Suchergebnisse

Intro -- Contents -- Preface -- List of Abbreviations -- Note on Language, Translation, and Dates -- Introduction: Impunity as State Formation -- 1. The Repetition of Arbitrary Detention -- 2. The Birth of Human Rights and the Rise of Authoritarianism -- 3. The Burning of People and Villages -- 4. The Hidden Transcript of Amnesty -- 5. Accounting for Human Rights at the End of the Cold War -- 6. Disappearance and the Jurisprudence of Impunity -- 7. Who Can Be Killed with Impunity and Who Cannot Be Impugned? -- Conclusion: History in a Time of Dictatorship -- Appendix: A New, Partial Chronology of Thai History -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Index.

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

A decade on from the country's last coup, aggressive use of a law shielding the monarchy from criticism has blocked a real return to democracy.

Since the end of the absolute monarchy in Thailand on June 24, 1932, the rulers and the ruled have been locked into struggle, often violent, over what form the polity and the people's participation in it should take. This essay examines this struggle, the imagination of justice, and the inability to consolidate democracy, or even a stable government, through the lens of the monarchy, which has remained beyond accountability. Violence committed to preserve the monarchy forecloses democracy and fosters a form of what can be called modern absolutist monarchy, when some lives are visibly placed beyond the law's protection from violence and others are made dispensable by being made subject to repressive enforcement of the law. The emergence in 2020 of a daring challenge to the position of the monarchy beyond the law refracts both the dangers it poses to democracy and the urgency of imagining a new Thai polity.

Since the May 2014 coup, the junta has leaned on the law to impose the worst repression in Thailand since the 1970s. Opposition activists are fighting back in the courts.

There were two, not one, amnesty laws passed in relation to the 6 October 1976 massacre at Thammasat University and coup in Thailand. The first amnesty law, passed on 24 December 1976, legalized the coup and prevented those who created the conditions for the coup and seized power on the evening of 6 October from being held to account. The second amnesty law, passed on 16 September 1978, freed eighteen student activists still undergoing criminal prosecution and dismissed the charges against them. Although neither amnesty mentioned the massacre, the urgency of producing and then safeguarding impunity for the state and para-state actors behind the violence at Thammasat was the absent presence in both laws. Combining a close reading of both laws with examination of archival documents about the drafting of the first amnesty law and court and other records related to the second, this article uncovers the hidden transcripts of both amnesty laws as a point of departure for examining questions about impunity, law, and history. First, what are the legal mechanics through which violent actors escape accountability? Second, what are the legal and political functions of amnesty when no crime has been committed? Third and finally, might accountability for past violence be possible, and if so, under what conditions? The answers to these questions illuminate how impunity was produced in the specific case of the 6 October 1976 massacre in Thailand as well as address broader concerns about impunity's role in state formation. (Crit Asian Stud/GIGA)

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.

There were two, not one, amnesty laws passed in relation to the 6 October 1976 massacre at Thammasat University and coup in Thailand. The first amnesty law, passed on 24 December 1976, legalized the coup and prevented those who created the conditions for the coup and seized power on the evening of 6 October from being held to account. The second amnesty law, passed on 16 September 1978, freed eighteen student activists still undergoing criminal prosecution and dismissed the charges against them. Although neither amnesty mentioned the massacre, the urgency of producing and then safeguarding impunity for the state and para-state actors behind the violence at Thammasat was the absent presence in both laws. Combining a close reading of both laws with examination of archival documents about the drafting of the first amnesty law and court and other records related to the second, this article uncovers the hidden transcripts of both amnesty laws as a point of departure for examining questions about impunity, law, and history. First, what are the legal mechanics through which violent actors escape accountability? Second, what are the legal and political functions of amnesty when no crime has been committed? Third and finally, might accountability for past violence be possible, and if so, under what conditions? The answers to these questions illuminate how impunity was produced in the specific case of the 6 October 1976 massacre in Thailand as well as address broader concerns about impunity's role in state formation. ; The research for this essay was supported under the Australian Research Council's Discovery Early Career Researcher Award funding scheme [project number DE120101838].

There were two, not one, amnesty laws passed in relation to the 6 October 1976 massacre at Thammasat University and coup in Thailand. The first amnesty law, passed on 24 December 1976, legalized the coup and prevented those who created the conditions for the coup and seized power on the evening of 6 October from being held to account. The second amnesty law, passed on 16 September 1978, freed eighteen student activists still undergoing criminal prosecution and dismissed the charges against them. Although neither amnesty mentioned the massacre, the urgency of producing and then safeguarding impunity for the state and para-state actors behind the violence at Thammasat was the absent presence in both laws. Combining a close reading of both laws with examination of archival documents about the drafting of the first amnesty law and court and other records related to the second, this article uncovers the hidden transcripts of both amnesty laws as a point of departure for examining questions about impunity, law, and history. First, what are the legal mechanics through which violent actors escape accountability? Second, what are the legal and political functions of amnesty when no crime has been committed? Third and finally, might accountability for past violence be possible, and if so, under what conditions? The answers to these questions illuminate how impunity was produced in the specific case of the 6 October 1976 massacre in Thailand as well as address broader concerns about impunity's role in state formation. ; The research for this essay was supported under the Australian Research Council's Discovery Early Career Researcher Award funding scheme [project number DE120101838].