Abstract
Human Rights in Thailand is a timely contribution that will be widely read and appreciated by anthropologists, Thai studies scholars, and scholars of human rights. Based on fieldwork conducted between 2002 (just after the appointment of the country’s first National Human Rights Commission or NHRC) and 2005, Don Selby’s sprawling volume takes up the question of how human rights emerged in Thailand following the country’s Black May of 1992 and “what social actors do to and with human rights” in the years that follow (2018: 4).
Selby argues that “human rights become visible as an anthropological object through interconnections with other aspects of sociality in Thailand” (2018: 2). By his estimation, Thai conceptions of human rights neither conform perfectly to liberal Western understandings, nor do they offer a complete rejection of those values. Using rich ethnographic case studies to make his case, Selby shows how local understandings and practices of Buddhism, democracy, and social stratification have played hugely important roles in informing the shape, structure, and power of human rights as an emergent institution and discursive practice in Thailand.
While the work of the NHRC is an enduring focus throughout the book, each chapter offers a different window into the practice and meaning of human rights in Thailand through detailed case studies. These case studies offer rare and insightful windows into the formation of the NHRC in relation to Buddhist morality and in the context of the country’s broader history of democratic struggles; consider the activities of the Law Society of Thailand and other human rights advocates working with the NHRC on vulnerable Burmese migrants in Southern Thailand; and share with us the experience of mothers in pursuit of justice related to land that was flooded by a dam and a house that was demolished.
The author does well in handling each case with care as topics that are known to be sensitive, substantively important, and less well treated than they could and arguably should be. While the wide-ranging nature of the case studies sometimes leaves the reader feeling that the cases are only loosely connected, the researcher succeeds in his treatment of the issues and the reader is left convinced that local understandings and practices do figure into the shape and power of Thai human rights in important ways. And the overall focus on opening up the black box of the NHRC is particularly welcome.
Serious scholars of Thai politics will perhaps be most interested in what Selby has to say in “Chapter 5: The Return of Coup Politics,” which considers Thailand’s human rights institutions and discourse in relation to Thailand’s turbulent history of dictatorship and democracy from 2006 on. Selby argues that “the return to coup politics . . . has raised specific tensions around human rights but has not done away with them” (2018: 126). In this chapter, the author considers these tensions specifically in relation to the country’s controversial lèse-majesté laws, changes to constitutional provisions related to the NHRC in 2006 and 2016, and recent efforts to merge the NHRC with the Office of the Thai Ombudsman.
Here, Selby delves into some important territory and makes a number of interesting points. Very broadly, he recognizes that the autonomy of the NHRC has come “under direct threat in the proposed 2016 constitution” (2018: 132) that it has been “diminished by the 2006 coup and its subsequent rewriting of the constitution” (2018: 140) and that, as a practical matter, its work may be hampered by the fact that it now houses fewer commissioners after these changes (2018: 134, 140). However, he also argues that the fact “that the NHRC survived the 2014 interim constitution . . . and has a continued constitutional existence in the 2016 constitution suggest that, under adverse circumstances, human rights are, constitutionally, here to stay” (2018: 134). But are they? At times one wonders just how much further strain the institution may be able to bear before its raison d’être is upended completely. On this, Selby reflects on whether or not the purpose of the NHRC in its current form is to “protect Thailand’s reputation on questions of human rights,” given the recent junta’s concern with its international reputation (2018: 134–135). Critical scholars may also have wished to hear more about if and in what ways the NHRC may itself have figured into the production of these tensions in the first place. I would also have appreciated more of an update on some of the groups Selby tracks in his case studies, not to mention some broader comment on the challenges facing Thai citizens, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), and academics in this new moment.
Following an anthropological approach, an abiding strength of the book is the way in which it problematizes views of Thai human rights as simply a vernacularization of a broader global discourse. At times, however, this sociologist wondered if the author missed an opportunity to engage with (at least or set his work against) world culture theory, which has done much in sociology to demonstrate that isomorphic pressures in human rights (and other policy domains) are indeed a real force in the world. Even if such engagement might have broadened the book’s audience, the primary audiences to which the book is admittedly intended to speak are anthropologists and Thai studies scholars, so this lack of engagement is certainly forgivable.
There were however a number of scholars’ work whom I would have expected to see the author engage with more. In Chapter 2, Bamber (1997) is indeed an important reference. However, more recent contributions that bear on the issues were surprisingly absent (for example, Cohen, 2007; Harris, 2014; Munger, 2014; Nam, 2015; Ondam, 2004). Likewise, given the book’s more general focus on human rights in Thailand, I would also have expected the work of scholars like Tyrell Haberkorn, Prajak Kongkirati, and Somchai Phatharathananunth to figure much more prominently in the text than they do. This is in no way to diminish the contribution. Rather, I believe it points to the need for scholars to continue vigorously exploring these important issues in the future and to be in greater dialogue with one another to offer a more complete picture of the changes that are taking place. The book offers a useful window into some of those changes and is a sorely needed addition to the literature on human rights in Thailand.