Department of Political and Social Change

This article examines the struggle for land tenancy reform and the assassination of Farmers' Federation of Thailand (FFT) leaders in northern Thailand during the period of democratic politics between 14 October 1973 and 6 October 1976 as unresolved, ambiguous, and linked events in the recent Thai past. During the 1973-1976 period, farmers became new political and legal subjects as they fought to pass and then implement the 1974 Land Rent Control Act. Drawing on provincial archival records, the author contextualizes how and why tenancy became a contentious issue between farmers and landlords beginning in the 1950s and then examines the anxious and violent backlash with which their organizing in the 1970s was met by state, para-state, right-wing, and landholding elites. The author interrogates the conditions and effects of the assassinations by writing about the life and death of one of the leaders of the FFT, Intha Sribunruang. The denials by a range of state officials of the political nature of Intha and other FFT leaders' murders underscore both the importance of the FFT's work and the necessity to critically evaluate the assassinations. The author concludes by arguing that the lack of resolution surrounding the struggle for tenancy reform and the assassinations of FFT leaders continues to resonate in present-day politics. An Appendix to the article offers the first English-language list of the FFT leaders known to have been killed or victimized by violence between 1974 and 1979.

"Born into a wealthy Bangkok family in 1917, Ajarn Angun Malik was one of the first professors in the Faculty of Humanities when Chiang Mai University (CMU) opened in 1964. Ajarn Angun’s house and garden in Chiang Mai, Suan Anya, or Anya Garden, was mentioned as the site of many activist organizing meetings, communal living, as well as a place of shelter for student and farmer activists fleeing state and para-state forces after the 6 October 1976 massacre and coup. After the massacre, she chose not to flee to the jungle to join the CPT because she viewed her actions as being in the service of justice; some state officials perceived differently and she was arrested and detained as “a danger to society” for ninety days at the Karunyathep Center in Chiang Mai. Ajarn Angun’s significant material generosity supported and facilitated many different social justice projects, during here time in Chiang Mai as well as after she retired from civil service and returned to Bangkok.

Between December 2003 and August 2005, I collected seven cremation and commemoration volumes about Ajarn Angun’s life. Her name came up in every interview about progressive activist in the 1970s that I conducted with former student and farmer activists, professors, CMU staff, and others. Most striking were the accounts of the intangible roles Ajarn Angun played in her students’ and colleagues’ lives. Many people sited her life as the example that either propelled them towards activism, or helped sustain their commitment to justice.

Yet, despite her clear and multifaceted role, she is not mentioned in any of the histories about political activism or movements in the 1970s outside of the books published in her honor. While part of the explanation to why Ajarn Angun is absent is the sheer recognition that this period has yet to be fully treated academically, thornier issues complicate her inclusion. The more I learned about her life, the more important to political history, or the history of how people struggle to contest the ruling order, and how the ruling order responds, she seemed. Her material support of activist groups was critical to their work, her maverick teaching and classroom dress stood in opposition to the entrenched order, and her personal example facilitated and enlivened the farmer and student movements in Chiang Mai in the mid-1970s. In this article I argue that the very definition, and gendering, of politics is at stake here. While tracing the ambivalent place of Ajarn Angun in recent Thai history, I develop a new conception of politics capable of accounting for the multiple sites and varied ways that individuals change their lives and join with others to change society."

Phelan's work on the Philippines thus remains, since its first publication in 1959, a reference work to understand the early Spanish conquest and colonisation of the archipelago. His book has been and still is one that every scholar of the Philippines needs to read in order to gain a first understanding of the Spanish colonisation of the islands. This work provides the most thorough analysis of the religious and administrative mechanisms, which, in tension with native socio-political and economic agency that combined resistance and adaptation, transformed the inhabitants of a part of the archipelago from a diversity of Malay cultures into Filipinos. But it also remains up-todate because Phelan's analytical approach was always at the service of some higher understanding about the social and political interactions of human beings from different cultures. And such an approach is still, oddly enough, both refreshing and rare.

Regarding political conflict in Thailand, many years ago I proposed that the political system (relations of power) is unable to adapt and broaden itself to accept the expansion of a new group of people who I referred to as the lower middle-class. This group of people is vast and needs a space to politically negotiate within the system, because their lives, their worldviews, and their interests have changed.

This research note outlines a series of questions about conducting research on state  violence and human rights in Thailand. Taking as a central problem the recurrence  of state violence across regimes both dictatorial and democratic in the 80 years since the end of the absolute monarchy, I argue that the failure to secure accountability  for state violence can productively be placed at the center of researching and writing  about modern Thai history. Unevenness is common both to the attempts to secure  state accountability for state violence and to the available archival and other sources  for writing histories of such violence. This research note examines the particular  methodological and analytical difficulties and productive possibilities presented by  the partial attempts and failures to secure state accountability and the equally partial  available documentation of state violence.

On 5 April 1951, Ethel Rosenberg was sentenced to death for allegedly conspiring to commit espionage and sell U.S. atomic information to the Soviet Union. On 28 August 2009, Daranee Charnchoengsilpakul was sentenced to eighteen years in prison for allegedly insulting the royal family of Thailand. By bringing the suffering and courageous actions of these two women into conversation across time and space, the nature of national crisis and the impossibility of loyal dissent in the Cold War United States and late reign Rama IX Thailand are refracted and made acutely visible. Taking the disjuncture between the severity of the charges and the paucity of the evidence presented as a point of departure, this article interrogates the legal instruments under which Ethel Rosenberg and Daranee Charnchoengsilpakul were charged, namely the U.S. Espionage Act of 1917 and Article 112 of the Thai Criminal Code, the logic of the courts which convicted them, and the public discourse surrounding both trials. Developing sedition as a lens of comparison and a strategy of analysis, their actions are examined as transgressive in three intersecting and overlapping registers: law, dissent in excess of the law, and gender performance. A fourth register of sedition – scholarly work that aims to be seditious – offers the possibility of challenging the strictures of crisis in which dehumanizing and disproportionate punishment, such as that experienced by Ethel Rosenberg and Daranee Charnchoengsilpakul, becomes possible.