Subjects of politics: Between democracy and dictatorship in Thailand

Abstract

In May of 2014, the Thai military deposed elected Prime Minister Yingluck Shinawatra. Since the coup, the chief aim of the military government has been to bring order to the country by silencing politics. In this paper, I trace the drift from democracy to dictatorship as a set of disagreements about democracy and its redistribution of political capacity. Specifically, I show how debates revolving around the political capacities of the poor reflect both the emergence of a new subject of politics and the anxieties produced by shifting arrangements of the political.1 Working from the vantage point of urban railway squatter communities in northeastern Thailand, I show how disagreements between residents, non-governmental organization activists, state development agencies and the military reflect unresolved tensions between multiple orderings of the political and the unreconciled question of who is a legitimate political actor. Residents’ engagements with development projects preceding the coup expose the ways in which their emergent claims to political capacity provoked new governmental strategies to incorporate their voices but manage their political aspirations. Military rule has once again transformed the shape of the political, narrowing the horizons of political possibility for citizens such as those living along the railway tracks. Yet, even amidst such threats, the military government remains fragile precisely because the political is always contingent, composed of heterogeneous disagreements. By making these processes legible through an ethnography of disagreement, I argue that anthropology and ethnography are fundamental for understanding the emerging forms of the political in the 21st century.

Introduction: A return to politics

“…We argue, following Candea (2011), that the answer to this question is itself an ethnographic question. As we show here, opening up the political as an ethnographic question enables an investigation into the places in which new political sites are emerging--like urban social movements (see the contributions of Holston;Elinoff, 2019) and new struggles over sovereignty (see Postero and Fabricant, 2019)--while also pointing out that the struggle to become a legitimate political actor itself hinges on the contested boundaries of the properly political. We are not talking here about an academic question of how we scholars define the political.…”

REWILDING BANGKOK: Critical Zones and the Cosmoecology of Parks and Protests

“…It is possible to connect this politics of coexistence with the old Greek sense of critique as a matter of learning to make crucial distinctions during times of crisis (Brown, 2005: 19)-when things are in a critical condition. Here, too, we are close to Simone's (2020) search for methods to piecing together a life worth living, and in the vicinity of Elinoff's (2019) reconfigured political possibilities. But rather than identifying tiny pockets of resistance with slim chances of success, our explorations of park and protests seek to empirically detect and conceptually widen ontological openings (Taguchi and de la Cadena, 2017).…”

“…Over the past decades, Thailand has had numerous prime ministers and elections, several rounds of urban protest, two constitutions and five military and ‘judicial’ coups (Elinoff, 2019: 144; see also Chachavalpongpun, 2010). The last was in 2014, when the elected government was cleared out to the tune of the power ballad ‘Restoring happiness to Thailand’, and General Prayut Chan‐o‐cha was put in charge of government (Marshall, 2015; Baker, 2016).…”

The emergence and contested growth of social enterprise in Thailand

“…The financial crisis of 1997 brought in new governance measures for business with the Thai Securities Exchange and the Stock Exchange Thailand (SET) establishing a Good Governance Subcommittee. Since 2006, Thailand has experienced significant disagreements over democracy with two coups, two constitutions, three 'judicial coups', four general elections, five cycles of both pro-and anti-democratic urban occupations, seven different prime ministers and two periods of authoritarian rule, one of which is ongoing (Elinoff, 2019). Central to this volatility and the recent turnaway from democracy are interlocking disagreements about the meaning of citizenship, the value of democracy, the rule of law and the question of sovereignty (Elinoff, 2014).…”

“…In 2012, the Stock Exchange of Thailand launched incentives for companies to shift their CSR approach towards SE (see Table 2 below). Furthermore, the public-private partnership (Pracharath) initiated by the current authoritarian government (Elinoff, 2019) launched in 2016 encourages corporations to create SEs. Thai Beverage Group CEO announced in April 2016 the establishment of Pracharath Raksamakkee, an umbrella organization to set-up SEs nationwide.…”