatens the king, queen, crown prince, or regent) has hitherto remained an intraelite affair. The pervasive application of Article  in a sense socializes this central tension, making it a preoccupation of all Thai, effectively recruiting the courts as political tools of the conservative elite (Aim ; Hewison ; Streckfuss , ). In part, this socialization of the lèse-majesté law reflects the structural changes discussed above and the way that Red Shirt (UDD) supporters have become invested in democratic governance. More than a tactic of elites against other elites, in the context of a hyperroyalist junta that feels itself—and by

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extension the monarchy—to be under attack by those who defend electoral democracy, like the UDD, and who may criticize royalists for standing in the way of democratization, the notorious vagueness of Article  renders lèsemajesté a thought crime (Thongchai a, ; b). The penumbra of fear that Article  generates arises in part from the utter destruction a charge likely implies for one’s life, which spreads like a pathogen to one’s family (with or without a guilty verdict), and partly from the ambiguities around what forms of thought, speech, and action are permissible (a tendency, in the months leading up to the referendum to ratify it, that extended to the suppression of all public opposition to, criticism of, or questioning of the  draft constitution, under threat of sentences up to ten years in prison) (Thongchai a, ; Ehrlich ). Compounding this profound uncertainty around the criteria of offense are procedural peculiarities crippling to the defense. It is not necessary that anyone actually find that an act or statement denigrate the monarchy. Rather, it is an offense “if anyone could hypothetically construe an alleged statement or conduct as being detrimental to the reputation of the monarchy. In a nation which treats its royal family with such great reverence, it is not possible for the prosecution to establish the offence by reference to the actual impact of the alleged conduct” (Harding and Leyland , ). To declare in open court, as a witness for the prosecution, that someone else’s speech or conduct had diminished your esteem of the monarchy would itself constitute lèse-majesté. The law, in response, relieves the prosecution of this burden. Further, the police, prosecutor, and judge rarely grant the accused bail for fear that they, too, could then face a charge of lèse-majesté (Thongchai a, ). As human rights advocates have protested, these routine circumstances systematically deny the accused constitutionally guaranteed rights (Hewison ). In this way, the Red Shirt/Yellow Shirt conflict—as one that pits national symbolism (red for blood and the land) against monarchical symbolism (yellow for the king) and democratic aspirations (Red Shirts) against hyperroyalist zeal to protect the monarchy (Yellow Shirts)—takes root in the judicial system, opposing the constitutional protection of civil rights against the legal code’s protection of the reputation of the monarchy. The NHRC, as a constitutionally autonomous agency, is one of few—indeed, perhaps the only one in contemporary Thailand—that can openly voice concerns about the uses of Article , especially as it has been used as a tool for the junta to subdue the Thai public. This autonomy, however, comes under direct threat in the proposed  constitution.

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Constitutional Drift One of the most consequential aspects of the return of the coup era for the NHRC has been the way successive constitutions have altered its mandate. Initially, the NHRC had six constitutionally defined duties, which expanded to nine, largely covering the same territory, in the  constitution. A major difference introduced in , however, appears in item four of Section , which gives the NHRC the power to file a lawsuit with the Court of Justice on behalf of one who has suffered a violation of human rights. This is a significant reduction in the space between the NHRC and the state, as it no longer has the role only of collecting evidence, proposing remedial measures for the violator, and submitting findings to the National Assembly (which, as an organ of the state, would direct the appropriate state agency to pursue legal remedies, as it did through the Office of Consumer Protection Board in Rattana’s case). This does not complete a move to participate in the state violence underpinning law (in both Weber’s sense of the state as holding a monopoly on the legitimate use of violence and in Benjamin’s of violence standing at the origin and in the maintenance of law), but it is a substantial step for the NHRC in that direction. It is not especially clear how consequential this shift has been for the practice of human rights in Thailand. First, a possible lament about human rights is that conventions, treaties, declarations, and the like, without the coercive powers of law, lack teeth (for a regionally relevant example, see Durbach et al. ). This acquisition of teeth would, by such thinking, make human rights easier to enforce (on, or almost on, the model of law). The companion to greater coercive powers, however, is a greater risk of abuse, as the NHRC comes in this respect to resemble more closely the state it is its task to monitor. That is, gaining coercive powers makes it vulnerable to the same sorts of human rights violations as any other state agency. A more significant source of ambiguity, however, was that this new power could only constitute a change insofar as it became manifest in practice. With a new tranche of commissioners in  and new constitutions in  (interim) and , this provision did not have much opportunity to leave a lasting impression on human rights practices in Thailand. It did, however, set a precedent to which later constitutional drafting committees may be tempted to return, which gives the increased proximity of coercive powers some lasting relevance. We will see, further, that the  constitution draws the NHRC further into the service of the state, but there are other important changes in the

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 constitution that persist in the  constitution, including the reduction of the number of commissioners from eleven to seven. The effect of this is not yet fully clear, especially given the appointment of the third tranche of NHRC commissioners in November  and the continuation of military governance. It was, however, clear when Kat and Dr. Chuchai discussed the NHRC and the ONHRC that both bodies were becoming taxed by the volume of work, and it is hard to imagine that fewer commissioners would be able to address Thailand’s human rights needs when eleven were already becoming stretched thin. One advance of the  constitution over the  that might have reduced the burden on the NHRC (as they would no longer have to act as an intermediary) is the introduction in Section  of the right of individuals to petition the Constitutional Court directly (a section repeated in Section  of the  constitution). It is a constitutional path to exercising the fundamental rights of which the establishment of the NHRC was one expression, but that was not inscribed in the  constitution (Harding and Leyland , ). That the NHRC survived the  interim constitution (which has no sections devoted to the NHRC but does acknowledge its continued existence in Section -, which excludes from consideration ministerial candidates who are national human rights commissioners) and has a continued constitutional existence in the  constitution suggests that, under adverse circumstances, human rights are, constitutionally, here to stay. The role of the NHRC in the  constitution does, however, change in an intriguing way. In Section - of the  constitution, we find a curiously worded new duty for the NHRC: to clarify and report promptly accurate evidence in cases where reporting on the human rights situation in Thailand is incorrect or unfair. This appears to charge the NHRC not just with promoting and protecting human rights in Thailand (as the rest of Section  outlines in terms consonant with both the  and  constitutions) but also with protecting the Thai government from incorrect, unfair, or inaccurate reports on the human rights situation in Thailand. Put concisely, the NHRC is now to protect Thailand’s reputation on questions of human rights. (While this exposes the junta’s concern with and sensitivity to its international reputation on human rights—and, so, attentiveness to international monitoring bodies—it is too early to see what this means in practice.) It is tempting to think, especially given the sections of the  interim constitution that expanded the powers of the junta and exempted its members from prosecution for their

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illegal acts, that the National Council for Peace and Order (NCPO, the government ushered in by the  coup) is constitutionally obligating the NHRC to protect its stature, to gain for the coup and the policies stemming from it a stamp of approval by a human rights body. That may be the case but an inadequate explanation on its own (especially given the presumption that there will, some day, be elections but that the  constitution will survive them). This is not, however, the only effect the  constitution holds for the NHRC. One of the novel elements of the constitution is a requirement that commissioners in the NHRC be “politically impartial and have apparent honesty.” The phrase มีความซื่อสัตย์สุจริต (mii khwam seusat sujarit) can mean “have honesty” or “have integrity,” but either translation will serve my point. This phrase appears in the  constitution four times, six in the  constitution (which was drafted, recall, by General Surayut’s military government to include provisions exonerating coup leaders after ousting Thaksin on the pretext of corruption) and a dozen times in the  constitution: a tripling of the appearances of . It appears as a qualification for the NHRC (and for the Constitutional Court and Office of the Ombudsman) for the first time in , though the term appears in all three constitutions in sections on the Election Commission, the National Audit Commission, and the CounterCorruption Commission (not always as an explicit requirement to sit on these commissions). The dramatic increase in concern for embedding evident integrity in the commission relates, possibly, to the perception that Thailand has become politically deadlocked between corrupt politicians (that is, those connected to Thaksin, the Thai Rak Thai party, or any of its descendants, which amount to the same thing in this view), who nonetheless have kept winning decisive electoral victories, and the military or “honest” forces who keep ousting them (through the courts or via coup). The entire drumbeat of the early Yellow Shirt protests (with Chamlong, the model of Santi Asoke asceticism, prominently leading) was the elimination of corruption, embodied by Thaksin and his family, from Thai politics. During a conversation in , after the  coup, a retired, high-ranking government bureaucrat surprised me by saying that, after all, something had to be done to root corruption out of the political system. The coup, she thought, was motivated by that desire. I take these inclusions of integrity in the constitutional requirements for commissioners as possibly expressions of this government’s anxiety to fulfill a certain mandate with respect to political corruption. They attempt to do this through the institution of new rules, which,

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as critical legal scholar Duncan Kennedy suggests, opens lines of argument and counterargument that are less likely to resolve problems of corruption than they are to open new avenues of litigation and rhetorical maneuver. Kennedy is careful to show that the rhetorical maneuvers (meeting an argument-bite with a counter and so on) are largely conventional (certain counters standing in a dyadic relationship with certain arguments, the opposition between them providing their structural basis, as opening moves in a game may unfold according to conventional moves and responses) and have two features: structure and context. On this view, the play of argument-bites (between iterations of argument, counter, rejoinder, and onward), in the pursuit of a resolution of any given legislative contretemps, will show the oppositional structure just mentioned, though the given context provides the content of the argument-bites appearing in this play (Kennedy , ). The constitutional maneuvering of the junta (exemplified in the  interim constitution and the  constitution) and the countermaneuvers of its prodemocracy detractors follow a pattern well captured by this view of conventional moves. The stakes are high, as the law is not neutral with respect to the distribution of wealth, power, and social justice but is decisive in determining such distributions, as well as the possibilities for altering them in the future, such that, through law, political and economic power become indistinguishable (Kennedy , , ; Tushnet , , ). The purification ideal promoted by the junta in Thailand has an antique religio-political analog in the role of the king purifying Buddhism when the sangha had become corrupted. In this form, the argument-bite would be, “because politicians and political parties have not freed themselves and democratic politics of corruption, the coup is necessary to reboot the political system.” The counter-bite might be “coups are by definition treason” or “no (Thai) coup has expunged corruption, so there is no reason to think coups are effective at ‘resetting’ Thai politics.” Or, the argument-bite might be “a coup is the only/the best way to purge corruption from politics, and so the  constitution embeds in law and institutions an efficient mechanism for removing elected governments the military deems corrupt.” The counterbite: “The  constitution makes elected governance impossible because it allows the military to remove any government with which it does not accord.” Perhaps the simplest dyad, and the closest to the sorts of claims Thai have made, is “democratic politics is rife with corruption, hence the need for a purging coup” and “only democratically elected governments are legitimate” (McCargo ; Aim ).

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It is all the more important to recall, in light of these considerations of argument-bite and counter-argument-bite as decisive moves in forming the laws that determine distributions of justice, political power, and economic power, that the junta has severely curtailed public discourse on questions of law, justice, and power. The prohibition of discussion of the proposed constitution leading up to the referendum in August  is not an aberrant policy initiative on the junta’s part but characteristic of its project of a depoliticized public sphere, evacuated of contentious debate (McCargo , ). An implication of this type of maneuver, on the assumption that justice is a matter of conversation undertaken from differently positioned or constituted subjects with differing interests and convictions (Cornell ; Ward , ), is that justice slips beyond the juridical horizon. In short, a view informed by Critical Legal Studies (CLS) finds the NCPO’s project of expelling corruption to banish justice, as well. The mission of extirpating corruption from politics, commissions, and courts, on one hand, and on the other giving the NHRC a new task of defending the national reputation from unfair appraisals might justifiably provoke apprehension. These both pivot on the notion of Thailand being or becoming politically purified and being seen by outsiders as so purified. There is the danger that this constitutional adjustment in the role of the NHRC is to mute its criticism of the NCPO and to help burnish the NCPO’s image, each of which reduces the autonomy of the NHRC. A move to incorporate the NHRC into the Office of the Ombudsman supports this thesis of reduced NHRC autonomy.

The NHRC–Office of the Ombudsman Merger In February , I contacted Kat about a story I had heard that the NHRC might be forced to merge with the Office of the Ombudsman (OTO). It was true, she said, that in the future the  constitution would make it so, adding, optimistically, that Thai politics might show further resistance, leaving the promulgation of the constitution, at that moment, uncertain. Organizations and institutions had, however, deteriorated badly, she continued, leaving society rather cowed, and the referendum has now vindicated this observation rather than her optimism. The  constitution in itself does not fold the NHRC into the OTO, which is cause for hope that the NHRC might maintain its autonomy. In fact, Section  declares that the selection of commissioners

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will be governed by the Organic Act of the National Human Rights Commission. This, however, is the only aspect of the NHRC that the constitution determines will be so governed. This is a point to which I will return in a moment. A new inclusion in the  constitution occurs in Section  on the powers and duties of the OTO. There, it says that the OTO is to refer to the NHRC all matters related to the violation of human rights. No previous constitution has a similar clause, and it does suggest that the drafters had in mind a closer relationship between the OTO and the NHRC. This is a significant move, as nothing in previous constitutions would have prevented the OTO referring cases to the NHRC, so the work of this paragraph, the emphasis it places on a link between the bodies, appended after the numbered subsections of , is important to the drafters. What might sharpen this point further, to return to the Organic Act, is that now that the referendum has approved the draft constitution of , the junta has before it the mandate and opportunity to draft the Organic Act that will govern the NHRC. Section , along with the previously stated intention of merging the two bodies into the Ombudsman and Protection of Rights of the People, suggests that this possibility remains alive. What, then, would be the implications of this merger? Unlike the NHRC, the OTO is not autonomous with respect to the state. It is a watchdog body whose duties, generally oriented to good government, “require action to be taken concerning the ethics of holders of political positions and State officials. The territory patrolled by the OTO is Thailand’s extensive public administration” (Harding and Leyland , ). It is not hard to see that its work will overlap with that of the NHRC, taking as it does the state to be the main threat to human rights. It was on these grounds that the drafters of the  constitution proposed incorporating the NHRC into the OTO. The NHRC opposed the idea outright. In a January  press release, it argued, first, that the scope of the NHRC’s work in promoting and protecting human rights extends beyond the scope of duties of the OTO. There is, the release points out, no other agency that investigates human rights infringements (NHRC , ). Second, the NHRC claims that the methods of investigation, fact finding, and routine and logistical work bear similarities to those of the OTO, “but the powers exercised upon their duties with different missions are not the same. Meanwhile, the actions these two entities take, particularly towards investigation, would provide more accessibility to facts examined in different contexts” (NHRC , ). The goals and targets of the NHRC and OTO differ, the release goes on, corresponding to distinct mandates and powers. Third,

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the NHRC presses the point about its independence from the administrative apparatus of the government. Critical in this regard is its freedom with respect to personnel and staffing, which is crucial for its ability to pursue “capacity-building corresponding to its duties and powers with the aims, in line with international standards, to protect and promote human rights” (NHRC , ). There is an additional cause for concern as the NHRC becomes more intimately entangled with state organs, whether the Constitutional Court or the OTO. The autonomy of the NHRC allows it a degree of neutrality as it investigates claims of human rights violation. Implicating itself with the state compromises the neutrality that this autonomy affords it (which is not to say that individual members succeed in maintaining that neutrality but rather that institutional distance is a minimum requirement for such neutrality). Could the NHRC reasonably be expected to investigate allegations against members of the OTO or the Constitutional Court under the current constitutional proposals? Amara Pongsapich, the chair of the previous (second) commission, was persuaded that the merger would be even more dire, in that it would effectively abolish the NHRC, leaving Thailand without a national commission, causing it to lose its important international membership in organizations like the International Coordinating Committee of National Human Rights Institutions (ICC). This loss, she claimed, would take years to recover (ONHRC , –). It was this second tranche of commissioners, with Amara as chair, that dropped from A to B status with the ICC and is widely viewed as a disappointment, albeit for reasons that were somewhat beyond its control. In , the first commission completed its term, and a new one had to be selected. Where the first selection process occurred under the  constitution and was transparent and consultative (including, in accord with the Paris Principles, extensive input from NGOs working in areas on which human rights bear) and seated a highly qualified and diverse eleven-member commission, the  process was less auspicious. Working under the  constitution, the new commission was selected in a compressed process without the broad public input of the first commission. The first commission had NGO activists, academics, lawyers, an educationalist, and a journalist, all with expertise in human rights and closely associated areas of rights and social welfare. The  panel was reduced to seven commissioners whose expertise was less obviously connected to human rights. As Harding and Leyland put it, “The profiles of the Commissioners give an overall impression of embodying more

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administrative experience than human rights experience” (Harding and Leyland , ). It is clear, then, that the NHRC was diminished by the  coup and its subsequent rewriting of the constitution. The question now is whether the  tranche of seven commissioners, facing absorption into the OTO and still heavily weighted toward juridical and administrative experience, is any better positioned to undertake human rights work.

Conclusion This chapter offers an account of political unrest in Thailand since  and the return of the cycle of coup–new constitution–election (perhaps new constitution)–coup that shows, in the first instance, the uniqueness of the moment in which the rest of this ethnography occurred (roughly from the time of the  People’s Constitution until the  invalidation of the election of Thaksin). This moment was especially important as it created the political and social space for the emergence and institutionalization of human rights. In the second instance, I have shown some of the distinctive features of the past decade (what distinguishes this coup-election-coup cycle) and what some of the human rights implications have been. Just as the NHRC had started to make progress on human rights education, it has come under new and potentially debilitating threats that stem directly from the coups of the past decade and the constitutions they have produced. These include a commission diminished in size and expertise, a greater orientation to the sort of administrative charter (rather than a democratic one) that Harding and Leyland associate with military governments (Harding and Leyland , ), and incorporation into the state in a way that would compromise its investigative freedom and moral authority as an autonomous entity. Where Kat’s hope, expressed at the beginning of this chapter, that the military coup was a thing of the past was clearly misplaced, her anxieties about the possible eclipsing of human rights promotion in Thailand seem all too well founded.

Conclusion

One of the chief tasks of this book is to think about how we might take human rights as an anthropological object, registered in the midst of their emergence and constituted of practices, institutions, conventions, and meanings, each of which, as a site of contest, reveals force and power to move through and to shape them. To get at this, I have attended to the novelty of their historically and culturally situated production in Thailand at a uniquely fertile moment. This moment was in part politically defined from the progressive, inclusionary sea-change following the broad-based demonstrations that ended in “Bloody May,” . The salient aspect of this moment is that, in allowing for the formalization and institutionalization of human rights, at a national level, as an element of the prevailing progressive agenda, it also encouraged a turn back to contentious egalitarian trends in Thailand’s political history and Buddhism. The mutually enabling influence of human rights and egalitarian Buddhism, as well as human rights and egalitarian politics, brings out important ways that human rights have emerged, as if overheard, in ways distinctly marked by political and moral history in Thailand and specific social conventions. The everyday sociality articulating with human rights in Thailand includes, I argued, face-work and the specific combination of obligations and moral authority of motherhood. That human rights have developed substantial roots in Thailand is apparent both from the sustained level of appeals the public makes to them and from the survival of the NHRC in the present moment that is, politically and constitutionally, nearly the antithesis of the progressive, inclusive moment of their emergence, even if the tasks they may now be asked to perform court new contradictions of advocating for and monitoring the state, participating in and acting as a brake on state powers. I have tried to show through the specificity of their emergence that human rights in Thailand do not fit with narratives of convergence on a given view of human rights or with a teleological notion of Thailand “catching up” to liberal ideals of human rights arising under different conditions. On the

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contrary, my point is that when those Thai tasked with or committed to working out human rights undertook the experiments that I have described in these chapters, the human rights they uncovered did not exist independently of the experiments but were their creations. The same is true of the “rights of man” arising in revolutionary France and the human rights defined through the process of deliberation and debate by the UN Drafting Committee that produced the drafts of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Whether in the France of , in the United Nations in  and , or in Thailand through the s, human rights have emerged in and through struggle and dispute. The struggles have not been the same in each case but rather have reflected the immediate concerns of people at specific times and places. In each case, we can see how important experimentation—with ideas, practices, conventions, and moral precepts—was for the relevant people to generate an understanding of human rights and how they may be implemented or promoted. In concluding this study, I will consider what stakes pertain to the contests over human rights in Thailand, how experimentation affects human rights, and how it affects the social conventions with which they make contact.

Stakes In May , Prime Minister Thaksin dismissed a report by UN special envoy Hina Jilani on the state of human rights in Thailand with the terse statement “the UN is not my father,” which he later followed by the assertion that Thai must “treasure our country’s dignity” (Crispin ; Supra ; Lynch , ). When, in June , I recalled this moment during a discussion with Phim about saving and losing face, she said that the government fears losing face (in the sense of เสียหน้า, sia na) but less with respect to Thai than within the international community, like the UN, an anxiety that seems also to have informed the role allotted the NHRC in the  constitution. The libel case that Prime Minister Thaksin initiated against Supinya that I discussed above suggests that Thaksin’s sensitivity to international criticism had an analogous sensitivity to domestic criticism, but the lesson is that human rights had force enough in Thai politics to elicit such a sharp response. That the prime minister responded as he did, raising these particular concerns, is revealing on two levels. First, he saw dignity to be at stake in human rights criticism. Second, he denied that the UN has, over him or his office, the authority of a father.

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Based on its  and  constitutional innovations, it seems that the current junta, politically opposed to Thaksin as it may be, shares something of his sentiment on human rights as a threat to maintaining face. We will recall that the figure of the father leads back to Buddhist theories of kingship and, therefore, to the legitimacy of authority and of rule. In this connection, the prime minister’s response reflects an abiding concern in Thai politics: the ability to confront and outmaneuver imperial threats, an anxiety widespread in Thai historiography, which depicts heroic kings stifling colonial encroachment by England and France (Thongchai , –). Prime Minister Thaksin, then, responds to the UN High Commission on Human Rights both as an unwelcome, encroaching force that he, in the tradition of great Thai rulers, must rebuff and also as questioning the legitimacy of his rule. More is at stake than sovereignty, though, as the reference to dignity makes clear. Implicit in Thaksin’s dismissal of UN criticism is that exposure to criticism on human rights grounds has serious implications for the maintenance of one’s dignity, which, as I discussed with respect to sakdina, connects one to patrons or secures clients, ensuring one’s status in the world. Losing face to the UN, as Phim suggested, would not just denigrate Thailand on the international stage but would imply that Thaksin did not have the power to act as a patron, with the consequence that supporters at home would begin to look for leadership elsewhere. Taken together, Thaksin’s responses to the UN and the junta’s constitutional maneuvering signal a sense among political (and, in Thaksin’s case, also economic) elites that human rights imply stakes for them: they stand to lose. A check on elite powers to act with relative impunity does by most measures appear as a human rights principle, especially so by the measure of the egalitarianism permeating the NHRC at its outset. I have shown, however, that elites are not the sole stakeholders in the Thai human rights scenario. We saw with both Yai Hai and Rattana that citizens whose voices go unheard by the state may use human rights to modify and enhance the impact of other strategies to compel the state to redress injustices. Some of the most vulnerable within Thailand’s borders, like Burmese migrants, also gain some protections through human rights advocates and principles from the threats of human trafficking and abuse by employers or agents of the Thai state. There are, further, stakes for those engaged in struggles over Buddhist doctrine and how it folds into everyday social practices. As we saw, there is a proliferation of Buddhist movements, but for those who envision a Buddhism

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with a nonconformist, egalitarian potential, there are few choices. The mutual reinforcement that the NHRC sought between a nonconformist, egalitarian Buddhism with its this-worldly orientation and human rights helps move such a Buddhist vision into everyday life, into Thai politics, and into the realm of rights. The same can be said for those (not least in the Ministry of Public Health) who wish to recuperate the egalitarian political ideals that inspired and spread from the student movements of the s and the NGO movement following the collapse of the CPT. Positioning human rights as the heir of Thailand’s democracy movements gave such advocates a novel way, with the institutional force of the NHRC, to rearticulate their aspirations. The stakes of human rights in Thailand, then, do not reduce to individual cases but have far-reaching, societal implications.

Experimentation, Transformation Among the most surprising aspects of the emergence of human rights in Thailand has been social actors’ discovery that they can use human rights without being able to depict them. If not how to define human rights, what did they have to know to be able to use human rights? I recall Khunying Amphorn to answer this. When she prioritized the five precepts lay Buddhists should follow as the basis of human rights in Buddhism, she pointed to everyday knowledge in Thailand, knowledge that is so familiar that it is nearly invisible. Finding human rights in what lay at hand, near, enabled two sorts of experimentation. The LST/LPN group had frequent strategy sessions and regular debriefing, planning their educational initiatives and collaborative projects carefully. The Takua Pa Prison educational session is a clear enough example of this sort of planning, but another moment with the LPN in Mahachai shows this more clearly. As Un conducted her research into the working conditions of Burmese in Mahachai fish-processing plants, she displayed the sort of ordinary deference to business owners that would be immediately recognizable to them, defusing any defensiveness they might feel facing questions about their workers. She did this deliberately, in part settling on this tactic because of its invisibility. When Bo and Alip approached the Ranong police, they deployed this sort of knowledge differently, knowing that a direct confrontation with the police over their failure to protect the human rights of the Burmese worker would be

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utterly counterproductive. Their decision to use the name of the NHRC, based on a guess that the police would respond better to an implied threat of exposure than an open threat of investigation, was effective because it conveyed the implicit consequences of obstruction while also allowing the police a graceful way out. They tried this approach because of what they know—police departments are as knit with patronage networks as any bureaucracy, and loss of face is contagious—even as they could not fully foresee the outcome. As I said earlier, the very ambiguity of human rights is what made them so forceful here, allowing for experimentation by Bo and Alip. Familiar attacks have familiar defenses, but the police, being only partly aware of what the invocation of the NHRC might portend, had no ready countermove and responded to uncertainty with capitulation and cooperation. A theme tying these examples together is the indirectness of their strategies and experiments. I argued that there is something similar at work in the ways that human rights advocates brought Buddhism and human rights or democratic history and human rights together. Revisiting these disputes on the surface of human rights has started the work of defining human rights while presenting opportunities to reimagine older disputes, allowing social, political, and religious reformists a new platform to promote egalitarian models of justice. The way these moves have marked human rights has not, however, been entirely uniform. The opening two chapters showed that the channeling of student activists from  into NGOs and into the Ministry of Public Health has led to different styles of engagement with human rights and different sensibilities about the sort of ethos the NHRC should cultivate. This is a question that has remained unsettled, as the NHRC has elected to approach human rights through an adversarial posture with respect to the state, while workers at the village level, like the LST and LPN, have adopted the preventative, cooperative ethic and method proposed by Dr. Chuchai. I reemphasize, then, that human rights in Thailand, as elsewhere, gain their definition by the disputes, contests, and struggles that enfold them, and it is experimentation in conditions of deep uncertainty that enters them into the folds of religion, politics, and forms of sociality. The material that enfolds them, however, cannot help but be reshaped in the process, as face-work, in the hands of Bo and Alip, was both recognizable and uncannily redirected to benefit the vulnerable rather than the powerful and as motherhood retained its conventional force but became a technique of resistance and transgression as embodied by Rattana and Yai Hai.

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Articulations and Uses of Human Rights: Ethnography Toward the beginning of this study, I noted a shift in the way that anthropology studies human rights. As I engaged in fieldwork in Thailand, it became inescapably clear that approaching human rights through claims to universalism would systematically miss the ways that differently situated Thai made use of human rights, developed understandings or worked under conditions of uncertainty about them, and brought them into their everyday lives through familiar, if transfigured, modes of sociality. Equally, the sorts of cultural relativism employed by Prime Minister Thaksin to deny human rights a place in Thai politics utterly ignore the ways that, in fact, social actors do make human rights relevant and forceful within well-established conventions and modes of sociality. An ethnography of human rights allows the study of what social actors do with human rights as cultural practices and discourses that do not stand alone but gain their coherence or maintain their ambiguity and flexibility through their contact with other social practices and discourses. In this way, we can examine how human rights structure conflict— for example, making possible the mediation of Yai Hai and Rattana’s disputes or allowing the documentation of investigations into regions of the state otherwise inaccessible to the public—as well as how the particular struggles that are brought into the arena made available by human rights rework that arena to provide new and distinct potentials, like reconsiderations of the Buddhist foundation for social inequality. As emergent, human rights remain precarious within Thai sociality and politics, and there remain many open questions begging further study. My fieldwork took place at a moment when, in the aftermath of the massacre at the  democracy demonstrations, nobody believed the military would involve itself in politics again, a moment suited, in its optimism and progressivism, to begin the experiment of human rights. Since then, coups have ousted Prime Minister Thaksin’s reelected government and subsequent elected governments, instituted martial law, and dramatically rolled back human rights, even as the juntas have maintained the NHRC. Exactly how changes to the constitutional mandate of the NHRC and its membership will alter the practice of human rights in Thailand remains to be studied. In any case, it is the ethical associations that individuals and groups make with human rights that will define the range and modality of their force and the reciprocal influence they will have on Thai sociality.

Appendix 1

1997 Constitutional Provisions for the NHRC Part 8 The National Human Rights Commission Section . The National Human Rights Commission consists of a President and ten other members appointed, by the King with the advice of the Senate, from the persons having apparent knowledge and experiences in the protection of rights and liberties of the people, having regard also to the participation of representatives from private organisations in the field of human rights. The President of the Senate shall countersign the Royal Command appointing the President and members of the National Human Rights Commission. The qualifications, prohibitions, selection, election, removal and determination of the remuneration of members of the National Human Rights Commission shall be as provided by law. The members of the National Human Rights Commission shall hold office for a term of six years as from the date of their appointment by the King and shall serve for only one term. Section . The National Human Rights Commission has the powers and duties as follows: () to examine and report the commission or omission of acts which violate human rights or which do not comply with obligations under international treaties to which Thailand is a party, and propose appropriate remedial measures to the person or agency committing

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()

() ()

()

()

Appendix 1

or omitting such acts for taking action. In the case where it appears that no action has been taken as proposed, the Commission shall report to the National Assembly for further proceeding; to propose to the National Assembly and the Council of Ministers policies and recommendations with regard to the revision of laws, rules or regulations for the purpose of promoting and protecting human rights; to promote education, researches and the dissemination of knowledge on human rights; to promote co-operation and co-ordination among Government agencies, private organisations, and other organisations in the field of human rights; to prepare an annual report for the appraisal of situations in the sphere of human rights in the country and submit it to the National Assembly; other powers and duties as provided by law.

In the performance of duties, the National Human Rights Commission shall also have regard to the interests of the country and the public. The National Human Rights Commission has the power to demand relevant documents or evidence from any person or summon any person to give statements of fact including other powers for the purpose of performing its duties as provided by law.

Appendix 2

TAG Final Report 16 November 2005 Before I came to the district office to get my temporary ID reissued, I was very scared. But now I have received my card back and I feel very happy and confident. I can go home by myself. (Migrant being assisted in redocumentation) This is my first time to actually have my cards in my hand. My employers have always kept my cards with them. They never handed the cards to me. (Migrant being assisted in redocumentation) My registration documents disappeared with the water. I didn’t know that I could get them back, so I was very scared and in hiding. (Migrant being assisted in redocumentation) Migrants also needed to have their work permits reissued. Since the Department of Employment was based in Phang gna, [sic] it was difficult for migrants to travel this distance. The Ministry of Labour arranged to set up a temporary office in Khao Lak to assist in re-issuing work permits, but unfortunately the office was only in place for one week, too short a time to inform migrants and establish trust. TAG assisted a few migrants to re-issue work permits but was then requested by the Department of Employment to stop the process. Questions were raised as to whether the migrants had actually lost their work permits or if they were being illegally withheld by the employers. In June  a new registration process began. TAG trained migrant volunteers from different communities were involved in the process and distributed information to migrant communities in the hope that migrants would

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register. TAG met with other organisations during this time, who had decided to pay for the work permits or health cards for a small number of migrant workers. TAG discussed this possibility, but decided that this was not a sustainable or fair response to the problem. It would have been impossible to provide the costs for all migrant workers in the affected areas, and it would reduce the responsibility of the government to respond to the unique situation in the provinces affected by the tsunami. In many forums, TAG advocated for a free or reduced cost work permit for these areas, and the employers in the area also lobbied for the same goal. Unfortunately, none of the advocacy succeeded, and the cost of the registration stayed the same and the number of migrants who registered reduced dramatically. Only , migrants (all from Burma except for  from Lao and  from Cambodia) registered in Phangnga Province, while the employers reported the need for , workers. In Phuket, employers requested ,, but only , migrants registered. The difference between the demand and the registered supply of workers is likely to cause greater problems for the area in the coming year. Employers will be employing unregistered workers who will be extremely vulnerable to harassment, exploitation, trafficking, arrest, and deportation.

TAG Final Report 17 November 2005 Although , migrants had registered for temporary ID cards in July  at the local district office in Takuapa, when small groups of migrants tried to apply for their cards lost in the tsunami to be re-issued no system was in place. Migrants had to sort through all the records to find their previous registration in order to have their cards re-issued. It became clear that during the previous registration period, most registrations were completed not by the migrants or the employers but by brokers. Due to the lack of support in this process from the district office, TAG was able to facilitate only a small group of migrants each day to get cards re-issued. In total  temporary ID cards (Tor Ror /) lost in the tsunami were re-documented by the end of July. (http://www.mapfoundationcm.org/Eng/TAGfinal.pdf, pp. –)

Appendix 2

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TAG Final Report 18 November 2005 Criminal Defense

TAG provided interpretation for migrants who had been arrested because they were not carrying their work permits which had been either washed away in the tsunami or were held by the employer. The Lawyers’ Council of Thailand provided legal assistance to those migrants who were imprisoned for ‘alleged looting’ after the tsunami. TAG staff also provided assistance in translation. TAG took on the role of liaison between lawyers and migrant communities in order to assist in acquiring all the needed evidence to be presented in court. There was nobody visiting us and helping us, so I am very happy to have people visiting us. We are very pleased to have a trustable translator helping us as well. ( migrants in jail) The judgment for this case will be announced on  November rd. Much of the evidence provided, including the fact that the migrants were originally forced to sign a statement they did not understand without an interpretor, suggests that the migrants may have been wrongly accused. UPDATE: On November rd  all five migrants were found innocent and acquitted of all charges. They had spent  months in prison. They are currently trying to secure permission and protection to stay in Thailand for one month for compensation for their wrongful arrest and detention. (http://www.mapfoundationcm.org/Eng/TAGfinal.pdf, pp. –)

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Notes

Introduction . Although Sally Engle Merry’s work is the clearest elaboration of this in anthropology and seems to have informed work outside anthropology, there are nonanthropological precedents for the top-down discursive model, as in Brooten (), Mutua (), Kymlicka (), and Ignatieff (a, b). The specific deployment of the vernacular, though, sees its most dynamic growth in the years following Merry’s publications (Merry a, b, ). In Chapter , I will recall Merry’s contribution in light of Marianne Constable’s criticism of the top-down character of the notion of vernacularization of human rights. . On the whole, I will use “NHRC” to mean both the commission and the office (ONHRC), except where context makes it clear that I refer only to the commission (as when I discuss tensions between the commission and the office). I will use “ONHRC” to refer only to the bureaucracy (the office) working in support of the commission. . While “nirvana” and “karma” have wide usage in English, the literature on Buddhism in Thailand tends to follow Thai phonetics more closely, using nibbana, kamma, dhamma, and so forth. I, too, adopt this tendency, except where quotations use a different spelling. As I will explain in the chapter, an emphasis on kamma lends itself to explanations or justifications of social inequality, with one’s status being an index of one’s balance of kamma. The stress on nibbana allows for an egalitarian view of humans (each being able to attain nibbana at any time). . To ensure clarity, it is not that the end came because Thaksin, the individual, was displaced by a coup but rather because an elected prime minister, and so the electoral model of succession and legitimacy, was overthrown by the coup. . I borrow this phrase from R. A. Wilson (), but the emphasis on the social features of human rights—social actors, social action, and social practice in Goodale (); cultural practice in Preis () or performance in Slyomovics (), for example—is more broadly shared, and it is this trend I wish to identify.

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Chapter 1 . I adopt the common practice in the anthropology of Thai society to use terms phonetically close to the Thai wherever possible (here, using kamma rather than karma and nibbana rather than nirvana). . I will elaborate below on this terminology, borrowed from G. H. Mead ( []). For the moment, I offer the placeholder definition that an emergent event is an event that is analytically irreducible to any specifiable set of conditions within which it arises and that, through its emergence, can recast those conditions. . The contrast I seek here follows Veena Das’s shift from a notion of critical events, which appears in her work by that name (Das ), in which the event precipitates discontinuity with the everyday, typically at a national level with reverberations through to the domestic sphere of sociality. (In this respect, Das’s work anticipates Povinelli’s reflections on—but not her typology of—the event as occurring on a national scale, as distinct from the hard-to-distinguish quasi-event, which is nondescript—for example, a boat’s motor refusing to start—even as it may lead to catastrophe for individuals or small groups [Povinelli , –.) Das’s later considerations of the event explore how “world-annihilating doubt” can emerge from the very relations that constitute the everyday, while a turn back to the everyday is precisely, uniquely where the hope of recovery lies (Das , ; , -, , n). I wish to show here that the event can generate novel returns to the everyday even without a proximal scene of devastation (see also Selby ). It is, however, tempting to look to the  prodemocracy protests in Bangkok as, in Das’s terms, a critical event. Briefly, large demonstrations early in  opposed the military government that came to power after a fairly well-received coup in . The state ultimately, in “Bloody May,” met the protestors with violence, ending in many dozens of deaths. The conflict ended with the intervention of the king, setting the groundwork for elections soon after. The reputation of the military was badly tarnished, and it withdrew from politics, temporarily as we now know, making way for the draft ing of the  “People’s Constitution”—widely held to be the most progressive of Thailand’s constitutions and to have unprecedented popular input during the draft ing process (see, e.g., Baker and Pasuk , ff.; Hewison b passim; Klima ; Ockey ). . I do not claim religion as the exclusive source of ethics or morals. I argue also that motherhood, for example, offers its own ethical resources in Thai society (see Chapter  and Selby ). Michael Lambek makes the case that the ordinary is intrinsically ethical and ethics intrinsically ordinary, on which we agree, though he also pictures religion as transcending the ordinary, which suggests that religion is not a source of ordinary ethics. My argument here is that religious grounds can, in fact, be a site of ethical transfiguration in the everyday (see Lambek , ; on the distinction of ordinary and normal, see Dumm , ). . I have in mind here Emerson’s passage in “Self-Reliance”: “Most men have bound their eyes with one or another handkerchief, and attached themselves to some

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one of these communities of opinion. This conformity makes them not false in a few particulars, authors of a few lies, but false in all particulars. Their every truth is not quite true . . . so that every word they say chagrins us” (Emerson , ). Stanley Cavell develops Emerson’s thought of the refusal of conformity or dictation as “the wish for one’s discourse to establish its own interest,” which Dumm, in turn, folds into his passage on resistance to normalization, arguing that normalization threatens to suppress the ordinary, forging a line linking conformity to normalization as a threat to the ordinary (Cavell , ; Dumm , –). . It has since moved to Chaengwattana Road, Laksi District, near Don Muang Airport in Bangkok. . See http://www.prachatai.com/journal///; see also http://www .thaingo.org/cgi-bin/content/content/show.pl? or Buddhadasa Study Group’s account, http://www.liberationpark.org/news/supoj/summary.htm. For Phra Supoj’s biography, see http://www.skyd.org/Supoj/bio.html. . See http://www.omct.org/pdf/procedures//thHR_commission/NGOs _report/CCPR_Thailand_alt_report.pdf. . “Forest monk” is not meant as a technical term, defining a distinct group, nor is it an exclusive nomenclature. Kamala () employs the terms “thudong monks” (พระธุดงค์ ) or “wandering monks” to discuss many of the same figures that Tambiah () calls “forest monks.” Jackson (, ) also uses “forest monk” to describe Buddhadasa’s practice of solitary retreat to the forest grounds of Suan Mokkh (สวนโมกขพลา ราม, often shortened to สวนโมกข์, garden of liberation), starting in the s. . Jackson explains that Buddhadasa significantly provoked challenges but not persecution from authorities: While Buddhadasa’s reinterpretations of doctrine have been severely criticized by many religious and politically conservative individuals . . . he has never been criticized by the Sangha hierarchy. This is because, given that his work is neither illegal nor subject to secular censorship or restrictions, and that he strictly abides by clerical practices, there are no institutional means that can be used to criticize Buddhadasa. . . . Buddhadasa’s work is not only important because of his emphasis on the rational analysis of Buddhist doctrine. His views also conflict with the [conservative] form of Buddhism used to legitimate the present social order in Thailand. This gives his work, even the seemingly abstract and theoretical sections, a direct political and social relevance in modern Thailand. (Jackson , ) . Tambiah lists the ascetic practices: . The refuse-rag-wearer’s practice: The bhikkhu collects refuse cloth for robes. Pamsukula means “refuse” in the sense of its being found in

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.

.

.

. . . . . . . .

.

such a place as a street, charnel ground, or midden, or in the sense of its being in a vile state. The triple-robe-wearer’s practice: The bhikkhu has the habit of wearing the triple robe (ti-civdra), namely the cloak of patches, the upper garment, and the inner clothing. The alms-food-eater’s practice: The bhikkhu’s vow is to gather and eat the lumps (pinda) of alms food offered by others. (The word bhikkhu is derived from bhikkha, meaning alms.) The house-to-house-seeker’s practice: The bhikkhu wanders from house to house collecting food; he is a “gapless wanderer” (sapaddnacarin) in the sense that he walks from house to house, to all houses, indifferently and without distinction, begging from everyone and showing no preference. The one-sessioner’s practice: The bhikkhu eats only one meal a day in one uninterrupted session. The bowl-food-eater’s practice: The bhikkhu receives and eats the alms mixed together in one bowl, and he refuses other vessels. The later-food-refuser’s practice: The bhikkhu refuses extra food (or further helpings) offered him after his only meal has been concluded. The forest-dweller’s practice: The bhikkhu adopts the habit of dwelling in the forest. The tree-root-dweller’s practice: The bhikkhu dwells at the root of a tree. The open-air-dweller’s practice. The charnel-ground-dweller’s practice. The any-bed-user’s practice: The bhikkhu sleeps on any place that is allotted to him when he is in a community of monks, and in that sense he is an “as-distributed user.” The sitter’s practice: The bhikkhu refuses to lie down and when resting adopts the sitting posture. (The sitter can get up in any of the three watches of the night and walk up and down, for lying down is the only posture disallowed.) (Tambiah , –)

. In keeping with standard practice in Thai society and scholarship, I will use their first names and title (Khunying being a title, like lady, conferred by the king), which is to say, Saneh and Khunying Amphorn. . Bangkok, Office of the National Human Rights Commission of Thailand,  August . . For a clear presentation of the Asian Values position, see Kishore Mahbubani (). . Jay Garfield () explores the opposition between human rights, in the liberal tradition, and Buddhism, arguing a position that is not quite in opposition to Saneh’s position and not quite in line with it either. As long as liberalism takes rights

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as its foundation (and, by extension, takes human rights as an expression of this foundation), he finds that it will remain incompatible with Buddhism. If, however, we take compassion—a quality natural to humans in a way that rights do not seem to be—as foundational for human rights, then we can see the institution of rights as a mechanism to spread, cultivate, or express compassion (Garfield , –). This line of thinking is close to Khunying Amphorn’s emphasis on compassion as well as Saneh’s critique of liberalism and so merits mention here. There is, further, a small growth in literature that occupies itself with considering whether or not Buddhism and human rights can form conceptual comity, a growth exemplified by the essays collected in Keown, Prebish, and Husted (). I do not explore this literature here because my interest is less in the theoretical questions of how Buddhism may or may not inform human rights than it is in the anthropological questions around how the nexus of human rights and Buddhism finds expression in specific projects and practices by social actors in this moment in Thai history. . She sees a human rights consciousness reaching as far back as King Ramkhamhaeng, in the thirteenth-century kingdom of Sukhothai. . แท้ที่จริง เรื่องสิทธิมนุษยชนนี้ มีความคิดและมีการส่งเสริมกันในสังคมไทยมาช้านานแล้ว แต่อาจไม่ใช้คํานี้

หากเป็นไปตามขนบประเพณีดั้งเดิมของเราเป็นพึ้นฐานของความเชื่อ และศาสนาต่าง ฯ โดยเฉพาะพุทธศาสนา นั้น ได้ สอนให้คนดํารงชีวิตอยูด้วยความเมตตา เห็นอกเห็นใจกัน เอึ้ออาทรซัึ่งกันและกันจัดว่าเป็นรากเหง้าของ สิทธิมนุษชน . It is noteworthy that Buddhadasa was notoriously difficult to locate on a progressive/liberal continuum, as were some of the highest-profi le public figures inspired by Buddhadasa. Jackson describes Buddhadasa as a “conservative radical” (Jackson , ), which would apply equally well to Sulak Sivaraksa, the political, religious, social critic (who might answer better to “radical traditionalist,” if that is not too fine a hair to split, in that his inclinations seem to lean toward the value of traditional social and political forms, like kingship, more than to conservative social or political constraints, as on freedom of speech). It is noteworthy both that Buddhadasa was an important influence on Sulak and that the nonconformist spirit of Buddhadasa found its equivalent in Sulak, whose nonconformity has expressed itself with respect to politics (in cases of elected and coup governments), the monarchy (the title of his Loyalty Demands Dissent capturing his view), and even the optimistic universalism of Buddhadasa’s work (see Jackson , ; King , –, , –; Santikaro , –; Soraj ; Sulak , ; Sulak , –; Swearer ). I will not undertake an exegesis of Sulak’s oeuvre here, as the point is that Buddhadasa encouraged what Emerson () called self-reliance, over against conformity, and this reader of Buddhadasa, Sulak, had embodied such self-reliance even with Buddhadasa’s work. As we will see below, two important Buddhist moments, Santi Asoke and Dhammakaya, feature conformity, just as the sangha does, as an essential aspect of their understanding and practice of Buddhism. . Developing from the late s to the mid-s, there was an active debate, primarily in the Philosophical Review and the Journal of Philosophy, around what, if any, relationship existed between novelty and emergence. This debate provides the

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context for Mead’s work but is too expansive to discuss here. Representative contributions include R. Ablowitz (), A. J. Bahm (), C. A. Baylis (), G. Bergmann (), G. W. Cunningham (), D. W. Gotshalk (), P. Henle (), S. C. Pepper (), and W. T. Stace (). It has seen a resurgence of late, especially at the intersection of philosophy of mind and neuroscience, with sufficient force to produce edited volumes like those by Clayton and Davies () and MacDonald and MacDonald (), as well as overviews of the field like Kim () and Clayton (). A couple of passages are helpfully clarifying for my purposes here: “An emergent property is defi ned as a property possessed by a system but not by its components” (Bunge , ). Clayton describes four features of emergence: . Ontological physicalism: All that exists in the space-time world are the basic particles recognized by physics and their aggregates. . Property emergence: When aggregates of material particles attain an appropriate level of organizational complexity, genuinely novel properties emerge in these complex systems. . The irreducibility of the emergence: Emergent properties are irreducible to, and unpredictable from, the lower-level phenomena from which they emerge. . Downward causation: Higher-level entities causally affect their lower level constituents. (Clayton , ) It is principally this notion of irreducibility that enters my argument here, which is to say, while it was not inevitable that human rights would emerge from Buddhism (in such a way that they would take the name “human rights”), that they did invites an exploration of the distinctiveness of this moment and has implications for Buddhism in Thailand. To this end, I find G. H. Mead’s work speaks to the ethnographic material I consider here. Articulating, in his own way, thoughts that anticipate features two, three, and four above, Mead explains, “Whatever does happen, even the emergent, happens under determining conditions . . . but . . . these conditions never determine completely the ‘what it is’ that will happen. When these emergents have appeared they become part of the determining conditions that occur in real presents, and we are particularly interested in presenting the past which in the situation before us conditioned the appearance of the emergent” (Mead  [], ). He later defines emergence in a way that rearticulates points three and four from Clayton: “the presence of things in two or more different systems, in such a fashion that its presence in a later system changes its character in the earlier system or systems to which it belongs” (). . Sulak traces the emergence of human rights in Buddhism back to Ramkhamhaeng, as well (Sulak , –; Swearer , ). . See, for example, Ling ( ], chaps.  and ). . จตุรัส: การฆ่าฝ่ายซ้าย หรือ คอมมิวนิสต์บาปหรือไม่

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กิตติวุฑโฒ: อันนั้นอาตมาก็เห็นว่าควรจะทํา คนไทยแม้จะนับถือพุทธก็ควรจะทํา แต่ก็ไม่ใช่ถือว่าเป็นการฆ่าคน เพราะว่าใครก็ตามที่ทําลายชาติ ศาสนา พระมหากษัตริย์ มันไม่ใช่คนสมบูรณ์ คือต้องตั้งใจ เราไม่ได้ฆ่าคน แต่ฆ่ามาร ซึ่ง เป็นหน้าที่ของคนไทยทุกคน การฆ่าคนเพื่อชาติ ศาสนา พระมหากษัตริย์ ถือเป็นบุญกุศลเหมือนฆ่าปลาแกงใส่บาตรพระ

(กิตติวุฒโฑภิกขุ. น.ส.พ.จัตุรัส ปีที่  ฉบับที่  วันที่  มิถุนายน ), . Jaturat, : ( June ), . . The Mahavamsa recounts Dutugemunu’s life and victory in  b.c., after fi fteen years of war, over the Tamil king Elara in the northern part of Sri Lanka. Killing thousands upon thousands of Tamil soldiers and Elara, however, left Dutugemunu, a Buddhist, despondent. Learning of his dismay at taking so many lives, a group of arahants (world renouncers) went to console him, explaining that only one and a half humans—that is, Buddhists—had died at his hand. Tessa Bartholomeusz brings out the central point I wish to take from this tale: “In the Mahavamsa’s reading of the doctrinal assessment of killing, the killing of only one and one-half Buddhists has fewer negative karmic consequences that the killing of sixty thousand men. . . . In other words, the karmic repercussions for killing non-Buddhists are far less than for killing those who embrace the dharma” (Bartholomeusz , ). The logic of the arahants and of Kittiwuttho seem of a piece: taking certain lives (of those humans who one can call bestial or demonic—not full human beings) in order to maintain or promote the conditions under which the dhamma can flourish enhances rather than diminishes one’s merit. No less proponent of peace than the Dalai Lama concurs: “If the situation was such that there was only one learned lama or genuine practitioner alive, a person whose death would cause the whole of Tibet to lose all hope of keeping its Buddhist way of life, then it is conceivable that in order to protect that one person it might be justified for one or  enemies to be eliminated—if there was no other way. I could justify violence only in this extreme case, to save the last living knowledge of Buddhism itself ” (cited in Bartholomeusz , ). It merits note that in each case—Kittiwuttho’s, Buddhist fundamentalism in Sri Lanka, and in this passage—there is a specifically national preoccupation; at issue is preserving a national Buddhism, not simply Buddhism wherever one may find it. I thank Veena Das and Jonathan Spencer for drawing my attention to the use of Dutugemunu in Sri Lankan Buddhist politics. . In a  interview with CNN’s Dan Rivers, Samak Sundaravej, who was, briefly, prime minister after the  coup that ousted Thaksin Shinawatra, discussed his role as deputy interior minister during the  massacre at Thammasat. The terms in which he talks about the massacre are strikingly similar both to Kittiwuttho and to those of the arahants when they console Dutugemunu: DR: Some people are very critical of your past in Thailand, some people have even said you’ve got blood on your hands. What would you say to that? . . .

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Would you like to take the opportunity now to condemn what happened in ? SS: Actually it’s a movement of some students. They don’t like the government. DR: But dozens of people, maybe hundreds of people died. SS: No, just only one died. There are , students in the Thammasat University. DR: The official death toll was , and many people say it was much higher than that. SS: No. For me, no deaths, one unlucky guy being beaten and being burned in Sanam Luang. Only one guy by that day. DR: So there was no massacre? SS: No not at all, but taking pictures, , students, boys and girls lined up, they say that is the death toll. ,. DR: People say that your very right-wing rhetoric inflamed the situation. SS: What’s wrong to be the right-wing if it is? The right-wing is with the King. The left-wing is communist. (Samak ) . Santi Asoke (สันติอโศก) and Dhammakaya (ธรรมกาย) are rendered in multiple ways in Roman script by different writers, the most phonetically faithful being santi asok and thamakay. I opt here for the renderings the movements themselves have chosen. . There are several thorough histories of Wat Dhammakaya and Santi Asoke, including Jackson (), Keyes (), Swearer (, ), Mackenzie (), and Cook (), and my purpose here is not to reproduce them. Rather, despite offering alternatives to conventional Buddhist teaching and practice in Thailand and sometimes having a contentious relationship with Thai officials, they nonetheless align with positions on Buddhism and politics that contrast with those taken by NHRC commissioners and human rights advocates, and in this way, they bring into sharper resolution the novelty of the NHRC invocation of Buddhism in relation to egalitarianism, secularism, and normalization. . Despite the size and influence of Wat Dhammakaya, it and its founder (now removed as the wat’s abbot) now find themselves in the grips of a serious confrontation with the state. Late in , Thai police began what appeared to be preparations for a siege of the sprawling and increasingly fortified complex to serve warrants related to  charges “ranging from various regulatory violations to being party to laundering more than a billion baht in embezzled funds. Even Dhammakaya’s lay spokesman, Ong-art Thamnitha, is now wanted for sedition for allegedly inciting public unrest” (Pravit ). Following allegations of money laundering related to embezzlement at the Klongchan Credit Union Cooperative, Phra Dhammachayo has gone into hiding, and there are rumors that Ong-art has fled Thailand (King-oua ). Bringing out the opposition between the wat and the state starkly, a spokesman

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there, Phra Pasura Dantamano, has declared that Dhammachayo has declined to turn himself in and prove his innocence because he and Wat Dhammakaya followers “have no trust in the justice system under the military regime” (Pravit ). Such suspicions seem further confirmed by Dhammachayo’s recent defrocking, following charges of heresy, by the sangha (Mydans ). For the purposes of the present study, the continuation, in the midst of its confrontations with agents of the state, of “almost militaristic order and precision” (Mydans ) within the wat suggests that Wat Dhammakaya is no closer to providing a Buddhist alternative for human rights advocates. . On the absence of individual possessions, the ethic of collective work for the community as a whole, and communal living in Santi Asoke communities, see MacKenzie (, chap. ). On the elimination of social stratification (but not all forms of hierarchy) in Santi Asoke, see Swearer (, –, n). . โพธิรกั ษ์ is also rendered Bodhiraksa (Swearer ) and Photirak (Jackson ; Klima ). The Santi Asoke website uses Bodhirak, which I will use as my default, except when citing sources that use one of the alternatives. See http://www.asoke .info/Religion/Santi_Asoke.html. . This is precisely the Buddhist tradition that Swearer argues participated in the secularization of Buddhism by engaging with rather than eschewing modernization (see Swearer , –, and for a history of secularizing, reformist Buddhism reaching back to Rama I, the first king in the current Chakri dynasty, see Swearer , ). . James Siegel’s use of the term to describe the development of Indonesian nationalism captures something of this sense. He writes, This nationalism began not with the nation and not with the colonial forces but with the reception of messages from Europe and Asia, from nearly all over the world. It is my purpose to trace the course of this international overhearing and its transformation into a bounded, national frame. . . . In [my story], independence will appear as the result of the history of hearing and overhearing that went on between groups of the Indies and between the Indies and the world. The prehistory of the Indonesian nation commences with the forces that dislodged the relation between Dutch and “natives” precisely by making the world audible. (Siegel , ) . I met only one Thai, a publicly avowed Trotskyite, who openly argued for civil room to criticize the king. He now lives in exile on account of lèse-majesté charges. . Peter Jackson notes that the negation of “spiritual significance of kamma per se simultaneously undermines the basis of Buddhism’s use of [merit] as a means of popular political legitimation” (Jackson , ). Buddhism as “the progressive social ideology which Buddhadasa and his supporters desire it be” requires, rather, the “promotion of welfare in such a way as to enable the populace to strive for nibbāna.

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Political legitimacy then would not flow from symbolic association with or participation in the king’s merit but rather from the visible, individually-practiced morality of political and social leaders” (Jackson , –). Chapter 2 . In , General Saiyud Kerdphon, “a key architect of Thai counterinsurgency,” captured this in his reverie about village life in Thailand before the threat of communism: “A docile and politically apathetic peasantry was the backbone of Thailand’s agricultural economy. Society was governed by the strong cultural traditions of master-client relations and the tolerant Buddhist ethic which ascribes social status to one’s karma” (Saiyud , , cited in Connors , ). . I later learned that she was enthusiastic about Antonio Gramsci’s work, which shades her use of hegemony here. . Efforts to imbue Thai society with (greater) equality through small but noticeable and potentially potent means in the midst of political movements are visible in Michael Herzfeld’s account of resistance to forced evacuation from Pom Mahakan in Bangkok. He recounts such means through the gestures of Thawatchai, a pivotal figure in the Pom Mahakan community’s struggle against the city of Bangkok: After retreating frequently into a conversation on his mobile phone, he then smilingly gave a series of perfunctory and thus barely respectful wai greeting gestures to all the officials and, without waiting for a response, bustled off. . . . His jerky, rapidly distributed wai, reminiscent of a teacher giving sweets to a group of children, contrasted strongly with his respectful obeisance to the elder former palace policeman and with his affectionate softening of the same greeting toward me. In thus modifying the embodied model of hierarchical relations, he demonstrated the agency and mastery of practice through which egalitarian impulses reshape the inculcated cringe of respect. (Herzfeld , ) I return to consider gesture in a later chapter but wish to flag it here, as shown in this ethnographic vignette, as one of the subtle ways of eroding the political and social stability of social stratification in Thailand. . For example, communal rights to public land became law shortly before this conversation (Sato ). . See, for example, Sally Engle Merry’s discussion of human rights in the vernacular (Merry a, –). . The definitive study of the Village Scouts is Rituals of National Loyalty (Bowie ). . These two groups of soldiers also go by “Democratic soldiers” (ทหารประชาธ ิปไตย) and “Young Turks” (คณะทหารหนุม่ ), respectively (Baker and Pasuk , –).

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. Meuang (เมือง) can take a range of translations, including city, town, country, or land (as in Thailand in the case of เม อื งไทย or meuangthai). It is tempting, not to mention idiosyncratic, to translate this use of kin meuang as “eating the people” as it emphasizes the sense of political elites feeding, not on the city or country but on the citizenry itself. . This followed a hunger strike by Chalad Worachat, which ended before the massive rallies in mid-May. See Klima (, –). . Debates exist about the exact constitution of the crowd—largely middle class or largely working class, urban, or rural—but for the most part, the argument is that the “mobile phone mob,” as it became called (Baker and Pasuk , ; Klima , ), was not as overwhelmingly middle class as this moniker suggests. See, for example, Bamber (), Connors (, ), Giles (, ff.), or Ockey (, chap. ). . Buddhist Era. . Baker and Pasuk corroborate this version of the story, claiming that “the NPKC junta responded with a strategic plan designed for a communist insurrection, using fully armed soldiers imported from the jungle areas on the borders” (Baker and Pasuk , ). . In an obvious way, the  constitution was the proximal condition of possibility for the NHRC. It was the first Thai constitution to mandate the formation of such a commission. For the specific sections of the constitution that provide for the NHRC, please see Appendix . . Yellow is associated with the king and could not be displayed in this context without evoking him. . It is not lost on me that, since , yellow shirts, headbands, and caps became associated with the People’s Alliance for Democracy and later the People’s Democratic Reform Committee, one agenda of which had been to replace elected representatives with an appointed National Assembly, which is necessary in their view to clear up electoral corruption. The salient point, however, is that in each of these cases, displaying yellow proclaims loyalty to the king. . Recall Kittiwuttho from Chapter . . Writing on images in the margin of the Psalter of Robert Ormesby, Jonathan Alexander () suggests considering the images as framing the text rather than as marginal. While he does not return to answer the questions he poses in this respect (“Suppose rather than ‘marginal’ we describe it as ‘framing’? Does the image not then assume a different importance and a different role, a dynamic interaction of meanings, both secular and religious, on different levels for a variety of viewers?”), it is an enabling suggestion that I try to take up here (Alexander , –). . The convergence of health and human rights in this way runs parallel to the increasing association of health and human rights more generally, with health becoming a human right with increasingly prominent advocates. Within anthropology alone, we see the work of highly influential figures like Paul Farmer and Nancy

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Scheper-Hughes, dating back over a decade, exerting ever-increasing power within human rights scholarship. (See, for examples of their writing around the time of the NHRC opening, Farmer and Gastineau [] and Scheper-Hughes [].) My Thai interlocutors did not explicitly discuss health as a human right, but much of the NGO movement growing throughout the s oriented to health issues (especially around HIV/AIDS) and the Health Reform Assembly, which I discuss in this chapter, attest to widespread attention to the relationships between health and rights (see Bamber ; Thirayut ). . Please see Appendix  for statistics on reported cases. . Dr. Prawase, who Dr. Chuchai cited as an important influence in the development of his preventive approach to human rights, is an important figure in medicine, public health promotion, and democratic planning in Thailand. His advice to medical students to “‘Go where the problems of health are the most urgent, among the poor, mostly in rural villages’” (Kitchana , ) reflects they type of egalitarian ethic I have tried to show in the NHRC (not incidentally because of his influence on Dr. Chuchai). He was also, however, one of the earliest architects of the  People’s Constitution, and as president of the Committee for Developing Democracy from  forward, he organized nationwide public hearings to solicit a wide range of citizens’ input into the draft ing of the constitution. This consultative ethic is widely credited for the progressive character of the People’s Constitution and provided the model for the HRA (see also Bamber ). . On the tight link between the radicalism of , armed insurgency in the aftermath of the Thammasat massacre, and the acceptance of amnesty by CPT fighters on one side and the explosion of NGOs and nongovernmental development organizations (NGDOs) in the s on the other side, see Prudhisan and Maneerat (, –). . Giles makes a similar claim, accusing them of maintaining certain Maoist predilections, like blurring class issues in with nationalist ones and prioritizing the countryside over the city (Giles , ). Chapter 3 . This could also translate as “Lawyers Council,” but at that time the institution took the English name “Law Society.” . A more literal English translation than the one chosen by the LPN would be Network to Promote Workers’ Quality of Life. . In fact, I recalled from my earlier trips to Thailand in the late s and early s a bureaucrat of some standing who offered several of us Canadians on a youth exchange room in her Bangkok house when we first arrived. While she held a senior position, she and important persons like Chokchai had a driver. Many years later, after her retirement, when I returned to do fieldwork, she chose, also like Chokchai, to drive herself.

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. I borrow this term from Goff man (, –). While I dwell on the specific features of face-work only in Thailand (rather than following Goff man’s project of developing a transcultural theory of face-work), including different ways one can lose, risk, preserve, regain, or threaten face, Goffman’s sensitivity to avoidance and corrective processes in face-work (–), as well as its aggressive and cooperative dimensions (–), within the context of social conventions is enabling. See Irving Goff man (, –). . Recall that in the previous chapter, Dr. Sriprapha Petcharamesree, human rights activist and chair of the human rights program at Mahidol University, said that the vast majority of Thai do not know or understand their rights, much less human rights, though the draft ing of the  constitution initiated a growth in awareness. . I made a comparable point above with respect to Buddhism. In a sense, what I turn to here is another facet of the argument I made about Buddhism, as Buddhism is closely connected to ideologies of status, patron-client relations, and face-work, dependent as they are on the pervasive model of kamma as it bears on one’s lot in life, as discussed above. . What human rights can do is partly circumscribed by the constitution. Crucially, section  of the  National Human Rights Commission Act describes the NHRC’s powers: “() to summon a Government agency, State agency or State enterprise to give written statements of facts or opinions concerning the performance of official duty or other duties or to deliver objects, documents or other related evidence or to send a representative to give statements; () to summon a person, juristic person or private agency concerned to give statements or to deliver objects, documents or other related evidence at the date, time and place as specified.” . On “force of law,” see Walter Benjamin (, –) and Jacques Derrida (). . Constituting what human rights are is not an ontological but a grammatical process. That is, I am not talking here about an eternal, morphologically stable essence of human rights but rather how anything counts as a human rights abuse, practice, principle, and so on. When Wittgenstein writes, “Grammar tells what kind of object anything is,” he immediately invokes criteria, hence “counting as” a kind of thing (Wittgenstein  [], §). I emphasize this here to place in the foreground the idea that how people in Thailand use human rights is just what they are. . This should not be taken to imply that there are no other groups subject to opprobrium in Thailand. Michael Jerryson makes a persuasive case that there is tremendous Buddhist hostility toward the Muslim population in the four southernmost provinces, such that even monks arm themselves in many of the monasteries there (Jerryson ). Charles Keyes, writing on the same time period, notes a sharp rise in antagonism between the Thai state and its Muslim citizens in the deep south under the Thaksin government (Keyes , ). This hostility decreased somewhat after Thaksin was replaced in the  coup that brought General Sonthi Boonyaratglin to

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power, but it did not disappear (Jerryson , –; Keyes , –). In part, this is because of continued pressure from various sectors to Thai society to include Buddhism as the state religion in the new constitution, though Keyes argues—reflecting the diversity of Buddhist sects and movements in the previous chapter—that this pressure does not reflect the Buddhist stance, because such a thing does not exist (Keyes , ). The point of comparison is that, just as the hostility to Muslims takes its shape from the particular details of the history of southern Thailand, so the animosity toward Burmese migrants is the specific product of the history of conquest between Siam/Thailand and Burma. . Siam was renamed Thailand in . . The United Nations, Thailand, puts the number of registered Burmese workers in Phang-nga at around ,, of whom , lived in the Ban Nam Khem area (http://www.un.or.th/pdf/assessments/IOM-Tsunami_Mission_Report-Thailand .pdf, accessed  July ). . Khunying Pornthip Rojanasunan fiercely contested police control of the DNA collection and testing processes. As deputy director of the Central Institute of Forensic Science and Thailand’s foremost forensic pathologist, Khunying Pornthip argued that her institute was best suited to handle DNA testing. Police efforts to wrest control (efforts that eventually succeeded) were, she claimed, political maneuvers motivated in part by the desire to discredit her (as she often arrived at forensic conclusions in criminal cases that contradicted police claims or interests). See Barkham (). . NGOs involved in the DNA testing at Ban Nam Khem included Thailand Tsunami Victims Identification (TTVI), International Organization for Migration (IOM), Thai Action Committee for Democracy in Burma (TACDB), Tsunami Action Group (TAG), Seafarers’ Union of Burma, and the Law Society of Thailand (LST). . A little under  square feet. . Sometimes written Moulmien. . ชีวิตไทย . Dawei is around  km west of Kanchanaburi and roughly  km south along the coast from Mawlamyine. . Pasuk et al. (, ) also show Thai police to be involved in the trafficking of foreign women into prostitution. . These costs corresponded to six- and twelve-month permits. . There were numerous obstacles to finding the government records for visas and work permits, including language difficulties for non-Thai-speaking migrants; the need to make a lengthy trip to Phang-nga’s capital to gain access to the records (a trip that the Burmese would have to make, of course, without any documents on hand, and in some cases no identification to use once they got to the government offices); the fact that much paperwork had been completed by brokers, not the migrants themselves; and the vacuum of trust between migrants and state agents and agencies. See Appendix  for TAG’s reporting on these issues.

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. See Appendix  for excerpts from TAG’s final report, outlining the immediacy of this vulnerability. . In fact, at around the same time as the story I recount here, I was taking language classes, where I was introduced to a conciliatory Thai aphorism: ผิดเป็นครู (phit pen khruu), or “mistakes are teachers.” . For a famous example of the productiveness of ethnographic mistakes, see Malinowski (, ff.). . On the contagion of losing face, especially as it affects one’s intimates in a community, or the preservation of others’ face, even should they be officials with whom one has an agonistic relationship, see Michael Herzfeld’s account of the Pom Mahakan community in Bangkok (Herzfeld , –, –, ). L. Hanks () would say that patron-client relationships characterize nearly all Thai sociality. One suspects that urbanization and the corresponding increase in social interactions that do not fit his model of entourage (which emphasizes face-to-face relations and familiarity) diminish this ubiquity. This is part of the social change (increased mobility and a resulting feeling of dislocation from the village home in all its familial, social, and spiritual dimensions) that Engel and Engel () note in their account of progressive reticence to resolve tort and personal injury cases through the courts. . For more on this story, see the Nation coverage from  June  and  June  at http://www.nationmultimedia.com/search/page.arcview.php?clid=&id= &date=-- and http://www.nationmultimedia.com/search/page.arcview .php?clid=&id=&date=-- (accessed  July ). . Nation,  June . . The argument, broadly, is that many Thai people’s increasing distance from the village of birth (in literal and social senses) has led to their feeling that law has also receded from them. “For them, official law has . . . become more remote, inaccessible, and irrelevant and, of particular significance, it has become disconnected from custom and from the unofficial system of village-level injury remediation that was familiar to their parents and grandparents” (Engel and Engel , ). There is, in addition, an increasing sense of delocalized religiosity, deracinated Buddhism, that has led individuals to consider their injuries in kammic terms and so try to locate their own (rather than the other’s) responsibility for the event that ended in the harm done to them. For kammic ails, there are kammic remedies—meritorious acts—that the courts cannot provide (Engel and Engel , , –). See also Engel (, , , , ) for further elaborations of these and related themes. . For an extended depiction of the case by Supinya herself, see สุภิญญา กลางณรงค์, อิสรภาพความคิด [Supinya Klangnarong, Freedom of Thought (Bangkok: KPS Press, )] Klangnarong, . Dozens of articles appeared on this case in Thai newspapers, both in Thai and in English, as well as in international media. See, for example, Mydans (), Wolff (), or the Nation () and team coverage in Manager Online for Thai reporting (ทีมข่าวอาชญากรรม ).

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. See the Nation (http://www.nationmultimedia.com////national/ national_.php, accessed  February ). . The gruesomeness of the torture is not the aspect of this case that is relevant here, since I am exploring the propensity of elites and authorities to respond to loses of face through strong-armed juridical tactics, but these details are available in Prachatai () and ประชาไท (). . I draw “felicity conditions” from Ordinary Language Philosophy and from J. L. Austin in particular, in his elaboration of performatives, specifically illocutionary and perlocutionary speech acts (Austin ). Attending to felicity in speech refocuses attention from the truth value of a statement to the force it may have as an act (hence, speech acts). . I will address in a later chapter changes to the constitutional mandate of the NHRC. . It was not possible, under these circumstances, for me to approach the police directly to ask about their change of attitude. Frank Munger’s work on cause lawyers corroborates many of these claims, highlighting how lawyers working in antitrafficking NGOs must delicately cultivate networks and call on existing statutes (like the Antitrafficking Law of ) to gain leverage within the social conventions around rank and status to motivate members of different bureaucracies to assist in antitrafficking work. See Munger (a, a, b). Sophorntavy (, –) describes a scenario in which competing sources of status (superior position within a firm coming up against superior educational credentials and family status) produce a situation in which Arun, from an inferior position, but having greater social and educational status, becomes marginalized (but not fired) within the firm for offering to help improve his (positional) superior’s job performance. Because of the contagious aspects of face-work, when Arun’s superior’s superiors chastise him (but, out of deference to his family’s status, keep him on), nobody of his rank wishes to work with him out of fear of being perceived as participating in his superior’s loss of face. Beyond the issue of contagion, one of the lessons of this anecdote for the Ranong case is how the implications of status and face-work are not always transparent, and this opaqueness makes them open to exploitation by, for example, lawyers advocating on behalf of Burmese migrants. . Austin draws a distinction between justifications and excuses such that a justification implies a sense of entitlement to have acted thus, while one offers an excuse to mitigate responsibility for an act (Austin , ff.). I argue here that certain features of the Thai view of Burmese and the history they share had hitherto allowed the police to position their neglect of Burmese migrants within the realm of justifications. That such justifications were no longer available to them is the novel and disorienting feature of the moment about which I write (Austin , ff.). . ไทยรักพม่า (Thai Rak Phama) or “Thai Love Burma” is a play on ไทยรักไทย (Thai Rak Thai) or “Thai love Thai,” the name of the ruling party at that time. (It is ambiguous if this is a descriptive or an imperative phrase; Thongchai’s title seems to be both

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ironic and imploring.) Many Thai scholars share Thongchai’s position. See, for example, Baker and Pasuk (, ) and also Pavin (). . In one of his many sustained engagements with Wittgenstein as a philosopher of the ordinary, Stanley Cavell writes, “Sharing the intuition that human existence stands in need not of reform but of reformation, of a change that has the structure of transfiguration, Wittgenstein’s insight is that the ordinary has, and has alone, the power to move the ordinary, to leave the human habitat habitable, the same transfigured. The practice of the ordinary may be thought of as the overcoming of iteration or replication or imitation by repetition, of counting by recounting, of calling by recalling. It is the familiar invaded by another familiar” (Cavell , ). He goes on to identify this invasion of the familiar by another familiar, transfiguration, with Freud’s thinking on the uncanny, a topic on which he dwells at length elsewhere. While Freud primarily occupies himself with an interpretation of the uncanny (as an expression of castration anxiety) rather than as an occasion for further interpretation (a task that Cavell sets for himself), what is especially apposite here is the sense of disorientation, or of not knowing one’s way about in the everyday, as an opportunity for experimentation. That is to say, the transfiguration of ordinary conventions of status and face-work does not abolish them or bring them to a standstill but makes them navigable toward novel ends. On the uncanny, see Freud (, – ) and Cavell (, –). Chapter 4 . Herzfeld notes in his account of struggles by the community living in Pom Mahakan that to maintain their residence there in the face of prolonged efforts by the city to evict them, the NHRC played a valuable but not central role in their maneuvers. That is, along with the cases I consider here, the aggrieved parties approached the NHRC for assistance at a critical juncture but less because they conceptualized their struggles in straightforward human rights terms than because they recognized in the NHRC a potential asset and an ally that could add an important dimension to their overall strategies (Herzfeld , , n). . Th is claim, indeed, was borne out in the example of Takua Pa Prison in Chapter . . I do not take citizenship to be at stake in their struggles (as something they risk losing), but rather to configure their struggles (as a constitutive, distinguishing feature). It is not the case, as in Arendt’s description of stateless persons, that Yai Hai and Rattana are not entitled to the rights of Thai citizens. Their claims had simply gone unacknowledged by Thai authorities. . Here, I follow Das’s work on Wittgenstein and anthropology, where she writes, “To say ‘I am in pain’ is to ask for acknowledgment from the other, just as denial of another’s pain is not an intellectual failure but a spiritual failure, one that puts our future at stake” (Das , ). Staking “our future” here is staking a shared future, that is, our future together. The idea I am drawing out for Yai Hai and Rattana is that

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their futures are at stake individually—vitally, corporeally, and spiritually, as I will explain further on—but also as members of a community, as citizens. The refusal to acknowledge their claims of unjust treatment is a denial of their belonging and the rights that attend it. . This shift away from the particular details of motherhood (its powers, constraints, authority, and so forth) appears in work on other mothers’ movements, as in Berfin İvegen’s Gendering Urban Space: “Saturday Mothers” and Umut Arifcan’s “The Saturday Mothers of Turkey.” The former informs us that the fact of being mothers whose children disappeared is what motivated Turkish women to gather in (mostly) silent demonstrations at Galatasary High School in Istanbul, but the entirety of the analysis concerns gendered space, principally the novelty of women gathering publicly and politically (İvegen ). The latter uses the Saturday Mothers only as a point of entry to a discussion of the oppression of the Kurds in Turkey, devoting space to individual men (like Haluk Gerger and Ismail Besikci), imprisoned by the Turkish authorities, and leaving mention of the Saturday Mothers to a couple of passages in the introduction and a single, passing reference in the final line of the essay (Arifcan ). In short, the tendency to pass over the specificity of motherhood is widespread. . By donning white baby blankets, pañuelos, the Madres de Plaza de Mayo unmistakably identify themselves as mothers (Burchianti , n). . The dilemma she describes for boys in Baan Nua is that ordination is uncommon there, which leaves the boys without the opportunity to repay their debts through the accumulation and transfer of merit as novice monks. . Hanks describes several rites, including the winnowing ceremony, in which the parents each vocally claim the child and tie holy thread to the wrists and ankle of the child to ensure that its khwan (soul) remained with the body, thus “completing” the person of the child (J. Hanks , –). A related binding ritual involves inviting, in jest, the child’s khwan to run off, the presumption being that each human has free will and must choose to remain with the mother (–). Perhaps the most exemplary rite, however, is the ritual of lying by the fire after birth. Hanks writes, “Through the consecrated fire a woman formally achieved full maturity: she became suk (cooked, ripe, mature). Maturity did not come just by bearing a child. The fire brought about the transformation” (). . Bencha, thirty years later, corroborates J. Hanks’s () view that the rites of childbirth (including, in the recent past, the extended period after parturition during which the new mother lies by a ritually consecrated fire) confer upon her the new status of adulthood. . Penny Van Esterik notes that the patron-client relationship is a paternal variant on the same notion of care (liang), in which the overriding principle is offering nurturing that maintains others in your debt (Van Esterik , –). . Thomas Kirsch outlines a more tenuous relationship between Thai Buddhism and the status of mothers. He recognizes the prevailing view that a woman’s primary merit-making act is producing a son to be ordained, hampering her merit-making

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potential, as her “merit-mobility is tied to a role in the world, that of wife-mother, and thus to particular relationships” (Kirsch , ). Still, with this claim, he does recognize the social value attributed to motherhood, suggesting the mother as the model of this-worldly goodness. . Herzfeld’s emphasis on embodiment in gesture (particularly embodied experience) adds important nuance I would dwell on: if we take gesture to be embodied expression—to bring my preference into conversation with his—then experience enters the picture through Herzfeld’s notion of cultural intimacy (which he takes to bear on gesture in important ways), to “consist of ‘what everyone knows’” (Herzfeld , , ; see also Herzfeld ). I take him to mean that the knowledge that is at stake in gesture as bodily experience, and for me in gesture as bodily expression, is that quotidian knowledge that gives the gesture intimacy and force. . One partial exception to this is Henk Driessen’s () anthropological study of the embodiment of masculine sociability through gesture in Andalusia. Even here, however, Driessen stresses the lexical repertoire of such gestures and the ways in which one’s masculinity is the (temporary) stake of gestural play. Gestures here show (embodied) masculinity; the body is expressive, but it is not what is at stake. We might compare Thoreau on civil disobedience to get a clearer view of what I mean by staking the body in gesture. Of voting, he writes, “All voting is a sort of gaming . . . a playing with right and wrong, with moral questions; and betting naturally accompanies it. The character of the voters is not staked. . . . Even voting for the right is doing nothing for it” (Thoreau  [], –). Thoreau’s gesture—withholding his taxes from the government that is the government of slaves and slavery—stakes his character and his body in that he accepts his ensuing incarceration. . In this respect, when Wittgenstein writes, “What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence,” I find it suggestive to take him not only to write in the imperative—a position Friedlander () lays out persuasively—but also to describe our fate as language users; to wit, where we cannot speak, we must show. A remaining difficulty is to work out the relationships between saying, showing, speaking, and silence (Wittgenstein , §). . The Sukhothai dynasty was founded in the mid-s and was succeeded by the Ayutthaya dynasty, founded in  to . Ayutthaya persisted until the Burmese kingdom sacked it in . The current, Chakri dynasty arose in Bangkok in  (Baker and Pasuk , xv, –; Girling , chap. ; Keyes , chap. ). The point I make about Rattana’s protest gaining force or finding cultural traction with respect to Ram Khamhaeng does not depend on her proclaiming that she is evoking Ram Khamhaeng any more than the women mourning by inhabiting their filth had to mention Draupadi in order to draw on the imaginaire in which Draupadi has the power of an exemplar. Indeed, it seems to me that such pronouncements would run the risk of blunting the association, as it might then take on a rather calculated, instrumental, cynical appearance, diminishing the perception of authenticity so critical to the demonstrations. Indeed, it is not even necessary for Rattana to choose—deliberately,

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consciously, intentionally—to evoke Ram Khamhaeng. The force of the allusion does not come from her intentions but rather from the public associations that Thai, generally, may make with her positioning herself before Bangkok City Hall; that is, that this association is readily available. . See Wyatt (, –) or Munkhom (, –) for a complete translation of the inscription. The relevant passage reads as follows: “He has hung a bell in the opening of the gate over there: if any commoner in the land has a grievance which sickens his belly and gripes his heart, and which he wants to make known to his ruler and lord, it is easy: he goes and strikes the bell which the King has hung there; King Ram Khamhæng, the ruler of the kingdom, hears the call; he goes and questions the man, examines the case, and decides it justly” (Munkhom , ). . I call it the “Ram Khamhaeng inscription” to signal that my concern is how Thai who have taken this inscription to be the work of Ram Khamhaeng also take it to anchor a certain vision of Thai identity and history and to promote a particular concept of ideal Thai politics and a distant, but attainable, model for the good society. . See, for example, ชูชาติ [Chuchat] (). One notes that political rallies have not typically taken place outside City Hall but rather have favored Thammasat University, the adjacent park Sanam Luang, the nearby Democracy Monument (and the massive avenue, Ratchadamnoen Klang, that connects the three), and, more recently, Government House. Although City Hall is a short walk from Sanam Luang, Thammasat, the Democracy Monument, and Ratchadamnoen Klang, some combination of the latter four have typically been the sites demonstrators prefer. It is clear, then, that Rattana chose the Lan Khon Muang plaza in front of City Hall because she wished an audience with that authority in particular. . รายงานผลการตรวจสอบการละเมิดสิทธิมนุษยชน, รายงานผลการตรวจสอบที่ ๓๓/๒๕๔๖ . The National Legislative Assembly heard the report at its fi fth meeting on  November . Referencing the NHRC investigation, it described the case as “the outcome of a report on the violation of human rights (the case of Ms. Rattana Satjthep’s complaint that she did not receive fair treatment from the City of Bangkok’s order to demolish her residence” รับทราบรายงานผลการตรวจสอบการละเมิดสิทธิมนุษยชน (กรณี นางสาวรัตนา สัจจเทพ ร้องเรียนว่าไม่ได้รับความเป็นธรรมจากคําสั่งกรุงเทพมหานครที่ให้รื้อถอนบ้านพักอาศัย) (สภา นิติบัญญัติแห่งชาติ ). . Roughly $, in . . Images of Rattana crying are not difficult to find in the media coverage of her describing her fight. See, for example, http://www.thaingo.org/writer/view.php?id=, in a video in which she also points out the cracks in her walls, and http://www .tvburabha.com/tvb/home/program_detail.asp?id=&cate= or http://www.hunsa .com//view.php?cid=&catid= for still pictures. . I noted above how breastfeeding was caught in the care/debt circuit, and it is in part this cost to the mother in blood, as it transforms into milk (a process J. Hanks reports her Bang Chan informants describing to her), that contributes to the calculation of a mother’s sacrifice (J. Hanks , ; Van Esterik , –).

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. Within days, another woman parked her Honda CRV in front of Government House in Bangkok, also adorning it with banners telling of its problems. The outcome did not become public, but a Toyota owner a couple of days later fared poorly. Wing Commander Noraset Runpraphan staged the battering of his pickup truck at the Consumer Protection Board offices, claiming that the trouble he had with its brakes and suspension entitled him to nearly double the purchase price (฿,, rather than the ฿, he paid for it). He also offered to accept a Lexus RX (which sold at that time for ฿,,), as well as the truck. When Toyota determined that the problems with the truck arose from his own modifications to the suspension and wheels, they declined his offers (Sathien and Varghese ). . I translate ความยุติธรรม here as “justice” and ความเป็นธรรม as “fairness” (though “impartiality” also has merit). As Engel and Engel point out, however, translations of the Thai tend to leave aside something of the religious quality of each term (Engel and Engel , –). The word ธรรม that appears in each is damma (pronounced tham): khwam yuttitham (ความยุตธิ รรม) in the first case, khwam pen tham (ความเป็นธรรม) in the second. It may be for this reason—the shared sense of accord with Buddhist teaching, cosmic righteousness—that it is common to translate both as “justice,” a tendency that Engel and Engel wish to resist (). They argue that damma is more expansive than the more strictly juridical English term “justice” captures in either case (– ). Both nod toward Buddhist uprightness in damma, then khwam yuttitham ความ ยุติธรรม bearing within it yutti (ยุติ), a notion of ending, or settling, and so settling on/ ending in dhamma. On the other hand, khwam pen tham (ความเป็นธรรม) has to it something like “being dammic” (เป็น—pen—meaning “to be”), embodying the compassion inherent in damma. “Justice” and “fairness,” then, are not without their misleading aspects as translations but seem to me to do the best job of capturing, for justice, the implications of arriving at, settling on, or ending in dhamma for khwam yuttitham (ความยุติธรรม) and for fairness the sense of “being dammic” or “according with the damma” in the case of khwam pen tham (ความเป็นธรรม). . The officials are, specifically, the city and municipal authorities who bear on her circumstances—hence, her positioning at Lan Khon Muang, rather than any of the iconic protest sites, like the Democracy Monument, where demonstrations on a national scale, addressing the state, locate themselves. . Such a conviction is of a piece with the findings of Mary Beth Mills’s work on women’s labor activism in Thailand. She found that women typically played important and more enduring roles in strikes in Bangkok’s textile industry and that men often fell into drunkenness and belligerence—often resulting in violence—during large-scale labor activism (Mills , – passim). . Land titles are uncommon, especially in northeastern Thailand, where Ubon is located. . With regard to these fears, see ThaiNGO.org’s reports at http://www.thaingo .org/HeadnewsKan/LAHA.htm and http://www.thaingo.org/HeadnewsKan/ LAHA-.htm.

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. Mr. Seua Phankham and Mr. Fong Khanjanta were the neighbors who did not deed their land to the state. . The Pak Mun dam is on the Mun River, also in Ubon Ratchatani province, and was completed in  but closed in  after sustained protests. . Within anthropology in particular, cultural translation arose as a central project in the early s (Asad ) but has by no means remained the concern only of anthropologists (see, for example, the edited volume, The Translatability of Cultures by Burdick and Iser ). Constable’s sharp criticism of Merry’s (b) Human Rights and Gender Violence concerns a range of topics, including research bias (Constable charges Merry is too weighted toward NGOs), human rights imperialism (which Constable finds Merry unwittingly to promote—a criticism that reproduces the anticolonial relativism of anthropologists like Herskovits), and, at issue in this chapter, questions of the translation of human rights. She writes, The value of language, like that of human rights law, lies for Merry in its usefulness in manipulating states or others into accepting particular standards. “Vernacularization” becomes a one-way street. In consensus building at the international level, as in “local justice,” language use, according to Merry, consists of a deployment of symbols in which those with greater resources dominate from the top down. Religious language allows transnational activists to sugarcoat changes made at the local level, just as knowledge of the language of human rights allows manipulation of signs and discourse at international and state levels. (Constable , ) . The remainder of the ฿,, came from “various real estate businesses” (Pornchai ). . A measure of Yai Hai’s exemplary status is the honorary bachelor’s degree from Ramkhamhaeng University in , royally conferred on her by Princess Sirindhon. Chapter 5 . “Scrutiny of interim constitutions will reveal that in each case the coup-makers were provided with legal immunity for the consequences of their actions” (Harding and Leyland , ). . Ferrara writes, The debate over limitations to monarchical power is customarily traced back to , when eleven members of the Siamese royal elite in Europe, led by Prince Prisdang, wrote to the King to suggest that the threats to Siam’s independence could be defused by reforming the country’s political institutions in an attempt to make Siam appear more civilized, just, and thereby more worthy of its independence as a “country owned by its people” (mueang

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thong ratsadon). The significance of the appeal lies in the identification of the “nation,” and the national interest, not with the preservation or expansion of royal authority, but rather with ideas of constitutionalism, popular sovereignty, equal rights under the law, social justice, and the respect of civil and political rights. (Ferrara , –) . In the s, Thailand’s wealthiest  percent claimed around eight times the income of the lowest  percent, whereas this ratio had climbed to twelve or fourteen times by  (Walker , ). . The constitutions of , , and ; the interim constitution of ; and the  constitution all begin with exactly these phrases: Section . Thailand is one and indivisible Kingdom. Section . Thailand adopts a democratic regime of government with the King as Head of State. . . . Section . Sovereign power belongs to the Thai people. The King as Head of State shall exercise such power through the National Legislative Assembly, the Council of Ministers and the Courts in accordance with the provisions of this Constitution. The major distinctions between the People’s Constitution () and the  constitution on one side and the  constitution occur in Sections , , and . In  and , they read as follows: Section . The human dignity, right and liberty of the people shall be protected. Section . The Thai people, irrespective of their origins, sexes, or religions, shall enjoy equal protection under this Constitution. Section . The Constitution is the supreme law of the State. The provisions of any law, rule or regulation, which are contrary to or inconsistent with this Constitution, shall be unenforceable. In , we find the following: Section . Subject to the provisions of this Constitution, all human dignity, rights, liberties and equality of the people protected by the constitutional convention under a democratic regime of government with the King as Head of State, and by international obligations bound by Thailand, shall be protected and upheld by this Constitution. Section . Whenever no provision under this Constitution is applicable to any case, it shall be done or decided in accordance with the constitutional convention under a democratic regime of government with the King as the

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Head of State, but such constitutional convention shall not be contrary to, or inconsistent with, this Constitution. In the case where the question concerning the decision under paragraph one arises in the affairs of the National Legislative Assembly, it shall be decided by the National Legislative Assembly. If the question does not arise in the affairs of the National Legislative Assembly, the National Council for Peace and Order, the Council of Ministers, the Supreme Court or the Supreme Administrative Court may request the Constitutional Court to make decision thereon, but the request of the Supreme Court or the Supreme Administrative Court shall be approved by the plenary session of the Supreme Court or the Supreme Administrative Court and on the matter related to the trial and adjudication of cases. Section . There shall be the National Legislative Assembly, consisting of not more than two hundred and twenty members as appointed by the King from the persons of Thai nationality by birth of not less than forty years of age in accordance with the recommendation of the National Council for Peace and Order. The National Legislative Assembly shall act as the House of Representatives, the Senate and the National Assembly. What distinguishes the  interim constitution is its much greater emphasis on reiterating that the king is the head of state and on securing the legal authority of the junta (National Council for Peace and Order). By , these anxieties seemed to have eased, and the language reverts to that found in . . King Bhumipol’s color (that associated with his birthday) is yellow. Each king in the past, as well as each member of the royal family, has a specific color, so the PAD, in fact, identifies itself not with the monarchy in general but with this king in particular. . The other colors, white and blue, are identified with Buddhism and with royalty, as blue was the color associated with King Vajiravudh, who reigned at the time of the flag’s adoption in . . On the citizen-subject tension, see Ferrara (, ). . หมิ่นพระบรมเดชานุภาพ . There are different ways to count lèse-majesté: the number of charges, the number of cases prosecuted before different courts (Court of First Instance, Appeals Court, and Supreme Court), total number of cases in the court system as a whole, and so on. If our interest is in the use of lèse-majesté laws as a political weapon or a technique of junta intimidation, the most relevant way to count is the number of charges, as charges inevitably lead to detention by the junta (Hewison ), are highly likely to lead to conviction (see next note), and, because of the extraordinary glut of charges, will take police years to process the backlog (Streckfuss ). Further, if the point of the extraordinary frequency of lèse-majesté charges is intimidation of politically active

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opponents or dissidents, it is the charge itself and not the merits of the evidence (or, by extension, its ability to secure a conviction) that matters. . The rate of conviction stemming from these charges is unclear, as some cases take many years to resolve, but the rate of conviction from  to  was  percent (Streckfuss , ; see also Hewison ). . On the notion of recruitment, see below on constitutional changes in the role of the NHRC. . As outlined in Section , they are as follows: . to examine and report the commission or omission of acts which violate human rights or which do not comply with obligations under international treaties to which Thailand is a party, and propose appropriate remedial measures to the person or agency committing or omitting such acts for taking action. In the case where it appears that no action has been taken as proposed, the Commission shall report to the National Assembly for further proceeding; . to propose to the National Assembly and the Council of Ministers policies and recommendations with regard to the revision of laws, rules or regulations for the purpose of promoting and protecting human rights; . to promote education, researches and the dissemination of knowledge on human rights; . to promote co-operation and co-ordination among Government agencies, private organisations, and other organisations in the field of human rights; . to prepare an annual report for the appraisal of situations in the sphere of human rights in the country and submit it to the National Assembly; . other powers and duties as provided by law. In the performance of duties, the National Human Rights Commission shall also have regard to the interests of the country and the public. The National Human Rights Commission has the power to demand relevant documents or evidence from any person or summon any person to give statements of fact including other powers for the purpose of performing its duties as provided by law. (Thai Constitution, , §) . Section  of the  constitution reads as follows: The National Human Rights [Commission has] powers and duties as follows: . to examine and report the commission or omission of acts which violate human rights or which do not comply with obligations under

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.

.

.

.

. .

.

.

international treaties to which Thailand is a party, and propose appropriate remedial measures to the person or agency committing or omitting such acts to be acted upon. In the case where it appears that no action has been taken as proposed, the commission shall report to the National Assembly for further proceeding; to submit to the Constitutional Court any complaints received and an assessment of the provisions of the law that affect human rights and are inconsistent with the provisions of the Constitution; to propose to the Administrative Courts any complaints received and an assessment of any regulations, orders, or other actions that affect human rights and are inconsistent with the provisions of the Constitution; to fi le lawsuit with the court of justice on behalf of the injured when requested and deemed appropriate to solve problems of public human rights violation as specified by law; to suggest policy and recommendation to revise laws, regulations to the national Assembly and the Council of Ministers to promote and protect human rights; to promote education, research and dissemination of information on human rights; to promote cooperation and coordination among government agencies, private organizations, and other organizations in the field of human rights; to prepare an annual report for the appraisal of situations in the sphere of human rights in the country and submit it to the National Assembly; other powers and duties as provided by the law.

In the performance of its duties, the National Human Rights Commission shall also have regard to the interests of the country and the public. The National Human Rights Commission has the power to demand relevant documents or evidence from any person or summon any person to give statements of fact and has other powers for the purpose of performing its duties as provided by the law. . The NHRC website includes the Constitutional Court and the Administrative Court as sites where the NHRC could fi le a suit on behalf of another. See http://www .nhrc.or.th/AboutUs/The-Commission/Mandates.aspx. . I am thinking here of Weber’s description of the state as holding the monopoly on legitimate uses of violence (Weber , ), in which case the shift is from an autonomous body that has no claim on the legitimate use of physical force to having such a claim, and I am thinking of Benjamin’s explanation of law as born of and maintained by violence, in which case the shift is from an autonomous body that does not employ such violence, because it does not directly prosecute the law, to one that does

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participate in such violence as it becomes an agent that can directly bring legal sanctions against individuals (Benjamin ). . Harding and Leyland are helpfully clear when they point out that, even with the  constitution, the NHRC shares responsibility for rectifying human rights violations, and to that end, “other bodies, including executive, legislative and judicial organs, have direct responsibility for enforcing and supporting human rights,” which their research suggests introduces a further “gap between constitutional aspirations and the actual delivery of human rights” that proves difficult to bridge (Harding and Leyland , ). . Section  reads, “A person whose rights and freedoms provided by this Constitution have been violated is entitled to petition to the Constitutional Court for decision whether the provisions of the law contradict the Constitution. The exercise of the rights to petition under paragraph one shall be the last resort in accordance with the provisions of the organic Act on the Constitutional Procedure.” The wording in the  and  Sections  and , respectively, is nearly identical. Reproducing the English translation of the  passage is, therefore, redundant, but I include the Thai original for those who wish to see the overwhelming extent to which the  constitution reproduces the wording of ’s Section . : มาตรา ๒๑๒ บุคคลซึ่งถูกละเมิดสิทธิหรือเสรีภาพที่รัฐธรรมนูญนี้รับรองไว้มีสิทธิยื่นคําร้องต่อศาล รัฐธรรมนูญเพื่อมีคําวินิจฉัยว่าบทบัญญัติแห่งกฎหมายขัดหรือแย้งต่อรัฐธรรมนูญได้ การใช้สิทธิตามวรรคหนึ่งต้องเป็นกรณีที่ไม่อาจใช้สิทธิโดยวิธีการอื่นได้แล้ว ทั้งนี้ ตามที่บัญญัติไว้ในพระ ราชบัญญัติประกอบรัฐธรรมนูญว่าด้วยวิธีพิจารณาของศาลรัฐธรรมนูญ : มาตรา ๒๑๓ บุคคลซึ่งถูกละเมิดสิทธิหรือเสรีภาพที่รัฐธรรมนูญคุ้มครองไว้ มีสิทธิยื่นคาร้องต่อศาล รัฐธรรมนูญเพื่อมีคาวินิจฉัยว่าการกระทานั้นขัดหรือแย้งต่อรัฐธรรมนูญทั้งนี้ ตามหลักเกณฑ์ วิธีการ และ เงื่อนไขที่บัญญัติไว้ในพระราชบัญญัติประกอบรัฐธรรมนูญว่าด้วย วิธีพิจารณาของศาลรัฐธรรมนูญ . (๔) ชี้แจงและรายงานข้อเท็จจริงที่ถูกต้องโดยไม่ชักช้าในกรณีที่มีการรายงานสถานการณ์เกี่ยวกับสิทธิมนุษ ยชนในประเทศไทยโดยไม่ถูกต้องหรือไม่เป็นธรรม . The relevant sections are as follows: Expanded NCPO powers Section . In the case where the Head of the National Council for Peace and Order is of opinion that it is necessary for the benefit of reform in any field and to strengthen public unity and harmony, or for the prevention, disruption or suppression of any act which undermines public peace and order or national security, the Monarchy, national economics or administration of State affairs, whether that act emerges inside or outside the Kingdom, the Head of the National Council for Peace and Order shall have the powers to make any order to disrupt or suppress regardless of the legislative, executive or judicial force of that order. In this case, that order, act or any performance in accordance with that order is deemed to be legal, constitutional and

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conclusive, and it shall be reported to the National Legislative Assembly and the Prime Minister without delay. Section . All Notifications and Orders of the National Council for Peace and Order as well as Order of the Head of the National Council for Peace and Order which were notified or made between the nd Day of May B.E.  () until the date the Council of Ministers takes office under this Constitution, regardless of their legislative, executive or judicial force, as well as all acts performed in compliance therewith before or after this Constitution comes into force shall be deemed to be legal, constitutional and conclusive. Any Notification or Order that still in force prior to the date this Constitution comes into force shall be in force until it is amended or repealed by law, rule, regulation, resolution of the Council of Ministers or order, as the case may be. In the case where the National Council for Peace and Order has ordered any person to hold or vacate any official position as prescribed by section  prior to the date this Constitution comes into force, the Prime Minister shall present the King for appointment or removal. Exemption Section . All acts which have been done in relation to the seizure and control of the administration of State affairs on the nd Day of May B.E.  () of the Head of the National Council for Peace and Order and the National Council for Peace and Order, including all acts which have been done by any person in connection with the aforesaid acts, or by the person who has been entrusted or ordered by the Head of the National Council for Peace and Order or the National Council for Peace and Order, for the fulfilment of such purposes, regardless of their legislative, executive or judicial force, as well as any punishment and other acts performed in relation to the administration of State affairs and whether the actors of those act are principals, accessories, persons who employ another to commit those acts or the employed persons and whether those acts done before or after the date mentioned above, if the aforesaid acts were illegal, all related person shall be exempted from being offenders and shall be exempted from all liabilities. . เป็นกลางทางการเมือง และมีความซือ่ สัตย์สจุ ริตเป็นทีป่ ระจักษ์ ( Constitution, Section ). . In an especially Wittgensteinian moment, Kennedy explains that any competent legal arguer can produce a counterargument to any argument-bite (a stereotypical, assertoric “bite” of an argument) (Kennedy , ). Th is bears some resemblance to Wittgenstein’s thought on following a rule and the need to interpret the rule or appeal to another rule to judge if an action obeys the rule (because the rule itself cannot provide its own interpretation) (see Wittgenstein  [], §§, , , ; Kennedy , ). Stanley Cavell captures Wittgenstein’s theme nicely: “In

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the late s, when university gatherings were apt to inspire a certain laxness of manners, officials at Harvard reaffi rmed the rule that jackets and ties would be worn in the dining halls. So naturally a certain number of young men showed up in jackets and ties and without shirts. . . . Was the original rule indeterminate? To imagine so would be to slight the difference between disobeying a rule (by failing to wear a jacket and a tie) and mocking it (by obeying it literally and disgracefully” (Cavell , –). . Kennedy captures this in the conclusion of his paper thus: “The system of bites, counter-bites, support systems and clusters that exists at a given moment is a product of the actual history of a particular legal discourse, at the same time that it is the product of the logic of operations. An existing system is always incomplete, looked at from the point of view of possible operations, and always changing as new bites enter the lexicon and others change their form or fall out of use altogether. Each change of this kind alters the possibilities of legal discourse, because it changes what is available to the arguer as stereotyped argument to be deployed across the range of fact situations as they arise” (Kennedy , ). . Mark Tushnet’s account of CLS, to which both he and Kennedy contribute, describes the CLS’s heritage along these lines: “The role of the progressive tradition in CLS has been to support the general judgment that there is no tenable distinction between law and politics,” (Tushnet , ). He anticipates the point Kennedy emphasizes: “The legal system, through its rules of property, contract, and tort, creates a set of entitlements. These entitlements constitute the pattern of wealth-holding in the society” (Tushnet , ). . See, for example, Tambiah: “The king’s right to purify the religion was usually exercised in circumstances of monastic abuse and degeneracy generated from within the ranks of the sangha. Frequently, the monks were found not to live according to the vinaya rules of monastic life, and the guaranteeing of their disciplinary purity was accepted as part of the king’s competence. Thus we have here a matter of central interest: The king as political authority and dhamaraja acts to correct the monk’s failings” (Tambiah , –). See also Somboon (, chap. ; , chap. ). . The notion of a “restart” was pervasive among Yellow Shirt protestors, becoming one of their central tropes ahead of the  coup. See McCargo (, ). See also Gollom (), and on the widely held view of the military as the agent of conflict resolution par excellence, see Aim (). . Jane Krishnadas approaches the relation of law, conversation, and legitimacy along comparable lines. Arguing for a Habermasian view of the legitimacy of a political order, she emphasizes his argument that law may only claim legitimacy when all parties it could affect can, after rational deliberation, consent to it (Krishnadas c, ). One notes that she concerns herself with legitimacy rather than justice but that the role of conversation is equally central. . ในอนาคต รัฐธรรมนูญกําลังร่างให้เป็นเช่นนั้น แต่การเมืองไทย อาจมีการลุกฮือครั้งใหญ่ รัฐธรรมนูญใหม่ก็

ไม่รู้ว่าจะประกาศใช้ได้ไหม ทุกองค์กร/สถาบันเสื่อมทรุด สังคมนิ่งมากๆ

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. On the issues of its independent financial status and NHRC control of its own enabling act, Harding and Leyland note, “In Thailand great importance is attached to responsibility for implementation, as the department implementing will be able to a large extent to decide matters of personnel, procedure and budget” (Harding and Leyland , ). . A status connotes “Compliance with the Paris Principles”; B, “Not fully in compliance with the Paris Principles,” and the lowest grade, C, “Non-compliance with the Paris Principles” (http://nhri.ohchr.org/EN/AboutUs/ICCAccreditation/ Documents/Chart%of%the%Status%of%NHRIs%(%May% ).pdf). . It is now chaired by What Tingsamitr, a former Supreme Court judge. The other commissioners are Chatsuda Chandeeying, formerly an associate judge in the Juvenile and Family Court of Samut Prakan; Prakairatana Thontiravong, previously a member of the National Assembly and an associate judge in the Juvenile and Family Court of Nonthaburi; Surachet Satitniramai, MD, with an administrative background in a variety of medical institutions and a post as inspector general, Ministry of Public Health; Angkhana Neelapaijit, a nurse who became a human rights activist of national stature after her husband, human rights lawyer Somchai Neelapaijit, disappeared in ; Tuenjai Deetes, a former senator for Chiang Rai, with an environmental NGO background; and Chartchai Suthiklom, formerly director-general of the Department of Corrections. Conclusion . During the French National Assembly’s debates of the nature and content of La Déclaration des Droits de l’Homme et du Citoyen, divisive issues included the place (if any) of the monarchy in the Déclaration and whether it was to precede or follow the draft ing of the new constitution (so providing a framework and foundation for the constitution or deriving from it—founding law or expressing legal principles established by the constitution). Many proposed declarations, like M. Mounier’s on  July  or M. Clermont-Tonerre’s three weeks later, asserted from the outset that the place of the king was sacred, that France must be, above all, a monarchy (Archives Parlementaires VIII , , ). Others, like Sieyès, accepted but did not assert the place of the king (). Contesting these positions and allowing no role for the monarchy whatsoever were those like the veteran of the U.S. Civil War, the Marquis de Lafayette, who, by  July , came to assert the freedom and equality of all men. These positions are clearly irreconcilable, and one would have to cede to the other. Keith Michael Baker explains, “The Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen . . . was . . . drawn up with enormous difficulty and great urgency, at the cost of bitter argument, inevitable linguistic compromises, and dramatic theoretical tensions, by an assembly profoundly divided over the nature and purpose of the text it was struggling to construct” (Baker , ).

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As both Baker and Lynn Hunt point out, the French National Assembly negotiated only a provisional text by  August, when they elected to postpone further debate until after the completion of the constitution (Baker , –; Hunt , ). The National Assembly, however, never did return to these debates, and the provisional draft—the product of six days of debate—became the final version of the declaration (Hunt , ). As Baker and Hunt argue, the declaration was the site of fierce debate and, in the end, did not emerge as a resolution of the divisions among the National Assembly’s deputies. Ultimately, unresolved dispute produced La Déclaration des Droits de l’Homme et du Citoyen, without reaching consensus on what its contents should be. . From February  until the end of , the Commission on Human Rights (CHR, a commission under the auspices of the UN Economic and Social Council) met almost continuously to draft the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The majority of this burden, however, fell on the Drafting Committee (DC), an eight-member subcommittee of the CHR. Illuminating friction occurred when the members of the DC encountered moments of disagreement, which occurred over a range of issues. One instructive example was the first article of the first draft they considered, the duties of individual loyalty to the state: “Every one owes a duty of loyalty to his State and to the (international society) United Nations. He must accept his just share of responsibility for the performance of such social duties and his share of such common sacrifices as may contribute to the common good” (E/CN./, ). At the beginning of the DC’s first meeting, the French representative, René Cassin, questioned whether the committee should discuss limitations on rights at all or if it “should confine itself to rights and freedoms” (E/CN./AC./SR., ). Eleanor Roosevelt, chair of the CHR and the DC, shared Cassin’s concerns, suggesting the elimination of the first article, as it dealt with the rights of the state, not the human. Lebanese delegate Charles Malik also immediately took up Cassin’s question, pointing out that the first two articles of the draft did not discuss rights at all but rather limitations on rights (E/CN./AC./SR., ). Their position, however, would not go uncontested. The U.K. and Australian delegates, Geoff rey Wilson and William Hodgson, expressed deep reluctance to discuss rights in, as it were, a vacuum, without the balance of duties. In a revealing moment, Hodgson says, “Every one of these rights has a corresponding duty. That brings in the points . . . as to the interests of the state against the interests of the individual” (E/CN./AC.//ADD., ). To this, Charles Dukes of the United Kingdom (U.K. representative not at the DC but at the CHR) adds, “It is of no use, in my opinion, of seeking to define personal freedom entirely detached from the obligation of those individuals either to the State or to voluntary organizations and at the same time claim the advantages and the benefits of [these rights]” (). The significance of these expressions of reluctance to consider rights without corresponding duties is the way that they pose rights as intrinsically contingent: you may claim rights as long as you fulfi ll your agreed-upon duties. This is quite a distance

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from the idea that human rights are inherent and inalienable in human beings and are available for the individual to invoke against the state. In his discussion of duties, however, Cassin considers the right to life in inviolable terms, acknowledging the shadow that darkened the entire process: what duties to Nazi Germany could one possibly have to fulfi ll in order to claim the right to life (E/CN./AC.//ADD., )? Ultimately, the argument for human rights as inalienable—not contingent on duties—carried the day. This was a dispute in which, again, one side prevailed, as with the French National Assembly path to the rights of man.

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Index

 October  uprising, –, , –, , , , , ,   August  demonstrations (Burma), ,   October  uprising, , –,  fig. ,  figs. –,  fig.  Abhisit Vejjajiva,  absolute monarchy,  Administrative Court, n affect, , , – Alexander, Jonathan, n Amara Pongsapich,  Amnesty International, ,  amnesty program, , ,  Anand Panyarachun,  ancestor worship, – Andaman provinces, , , , , . See also Phang-nga province; Phuket province; Ranong province Anderson, Benedict,  Angkhana Neelapaijit, n antiauthoritarianism, ,  anticommunism, – antimonarchism, – antitrafficking work, , , , n; facework and police cooperation, –; military collaboration, –; prisons and, –. See also human trafficking Apirak Kosayodhin,  arahants (world renouncers), nn– Arendt, Hannah, , n Aretxaga, Begoña,  Argentina, mothers’ activism in, –, n Arifcan, Umut, n Arporn Wongsang,  Arthit Kamlengek, 

asceticism, –, , n ASEAN Parliamentarians for Human Rights,  Asia Foundation,  Asian Values argument, ,  Assembly of the Poor,  Austin, J. L., n, n Ayutthaya, –, , n Baan Nua, , n Baker, Chris, , n Baker, Keith Michael, n Bamber, Scott,  Bang Chan, , n Bangkok City Hall, , , n; Rattana Sajjathep’s protest at, – figs. – Bangkok Land Department,  Ban Nam Khem, –, , n Bartholomeusz, Tessa, n Bayard de Volo, Lorraine,  Bencha Yoddumnern, n Benhabib, Seyla,  Benjamin, n Benjamin, Walter,  Beung Kum district,  Bhumipol, King, n Black May (), , –, , , . See also Bloody May () blood, symbolism of, –, , n Bloody May (), , , , n. See also Black May () Bodhiraksa. See Phra Bodhirak breastfeeding, , , n Brewer, E. C.,  Buddha,  Buddhadasa Bhikkhu, , –, –, –, –, , , n, n, n

224

Index

Buddhadasa Study Group,  Buddhism, –; Burmese, ,  fig. ; conformity, , , n; conservative/ reactionary, , , –, ; doctrine on killing leftists, –; egalitarian, , –, , –, –, , , , n; human rights and, –; motherhood and, –, n; normalization, , ; political use of symbols, , ; progressive/reformist, , , –; secularization of, –, , n; social action and, –; as state religion, n; Thai politics and, , –, ; worldly, –. See also dhamma; kamma; monks; nibbana; sangha; Santi Asoke; Wat Dhammakaya Buddhism and Human Rights (Saneh),  Buddhist ethics, , –, , , , –, –, –, nn– Buddhist nationalism,  Burapha,  Burchianti, Margaret E.,  Burma, –, , –, ; Buddhist nationalism, ; democracy demonstrations ( August ), ,  Burmese migrants: fear of police, , , ; human rights promotion and, –, , ; human trafficking of, , –, –, ; Thai attitudes toward, –; Thai sociality and, ; tsunami survivors, , , , –, –; vulnerabilities of, –, –; work permits and visas, , , –, n Camille, Michael,  Campaign for Popular Democracy,  care-debt, – Cassin, René, n Cavell, Stanley, , , n, n, n Chakri dynasty, , n Chalad Worachat, n Chamlong Srimuang, –, ,  chao meuang (provincial administrators),  charity model,  Chartchai Suthiklom, n Chatichai Choonhavan,  Chatsuda Chandeeying, n Chongkol Srikancha,  Chulalongkorn, King, ,  Chutima Siasathian, – citizenship, –, , , n

civil rights, . See also free speech; lèsemajesté laws and charges claiming rights, process of, –, –,  Clayton, Philip, n Clermont-Tonerre, M., n COMADRES (El Salvador), – commissioners, NHRC, n; integrity of, , ; NGO backgrounds of, , ; selection of, – Commission on Human Rights (CHR), n Committee for Developing Democracy, n Communist Party of Thailand (CPT), , , , –,  communists, Buddhist doctrine on killing of, – compassion, , , n compliance, ,  Computer Crime Act,  conduct, – conformity, , n conservatives, ,  Constable, Marianne, , n, n Constitutional Court, , , , , n Constitutional Drafting Assembly,  constitutional monarchy,  constitutions, –, –, , n, nn–, n; human dignity and, , , , n; human rights and, , –; NHRC duties and powers, , –, –, , –, n, nn–; “People’s Constitution” (), , , –, , , –, n, n, n, n Consumer Protection Board, , , n corruption, , , , – Counter-Corruption Commission,  coup politics, , –, , , , n; constitutions and, –, –; human rights and, , , –, , ; lèsemajesté, –; ousting of Thaksin, , , , , n, n; Yellow Shirt/Red Shirt conflict, –,  Court of Justice,  courts, –; human rights and, , , , . See also Administrative Court; Constitutional Court Criminal Code, Article , , . See also lèse-majesté laws and charges Critical Legal Studies (CLS), , n

Index cultural relativism, , , ,  cultural translation, n. See also translation of human rights curses, ,  Dalai Lama, n damma, n Das, Veena, , , n, n, n de Alwis, Malathi, , ,  defamation, – democracy, ; education campaigns, –; Sukhothai as model of, . See also democratic struggles; electoral democracy Democracy Campaign Program,  Democracy Development Committee,  Democracy Monument, n, n; protests at, , ,  fig. ; as symbol, –,  figs. –,  fig. , ,  figs. –,  Democratic Alliance Against Dictatorship. See Red Shirts “Democratic soldiers,” n democratic struggles, , , ; in Burma, , ; human rights and, –, ; patriotism and, ; watershed moments, –, , . See also  October  uprising;  October  uprising; Black May (); democracy; electoral democracy Democrat Party, , , ,  Denchai Thamthitipong,  Department of Women’s and Children’s Affairs,  deportation, , –, ,  Devadhatta,  dhamma (dharma), n, n Dhammakaya. See Wat Dhammakaya “dhammic socialism,”  dictation, , n dignity, , ; constitutions and, , , , n; national, – Diller, Anthony,  DNA testing (post-tsunami identification), –, , nn– doctors: in NGOs, ; prodemocracy activism, . See also Ministry of Public Health (MoPH) Draupadi, , , n drawings, – Driessen, Henk, n drug trafficking, ,  Duenpen Silaket, , 

225

Dukes, Charles, n Dumm, Thomas L., n Duryodhana, King,  duties, individual, n Dutugemunu, nn– economic growth,  economic power, distribution of, – egalitarianism, , , , , –, , –, n Elara, n Election Commission,  electoral democracy, , , –, –, , n elites, ; political, , , , ; preserving face, – El Salvador, mothers’ activism in, – embarrassment, , –. See also losing face emergence: features of, n; of human rights in Thailand, –, –, – Emerson, Ralph Waldo, n, n Engel, David and Jaruwan S., , n, n England,  equality, , , , , , , n, n, n ethics, , , , , –, n, n. See also Buddhist ethics ethnography,  Evans-Pritchard, E. E.,  everyday lives, –,  excuses, , n extra-judicial executions, ,  face-work, , , –, ; as resource for human rights, –, , –. See also reputation; shame fairness, n Farmer, Paul, n fathers, , – felicity conditions, , n Ferrara, Federico, , n fieldwork,  filing process for NHRC complaints, –,  fisheries, ,  flag. See Thai flag Fong Khanjanta, n foreign migrants: human rights and, –; vulnerability of, ; work permits, –. See also Burmese migrants

226

Index

forest monks, –, n Forum Asia,  France, , ; National Assembly, n, n freedom, ,  free speech, , . See also lèse-majesté laws and charges Freud, Sigmund, n Gandhi, Indira,  Garfield, Jay, n Geertz, Clifford,  gender: saving face and, ; women’s political activism and, –, . See also maternal suffering; motherhood; women gesture, , –, n; maternal suffering, , –, –, –; social stratification and, n; translation and, –. See also mourning Giles Ji Ungpharkorn, n global human rights discourses, –, –, , – Goffman, Erving, n Golden Age,  Goodale, Mark, n Government House, n Hanks, Jane, , nn–, n Hanks, Lucien, n Harding, Andrew, –, n, n haunting, – Hauser, Gerard,  health, , n. See also Ministry of Public Health (MoPH) Health Reform Act, – Health Reform Assembly, –, n, n Health System Reform Organization (HSRO), – Herskovits, Melville, n Herzfeld, Michael, n, n, n, n HIV/AIDS, , , , , –, n Hodgson, William, n homicide, –, –, –, , nn– Honda Automobile of Thailand,  Htoo Chit, , ,  human rights: as anthropological object, –, , , ; debates over, , n, n; as liberal Western value, , . See also

global human rights discourses; translation of human rights; vernacularization of human rights human rights advocates. See Labor Rights Promotion Network (LPN); Law Society of Thailand (LST); National Human Rights Commission of Thailand (NHRC); Thai Action Committee for Democracy in Burma (TACDB); Tsunami Action Group (TAG) human rights in Thailand: awareness of, , n; constitutions and, , –; emergence of, –, –, –; experimentation and, , , –, –, –, , , –; as if overheard, –, –, , ; as ordinary, , ; stakes, –; training sessions on, –, . See also Buddhism; coup politics; democratic struggles; face-work; motherhood Human Rights in Thai Society (Khunying Amphorn and Saneh), ,  human rights models, ; preventative, , , –, , n; reactive/juridical, , , ,  Human Rights Watch,  human trafficking: of Burmese migrants, –, –, –, ; police involvement in, , , ; Royal Thai Navy and, – humiliation, . See also losing face hunger strikes, , n Hunt, Lynn, n hyperroyalism, – identity. See Thai identity Ignatieff, Michael,  immanentism, , ,  imperial threats,  individual rights,  inequality, economic,  inequality, social, , , . See also rank; social stratification; status inheritance, ,  injustices, –, , . See also Rattana Sajjathep; Yai Hai Khanjanata integrity, ,  Internal Security Operations Command (ISOC), 

Index International Coordinating Committee of National Human Rights Institutions (ICC),  International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights,  International Mother’s Day,  International Organization for Migration (IOM),  Ireland, mothers’ activism in,  İvegen, Berfin, n Jackson, Peter, nn–, n, n Jaturat (magazine),  Jerryson, Michael, n Jilani, Hina,  Journal of Philosophy, n judicial system. See courts juntas. See coup politics justice, n; distribution of, –; pursuit of, – justifications, –, n Kamala Tiyavanich, n kamma (karma), , , , n; political legitimation and, n; social stratification based on, –, , , ; use of term, n Kattiya Sawatdipol,  Kennedy, Duncan, , n, nn– Keyes, Charles, n Khao Lak,  Khemphon Khemsida, – Khmer model of kingship,  Khunying Amphorn Meesuk, –, , , , , , , n Khunying Pornthip Rojanasunan, n khwam pen tham, n killing: Buddhist doctrine on, –, nn–. See also homicide; massacres king: criticism of, n; images of, ; loyalty to, , , , –, n; purifying Buddhism, ; responsiveness to subjects, –. See also individual kings; monarchy kingship, , n; Khmer model of,  kin meuang,  Kirsch, Thomas, n Klausner, William,  Klima, Alan, 

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Kriangsak Chomanand,  Krishnadas, Jane, n Krungthep Post,  Kukrit Pramoj, , ,  labor activism, –, n. See also Seafarers’ Union of Burma Labor Rights Promotion Network (LPN), , , –,  Lafayette, Marquis de, n Lambek, Michael, n land owners, , n Lang, Hazel J., ,  language: gesture and, . See also gesture Lan Khon Muang plaza, ,  figs. –, , n, n Latin America, mothers’ activism in, – Law Society of Thailand (LST), –, , –, , , ,  leftists: Buddhist doctrine on killing of, –; protests, , –, –, . See also Communist Party of Thailand (CPT); democratic struggles lèse-majesté laws and charges, , –, n, n, n Leyland, Peter, –, n, n libel, –,  liberalism, , , n Living River Siam,  losing face, –, –, , n, n; as contagious, , n, n. See also face-work; saving face Luang Por Sot,  Luang Wichit Wathakan,  Madres de Plaza de Mayo (Argentina), – , n mafia, ,  Mahabharata,  Mahachai, , –, ,  Mahasi Sayadaw, , ,  Mahavamsa, n Mahidol University, ; Institute for Population and Social Research,  Malik, Charles, n Mara (Evil One),  marginalized groups,  margins: as frames, , n; as sites of commentary, 

228

Index

Marxism, –,  masculinity, n massacres, –, –, , , , , , n. See also  October  uprising;  October  uprising; Black May () mass rallies. See political demonstrations maternal suffering, , –, –, – Mbembe, Achille,  McCargo, Duncan,  McCrudden, Christopher,  Mead, G. H., , , n, n Medical Assistance Programs (MAP),  medical students, –. See also Ministry of Public Health (MoPH) meditation practices, ,  merit, , , –, , ; killing and, –, n; political legitimation and, , n; transfer of, , n; wealth and, , ; women and, n Merry, Sally Engle, , n, n Metthadhamma Forest Dhamma Center,  middle class, n; rural, – Migrant Assistance Program,  migrants. See Burmese migrants; foreign migrants military: doves and hawks, –, , , ; reputational damage, , ; suppression of prodemocracy protests, –, , , ,  fig. ; upcountry soldiers,  milk, symbolism of, , n Mills, Mary Beth, , n Minister of Health,  Ministry of Defense,  Ministry of Public Health (MoPH), ; leftist students in, –, , , –, , ; preventative approach, –,  Mitchell, W. J. T.,  “mobile phone mob,” n monarchy, , n; absolute, ; symbols of, ; temples identified with, . See also individual kings; king; kingship; lèsemajesté laws and charges monarchy-religion-nation (three pillars), , , –, –,  Mongkut, King, ,  monks, Buddhist: debts to mothers, ; degeneracy, n; political activism, –, . See also sangha

Montgomery, Heather,  morality, ; conformity and, . See also Buddhist ethics; ethics; motherhood, moral authority of Morison, Alan, – Morris, Rosalind,  motherhood, ; activist movements and, –; care-debt circuit, –, n; moral authority of, , , , –, , , , , n; protection of family, –, ; status of, –. See also maternal suffering Mothers’ Front (Sri Lanka), ,  Mothers of Heroes and Martyrs of Matagalpa (Nicaragua),  Mounier, M., n mourning, –, , , n Mukhom Wongthes,  Mulder, Niels,  Munger, Frank, , n Mun River, n Musil, Robert,  Muslims, , n Naritsarawan Kaewnopparat,  Narong Kittakachorn,  National Assembly: election of, , n; NHRC reports to, , , n, n National Audit Commission,  National Convention,  National Council for Peace and Order (NCPO), –, n National Human Rights Commission Act (), , , n National Human Rights Commission of Thailand (NHRC): – data, –; annual cases,  table ,  fig. ; autonomy, , –; Buddhism and, –, –, , n; coercive powers (enforcement), , ; complaints by accused,  table ; complaints by region (),  table ; complaints by violation (),  table ; complaints received,  table ; complaints received (by delivery method),  table ; duties and powers, constitutionally defined, , –, –, , –, n, nn–; educational video compact disc (VCD), –, ; fieldwork at, ; merger with Office of the Ombudsman,

Index , –; military, collaboration with, –; organizational structure, ; origins of, , –, , n; plaintiff-defendant model, ; prison wardens, collaboration with, –; process for filing complaints, –, ; protection of Thailand’s reputation on human rights, –; Rattana’s case, –, , –; strategic plan, , , –, ; subcommissions, , ; Subcommittee for the Protection of Human Rights, ; survival of, ; symbols of democratic struggle and, –, ; types of cases by accused party, ; use of term, n; Yai Hai’s case, –, –. See also human rights models National Legislative Assembly, , n National Peace Keeping Council (NPKC), – Nawaphon,  Nazi Germany, n networks, – NGOs, , ; authority of, , ; health issues, n; leftists in, –, ; NHRC and, . See also Labor Rights Promotion Network (LPN); Law Society of Thailand (LST); Seafarers’ Union of Burma; Thai Action Committee for Democracy in Burma (TACDB); Tsunami Action Group (TAG) nibbana (nirvana), , , , , n; egalitarianism and, ; use of term, n Nicaragua, mothers’ activism in,  Noble Eightfold Path,  nonconformity, , , , , n Noraset Runpraphan, n normalization, , , , , n, n novelty, emergence and, n Nualnoi Treerat,  Office of the National Human Rights Commission (ONHRC), , , , , ; fieldwork at, ; organizational structure, ; use of term, n Office of the Ombudsman (OTO), , , – Ong-art Thamnitha, n ordinariness, –, , n, n Organic Act of the National Human Rights Commission,  overhearing, –, –, –, , 

229

Pak Mun dam, protests against, , n Palang Dhamma Party (Dhamma Power Party),  Pasuk Phongpaichit, , , , , n, n patronage networks (patron-client relationships), , , , ; care and, n; human rights and, –, , –, ; rural middle class and, – peasantry, , , , n People’s Alliance for Democracy (PAD). See Yellow Shirts People’s Democratic Reform Committee, n Phang-nga province, , , , , ,  Phibun Songkhram, – Philosophical Investigations (Wittgenstein),  Philosophical Review, n Phiphat Samphaonoi, –, – Photirak. See Phra Bodhirak Phra Bodhirak, –, n Phra Dattajivo,  Phra Dhammachayo, n Phra Dhammajayo,  Phra Kittisak Kittisophon, –,  Phra Kittiwuttho, –, , , n Phra Pasura Dantamano, n Phra Supoj, –, , ,  Phuket province, , , , , ,  Phuketwan (newspaper), – Phuriphek Sophon,  police: cooperation in antitrafficking work, –; face-work and human rights investigations, –, , –; involvement in human trafficking, , , ; violations of human rights, , . See also human trafficking political demonstrations: mass rallies, , n, n. See also  October  uprising;  October  uprising; Black May (); democratic struggles; Red Shirts (UDD); Yellow Shirts (PAD) political legitimacy, , , n, n, n; Buddhism and, , , n; of kingship, , ; massacres and, ; of protestors, , –, ,  Pom Mahakan, n, n populism,  poverty, , , , 

230

Index

Povinelli, Elizabeth, n power, distribution of, – Prachaatipatai (democracy),  Prakairatana Thontiravong, n Pranee Liamputthong,  Praphat Charusatien, , –,  Prawase Wasi, , , , n Prayuth Chan-ocha,  Preis, Ann-Belinda, n Prem Tinsulanond, ,  Prisdang, Prince, n prisons, –, – progressive politics, , . See also democratic struggles prostitution, , n protests: illegal, ; by monks, –, ; mothers’ activist movements, –; at Pak Mun dam, , n; at Thai-Malay pipeline, . See also democratic struggles; political demonstrations; Rattana Sajjathep; Yai Hai Khanjanata public education campaigns, – public health students, . See also Ministry of Public Health (MoPH) purification ideal, – rallies. See political demonstrations Ramathibodi Hospital,  Ramkhamhaeng, King (also Ram Khamhaeng, King), , –, , n, n, n rank, , , –. See also status Ranong province, , , , , , –,  Ratchadamnern Klang (also Ratchadamnoen Klang), , , , n Rattana Sajjathep, , –, –, , , ; blackened house, ,  fig. , ; filing NHRC complaint, , , ; protest at Bangkok City Hall, , –, – figs. –, n Red Gaurs,  Red Shirts (UDD), , – Relatives Action Committee (Ireland),  religion: political use of symbols, , . See also Buddhism; Muslims religious intolerance,  reputation: Royal Thai Navy, –; Thai military, , ; Thai state, on human rights, –. See also defamation; libel; losing face; shame

Reynolds, Pamela,  “rights of man,” , n, n right-wing politics, , –, , n Rivers, Dan, n Rohingya, – Roosevelt, Eleanor, n royalist democracy, –,  Royal Thai Navy, – Rural Doctors Society, ,  Saiyud Kerdphon, n salvation, path to, –. See also nibbana samadhi (concentration meditation),  Samakkhitham party,  Samak Sundaravej, n Sanam Luang (Royal Park), , n Sanam Luang Democracy Group,  Saneh Chamarik, –, , –, , , n sangha, –, ; conformity, n; critiques of, –. See also monks, Buddhist Santi Asoke, –, , , n Sant Sarutanond, ,  Sarit Thanarat,  Saturday Mothers (Turkey), n saving face, , , , –. See also facework; losing face Scheper-Hughes, Nancy, n Seafarers’ Union of Burma, , , – secularism, n self-reliance, n Seni Pramoj, , – Seua Phankham, n shame, , , , , , ,  Shin Corporation, ,  Siegel, James, n Sieyès, n Sikhs, – Sirindhon, Princess, n Slyomovics, Susan, n social actors, , , n; uses of human rights, –, , . See also face-work social dislocation, , n sociality, , , –, –, . See also face-work social stratification, ; Buddhism as justification for, –; Buddhist critique of, ; gesture and, n. See also merit; rank; status social welfare, , , 

Index Somboon Suksamran,  Somchai Neelapaijit, n Sonthi Boonyaratglin, n Sophorntavy Vorng, , n sovereignty,  speech, –, . See also gesture Spencer, Jonathan, n spirits, ,  spiritual claims,  Sri Lanka, n; Buddhist nationalism, ; Mothers’ Front, ,  Sriprapha Petcharamesree, n state project/policy, law cases,  status, ; human rights and, , , –; maintaining face and, –; situationality, . See also face-work; rank; social stratification Streckfuss, David,  strikes, female textile workers, –, n student activists, , , , –; in NGOs, . See also democratic struggles; Ministry of Public Health (MoPH) Suchinda Kraprayoon, , , ,  suicide, – Sukhothai, , –, , , n; history of, n Sulak Sivaraksa, , –, n, n Sultanpuri women, –,  Sungsidh Phiriyarangsan, ,  Sunsi Kotlanawin,  Supinya Klangnarong, , ,  Surachet Satitniramai, n Surayut, General,  Swearer, Donald K., n symbols, ; black (color), ; blood and milk, –, , n; democratic struggles and, –, , ; of monarchy, ; in NHRC strategic plan, –; yellow (color), , nn–, n. See also maternal suffering; mourning; tears Takua Pa Prison, –, –,  Tambiah, Stanley Jeyaraja, n, n, n Tamil, n tears, , – Temple of the Emerald Buddha,  Thai Action Committee for Democracy in Burma (TACDB), , , , , 

231

Thai Civil Action Network,  Thai Erawan, ,  Thai flag, ,  fig. , , n Thai identity, , –, n “Thai Love Burma” (Thongchai),  Thai-Malay pipeline, protests at,  Thai Rak Thai party, , , , n Thak Chaloemtiarana,  Thaksin Shinawatra, ; criticism of, –, – , ; denial of human rights, –, ; HRA bill and, ; libel suits against, , ; ousted by coup, , , , , n, n Thammasat University,  Thanom Kittakachorn, , –,  Thawatchai, n this-worldly action, , –,  Thongchai Winichakul, , , ,  Thoreau, Henry David, n thought crimes,  three pillars of Thai state. See monarchy-religion-nation thudong monks, n timeline of events, xi–xv torture, – Toyota, n Traiphum Phra Ruang,  translation of human rights, –, –, n tsunami (), , , , –, –,  Tsunami Action Group (TAG), –, –, – Tuenjai Deetes, n Turkey, mothers’ activism in, n Tushnet, Mark, n Ubon Ratchatani province, , n, n uncanny, n UN Drafting Committee, , n UN High Commission on Human Rights, – UN Human Rights Council, Universal Periodic Review (UPR),  United Front for Democracy Against Dictatorship (UDD). See Red Shirts Universal Declaration of Human Rights, , n universalism, ,  Vajiravudh, King, n Van Esterik, Penny, n

232

Index

vernacularization of human rights, –, , , n villagers, –, –, ,  Village Scouts,  violations of human rights, ; NHRC data (–), –; by police, , ; types of, . See also human trafficking; massacres; National Human Rights Commission of Thailand (NHRC) violence, ; legitimate use of, , n. See also massacres vipassana (insight),  Virgin Mary, ,  visas, , , –, n vulnerability, , –, ,  wandering monks, , n war on drugs, ,  Wat Dhammakaya, –, , n, n, nn– Weber, Max, , n

What Tingsamitr, n Wichian Puaksom,  Wilson, Geoffrey, n Wilson, Richard A., n Wittgenstein, Ludwig, , , n, n, n, n, n women: merit and, , n; political activism, –, . See also maternal suffering; motherhood work permits, , , –, –, n World Vision, ,  Yai Hai Khanjanata, , –, , –, , , ; status, n yellow, symbolism of, , nn–, n Yellow Shirts (PAD), –, , n, n, n; protests, , , ,  Yingluck Shinawatra,  Yoichi Aoki,  Young Turks, , n

Acknowledgments

The path leading up to this this project started decades ago with Pradeep Bandyopadhyay at Trent University. He offered a model of academic excellence, intellectual curiosity, and scholarly ambition, which is why he encouraged me seek out Veena Das at the New School for Social Research. I cannot overstate the impact she has had on this work, nor my gratitude for her continuing efforts to provide the sorts of enhancing challenges Pradeep encouraged. I had, further, the great fortune of working with Alain Péricard at McGill University, and with Deborah Poole at Johns Hopkins University. Both have offered invaluable advice, encouragement and enduring friendship that helped me surmount the most difficult hurdles this research entailed. During critical, formative stages of this project, Sameena Mulla and Valeria Procupez were irreplaceable companions, pushing me to defend, rethink, and revisit virtually everything I wrote. While the shortfalls of this book remain my own, many of the strengths stem directly from our ongoing conversations, and all that they spurred me to reconsider. The same can be said for the anonymous reviewers of early drafts of this book. The seriousness and generosity with which they treated the manuscript was humbling and had a dramatic effect on how I reworked the content, scope, and tone of the final product. At the University of Pennsylvania Press, Peter Agree, Lily Palladino, and Gillian Dickens were so responsive and thorough in their work that it often felt like my book was their only project. I feel fortunate to have worked with them. Lisa DeBoer’s work on the Index was sensational. Throughout my studies, I have had constant, indispensable support and inspiration from Mailan Doquang, Ralph and Mary Selby, Debbie Selby, and Judy Wolever. There are many hurdles I would never have cleared without them. The political climate in Thailand has changed decisively since the moment of my fieldwork. Because it is no longer possible for me to predict the implications of naming Thai individuals I met during my research, I have chosen

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Acknowledgments

to use pseudonyms throughout, except in cases that have already received wide public attention, rendering the individuals immediately recognizable from details of the events surrounding them. With regret, I am, therefore, unable to name here the individuals whose generosity, patience, and thoughtfulness during my fieldwork made the research richer, and in some cases, possible at all. Different stages of the research and writing of this book were supported by grants from the Charlotte W. Newcombe Foundation, the Wenner-Gren Foundation, the National Science Foundation, the Johns Hopkins Institute for Global Studies, the PSC-CUNY Research Award Program, and the CUNY Faculty Fellowship Publication Program. I thank the publishers for permission to reproduce material that appeared as “Experiments with Fate: Buddhist Morality and Human Rights in Thailand,” Wording the World: Veena Das and Scenes of Inheritance, edited by Roma Chatterji (New York: Fordham University Press, ), –; “Patronage, Face, Vulnerability: Human Rights in Thailand,” International Journal of Human Rights : (): –; and “Kat Mai Ploi: Bite and Don’t Let Go—Motherhood and Pursuits of Justice in Thailand,” Citizenship Studies :– (): –.