The history of Thailand over the past two decades is one of falling from grace. A country that moved forward with strong democratic and economic foundations after recovering from the severe 1997 financial crisis has turned into a land of conflicts and chaos. Political division and personal interests have overshadowed societal progress and the common good. The two successful coups in 2006 and 2014 interrupted democratic development in the country, adding fuel to the slow-burning political fire. Far from returning Thailand to normalcy, the junta has further repressed its opposition and persecuted political dissidents. Violent actions and human rights violations have become recurring themes on the front pages of newspapers, calling to mind the long-lived, vicious practices of Thailand's dictatorships. There are no simple or quick solutions to the ongoing political turmoil in Thailand. Yet, new framings, fresh perspectives, and additional insights into the nature of the Thai state and the struggles of Thai citizens against authorities and impunity—contributed by the three books under review—have provided refreshing input from multiple angles to address a puzzling question: what is really happening in Thailand?
Tyrell Haberkorn's In Plain Sight is a long-awaited resource for academics, students, and political observers who may be interested in the repressive nature of the Thai state. Impunity, which Haberkorn refers to as “the nature and repeated failure to secure accountability for state violence” (p. 4), serves as the lens and the key constitutive component of the investigation in the book. According to Haberkorn, the rise of impunity in Thailand can be attributed to the two intertwined processes of systematic suppression of dissidents who criticize the monarchy and other key institutions in the country, and the exoneration of state officials who commit violence against the country's own citizens. In Thailand, impunity interestingly appears in plain sight; instead of the law being used to effectively convict perpetrators, it works to reinforce impunity and exempt the convicted from the extrajudicial violence they committed. As impunity has continued to persist and has become normalized throughout Thai political history, Haberkorn argues that it has inevitably become an integral part of Thai state formation as well as Thailand's defining characteristic.
At the root of impunity production lies the rendition of certain members of the polity as less human. Haberkorn develops the idea of an “injustice cascade” to illustrate the contrasting picture of state authorities who are exempted from being held accountable for state violence and human rights defenders who experience forced disappearance or persecution. The Thai state has been able to conceal its repressive actions against its own citizens by providing its support for international human rights principles and institutions—both of which aim to prevent human rights violations. The contradiction emerges and persists partially because of the fragmented nature of the state, in which different bureaucratic units within Thailand perform different governmental functions. From time to time, Thai dictators even take advantage of such contradiction to shamelessly speak the language of human rights while continuing to perpetuate human rights abuses.
In addition to the stories of impunity, Haberkorn adds nuances to her explanations by providing evidence of the contestation against it. From chapter 5 onwards, she demonstrates that the production of impunity could be contentious. Oftentimes, victims, their families, and human rights movements have struggled for justice. Chapter 6 is paramount. Here Haberkorn discusses the disappearance of Somchai Neelapaijit, a human rights defender, in a case that she argues is partially exceptional because five police officers who perpetrated violence were arrested and tried. However, the perpetrators were exonerated after the final verdict in the Supreme Court because disappearance has never been a category in the Thai criminal law and all five of them could not be charged with murder in the absence of Somchai's body. At the same time, members of the Neelapaijit family were also prevented from serving as coplaintiffs in the case. The investigation of Somchai's disappearance leads Haberkorn to derive the concept of “jurisprudence of impunity,” by which she means a jurisprudence that prevents justice in a specific case and makes it difficult for other victims to access justice. This form of jurisprudence appears to deprive the victims of justice yet helps consolidate impunity.
While the new history of Thailand with a new chronology in Haberkorn's In Plain Sight is innovative and powerful, this book could have also benefited from the traditional periodization of Thai history. A comparative analysis between the production of impunity during different dictatorial regimes and the short-lived democratic regimes, for instance, might have allowed Haberkorn to add a more nuanced depiction of the impunity landscape and to argue for its overall pattern since the Siamese Revolution in 1932. Such a comparison could also have led to the inclusion of some other notable cases involving impunity, such as the Tak Bai incident, in which no authority has ever been indicted for mass violence.
Setting minor critiques aside, Haberkorn's bold and courageous attempt to write the history of impunity in Thailand deserves a scholarly accolade. She guides readers toward understanding Thai history in a whole new way, which is often limited by access, data, and resources. Over the course of eight years, Haberkorn spent time studying archival documents; reading public records, newspaper accounts, and funeral volumes; and sitting in courtrooms for many days. Through her laborious work, she was able to validate data from different sources and reconstruct a powerful narrative for many events that may be unknown both in English- and Thai-language scholarship. In Plain Sight therefore should be of value to scholars of Thai studies and those who are interested in repressive states. In Haberkorn's own words, “the pen of the writer is no match for guns of soldiers or the keys of the jailers who guard those locked up by the authorities. What the pen, and the writer who holds it, can do so is ensure that their actions are not left unrecorded” (p. 26). With her masterful crafting of In Plain Sight, Haberkorn has already achieved what she hopes to accomplish.
If Haberkorn's In Plain Sight demonstrates how Thailand has become a land of impunity, Kanokrat Lertchoosakul's The Rise of the Octobrists in Contemporary Thailand tells us stories of the former left-wing students who once defied impunity and how they and their movement have evolved since. “Octobrists” refers to a group of students who were once involved in political activism in the 1970s and have since diverged in terms of ideas and interests. Lertchoosakul attempts to understand how the former left-wing student activists have been able to survive and maintain their relevance and influence in Thai politics despite the shrinking political space for radical and leftist movements. Her investigation covers the evolution of the Octobrists over more than three decades and involves the utilization of various research methods, including archival research, oral history, and discourse analysis. The use of oral history is particularly exciting because it allows Lertchoosakul to obtain firsthand accounts of the Octobrists’ understanding of their own life course for the powerful reconstruction of stories about their political activism as well as their political trajectories since the 1970s, which have been defined by both conflicts and cooperation.
Lertchoosakul adopts three major theories of social movements—political opportunity structures, resource mobilization, and the framing process—for her analysis. She argues that external and international political opportunity structures, such as the proliferation of democracy at the global level and declining military power, opened democratic spaces that the Octobrists could occupy and in which they could return to be politically active. Many of them eventually became engaged in parliamentary and extra-parliamentary politics. At the same time, the rise of Octobrists was also facilitated by their ability to mobilize and integrate different kinds of resources, ranging from education to political and personal networks, which enabled them to cultivate new careers and forge new political alliances. Lastly, the strategic shift in the way the Octobrists reframed themselves and rewrote their history also led them to create new identities as fighters for democracy and to normalize their radical and leftist pasts.
In addition to the exploration of the Octobrists’ return to political activism, Lertchoosakul also uses social movement theories to explain the deepening of conflict among them in the early twenty-first century. The divergence of the Octobrists into different careers and new social affiliations led each of them to develop a different set of goals and interests, which could be at odds with each other. Their differences were exacerbated by the new political environment that came with the rise of Thaksin Shinawatra and the Red-Yellow Shirt rivalries that turned many of them from friends into foes. However, the Octobrists in both camps still exploited the Octrobrists’ frames of progressiveness, democracy, and social justice in their political activism and used them to attack their former comrades. Thus, instead of being a harmonious and unified group, Lertchoosakul suggests that the Octobrists are essentially discordant and contradictory.
While The Rise of the Octobrists is accessible and thought-provoking for observers and students who are interested in Thai political development from the 1970s to the time of the color-coded conflicts, it also suffers from a few shortcomings. These mostly emerge from Lertchoosakul's heavy reliance on social movement theories. Her employment of political opportunity structure, for example, hinders her ability to highlight the roles of class or of the monarchical network in transforming Thailand's political landscape over the past few decades. The shortage of analysis of some of these factors made her discussion of political environments that have facilitated the return of the Octobrists to politics less nuanced. Towards the end of the book, Lertchoosakul suggests that the rise of the Octobrists is a success story. While their ascendency could be interpreted as a political success, she could have explained further how such success has contributed to the goals that the Octobrists may have had since the 1970s, and whether the rivalry among themselves, especially during the color-coded conflicts, affected the overall success of the group.
Despite these critiques, the significant contribution of Lertchoosakul's The Rise of the Octrobrists is its ability to bring to life the stories of the Octobrists, who have played important roles in Thai politics for over three decades. The rich details about their political activism and their engagement in the Thai political arena provide a comprehensive outlook for how the group of former left-wing students and their movement have continued to be influential in Thai politics. The use of straightforward and clear language, as well as the very clear structure, are also notable and should allow readers to navigate through the stories of the Octobrists easily.
While the previous two books under review discuss political struggle at the national level, Michael Herzfeld's Siege of the Spirits brings our attention to the micro-level fight of the Pom Mahakan community (Chao Pom) against eviction by the Bangkok Metropolitan Administration (BMA). The latter wanted to turn the area where three hundred residents lived into a stylized park, forming part of a plan to turn Bangkok's old city center into a memorial glorifying the monarchy and the Thai nation. The BMA claimed that the residents resided by the old fortress illegally and pursued legal challenges against them. Nonetheless, for over twenty years, the Chao Pom were able to fight for their existence on the land.
At first glance, the struggle of the Chao Pom may resonate with other battles against urban eviction anywhere else in the world. Nonetheless, Herzfeld quickly challenges this potentially simplistic view by suggesting that the setting and implications of the fight under investigation were far beyond the community itself, since the space served as a microcosm of the contemporary Thai nation. Several competing ideologies, such as class and the notion of polity, were at play, reflecting a sociopolitical struggle at the national level. Employing urban ethnography as a method of investigation, Herzfeld reveals that the Chao Pom were able to remain intact in their space, especially through their effective command of discursive and strategic rhetoric as the guardians of Thainess and the spirits of the past. Their removal from their land, the community argued, would go against the spirits of the shrines found throughout the community and quintessential Thainess.
Herzfeld fills each of his chapters in Siege of the Spirits with rich and detailed descriptions and explanations of how the fight of the Chao Pom unfolded from the early stages, when the BMA initiated land development and beautification, to the period when the community used the language of conservation to delay eviction. Chapters 4 to 6 should be of interest to readers who would like to delve into the everyday struggles of the community. Herzfeld discusses the myriad methods and rhetoric adopted by the Chao Pom in detail as well as the extent of their success resulting from the adoption of those tactics in light of the strike back by the BMA. However, these chapters could have been made more engaging if Herzfeld had given some space to anecdotal stories of individual residents or key figures in the community. Such information would allow readers to better understand the close connections between the Chao Pom and the spirit shrines as well as the land by the citadel where they lived.
Despite their ability to resist eviction for more than two decades, the Pom Mahakan Community was eventually demolished in mid-2018—two years after the publication of Herzfeld's Siege of the Spirits. The BMA developed the land into an empty green lawn that is dull and lifeless. The eviction of the Pom Mahakan Community followed that of other communities in Bangkok. The Chao Pom and their community may be gone, but their stories and traces of their history remain. Herzfeld's vivid ethnographic writing helps maintain and preserve the spirit and the essence of their struggle against the Thai authorities. This book is worth reading for scholars of urban planning, sociology, anthropology, and human geography alike.
