1.

Record Nr.

UNINA9910963036003321

Autore

Haberkorn Tyrell

Titolo

Revolution interrupted : farmers, students, law, and violence in northern Thailand / / Tyrell Haberkorn

Pubbl/distr/stampa

Madison, Wis., : University of Wisconsin Press, c2011

ISBN

9786613134417

9781283134415

1283134411

9780299281830

0299281833

Descrizione fisica

1 online resource (254 p.)

Collana

New perspectives in Southeast Asian studies

Disciplina

959.3

Soggetti

Political violence - Thailand, Northern

Tenant farmers - Political activity - Thailand, Northern

Thailand Politics and government 1945-1988

Thailand, Northern Politics and government

Lingua di pubblicazione

Inglese

Formato

Materiale a stampa

Livello bibliografico

Monografia

Note generali

Description based upon print version of record.

Nota di bibliografia

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Nota di contenuto

""Contents""; ""Foreword""; ""Preface""; ""Note on Language, Translation, and Dates""; ""List of Abbreviations""; ""Map of Chiang Mai and Thailand""; ""Introduction: When Revolution Is Interrupted""; ""1. Breaking the Backbone of the Nation""; ""2. From the Rice Fields to the Cities""; ""3. From the Classrooms to the Rice Fields""; ""4. Violence and Its Denials""; ""5. A State in Disarray""; ""Conclusion: Resuming Revolution?""; ""Appendix: Leaders of the FFT Victimized by Violence, 1974-1979""; ""Notes""; ""Bibliography""; ""Index""

Sommario/riassunto

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.