Human Rights in Thailand. Don F. Selby
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arose in Thailand. The military, shamed and chagrined, withdrew from political life, while the progressive spirit inspiring the democracy movement had freer rein than, perhaps, ever in Thailand’s history, and further, it gained an institutional presence unseen previously. Beginning with the Democracy Development Committee, which, through public hearings chaired by Dr. Prawase Wasi, solicited input across Thai society for the drafting of a new constitution, through to the promulgation of the 1997 “People’s Constitution,” the inclusive, progressivist spirit became constitutionally entrenched (Harding and Leyland 2011, 22; Kitchana 2006, 38). Through the 1997 constitution, it also found institutional expression in independent agencies like the Constitutional Court and the National Human Rights Commission of Thailand (NHRC). “Thailand’s most democratic constitution” (Harding and Leyland 2011, 23) was also the first under which an elected prime minister, Thaksin Shinawatra, completed his term, to say nothing of standing for and winning immediate reelection. Indeed, as prime minister, Thaksin initiated policies that were clear violations of human rights—like his war on drugs that led to thousands of extra-judicial executions—the NHRC was unhesitating in publishing “a damning report of the government’s record” (McCargo and Ukrist 2005, 249). This unprecedented moment offered the unique opportunity in rights could grow, for the first time, on a national scale in Thailand.
Based on fieldwork during this singular moment, shortly after the July 2001 appointment of the first tranche of NHRC commissioners and running to 2005, several months before the coup that would oust Prime Minister Thaksin, this book occupies itself with the question of how human rights emerged in Thailand during this period. As the descriptive project it undertakes aims to show, this question is inextricably entangled with the question of why this moment was ripe for the emergence of human rights on a national and constitutional scale. That is, there were egalitarian and, in some ways, nonconformist social, political, and moral resources that had been developing for some time, a generation at least, available to human rights advocates after Bloody May. Drawing on these resources—whether Buddhist scholarship, the egalitarian student movements of the 1970s, everyday practices of face-work and observances of social stratification and rank, or the moral force of motherhood—simultaneously afforded human rights a tint of familiarity that they otherwise lacked for most Thai, while altering the resources on which they drew in novel ways (orienting Buddhism to this-worldly concerns, recuperating leftist politics, inverting power and vulnerability, finding transgressive potential in motherhood).
Human Rights as an Anthropological Object
Attending to the entanglement of human rights with other social, political, and moral forms helps, rather than hinders, thinking of human rights as an anthropological object. It clarifies the understandings, practices, and struggles around human rights that are particular to Thailand and specifies how they relate to one another in contemporary Thailand, albeit with an appreciation of their historical depth. We can see the same sort of thing in the ways that E. E. Evans-Pritchard describes political systems of the Nuer not as isolated social phenomena but as knit into Nuer kinship structures and economy (Evans-Pritchard 1940); or in Pamela Reynolds’s discussion of child labor not as separable from other aspects of Tongan sociality but as coherent only with an understanding of its relation to the specificities of gender, kinship, and economy in the Zambezi Valley (P. Reynolds 1991); or how Clifford Geertz depicts political theatricality in Bali in relation to kinship, patron-client relations, and irrigation practices (Geertz 1980). In other words, human rights become visible as an anthropological object through interconnections with other aspects of sociality in Thailand.
This does not produce a picture of human rights that matches many of the views that dominate human rights debates. It does not accommodate the sort of cultural relativism visible in the Asian Values argument (see De Bary 1998; Falk 2000; Ghai 1999; Kent 1999; Mahbubani 1999) because it finds that Thai human rights advocates articulate human rights principles as consonant with dearly held values like Buddhist ethics. This is not the rejection of human rights (as Western impositions inappropriate to Asian conditions) that one finds in the Asian Values argument. Nor does the picture align with the more widespread view that human rights are necessarily Western, liberal, and freestanding and imply societal convergence on values (sometimes conceptualized as socialization into human rights values) (see, for example, Donnelly 1982, 1989, 1999; Howard 1992; Howard and Donnelly 1986; on socialization specifically, see Risse et al. 1999, 2013; on the interplay of coincidence and coercion as spreading human rights values, see Hafner-Burton 2013; for an argument in favor of recuperating Enlightenment individualism in human rights, see Ignatieff 2001a).
Shifts dating to the early 2000s in anthropological work emphasize local renderings of global human rights and related legal mechanisms, for example, as a process of casting human rights in the vernacular (Merry 2006b, 2008) or as structuring or textualizing local disputes, violations, and subjectivities (Ross 2001, 2003a, 2003b; R. A. Wilson 2003, 2009). These anthropological views constitute an innovation in anthropology’s range of approaches to human rights and helpfully push into the foreground the active reception of global human rights discourses and instruments, disclaiming passive adoptions of a ready-made package of moral and political principles, but they still do not quite capture the way that human rights emerged in Thailand. We might think of them, loosely, as focusing on human rights as an anthropological subject: in large part, they address the structuring influence human rights have on disputes and social actors’ maneuvering with and within such structuring. In this way, human rights appear as a subject, acting on social actors, their conflicts, and the norms and practices for adjudicating conflicts or violations.
One important strand of this scholarship, the emphasis on translation or vernacularization of human rights discourse, has leapt anthropology’s disciplinary borders to become increasingly pervasive in the broader human rights scholarship. Seyla Benhabib, for example, employs vernacularization as the hinge connecting democracy and human rights, as well as allowing for resistance to elite discourses (Benhabib 2009). Christopher McCrudden situates the vernacular differently, finding dignity to perform a vernacularizing function with respect not to the content of human rights but with methods of their interpretation and adjudication (McCrudden 2008). Gerard Hauser engages with Michael Ignatieff’s work as a formulation of human rights not as a set of moral absolutes but as a discourse that offers a moral vernacular providing for “minimal agreement on the necessary conditions for a life worth living” (Hauser 2008, 460). Hauser extends this analysis to distinguish between thin and thick vernaculars of human rights, the former circulating in official public spheres, the latter deployed by victims of human rights violations and their advocates (460). One could continue to trace the path of vernacular and translated human rights into media studies and communication studies (Gregory 2010; Brooten 2013, 2015). There is, then, a widespread adoption of a language-centered, top-down understanding of human rights (even where language may include visual languages, as with Gregory), in which human rights discourses undergo translation or vernacularization.1
By comparison, in what follows, I place greater emphasis on human rights as an anthropological object in that I focus on what social actors do to and with human rights (for example, articulating them with and through Buddhism or harnessing them to the cultural authority of motherhood) and offer an ethnographic description of this work by social actors. I argue that what gave emergent human rights in Thailand their shape, force, and trajectories are the ways that advocates engage, contest, or rework (a) debates around Buddhism in its relationship to rule and social structure, (b) political struggle in relation to a narrative of Thai democracy that disavows egalitarian movements, and (c) regimes of social stratification and face-saving practices. In these ways, human rights emerge in Thailand less as global-local translation and more as a matter of negotiation within everyday forms of sociality, morality, and politics, albeit in relation to nebulous concepts and institutions (like the NHRC), with mysterious rather than transparent powers. Such (re)working is also what has allowed human rights to take on meanings as they articulate with and through other political, religious, and social discourses. I also show, however, that at moments when particular individuals—two mothers caught in land disputes with government bodies—found their claims to rights or entitlements went ignored or unheard, they explored nondiscursive ways to marshal the force of human rights, like gestural expressions of maternal dismay, perseverance, and authority. We cannot, therefore, model the emergence of human rights in Thailand solely