Unmaking civil society: activist schisms and autonomous politics in Thailand.

AuthorElinoff, Eli

One of the most surprising aspects of Thailand's recent political upheaval has been the fact that its turn away from democracy has drawn such strong support from the non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and activists who, little more than a decade ago, were regarded as the nation's democratic vanguard. (1) During the 1990s, Thai civil society activists were highly visible political actors, organizing coalitions with poor communities, advocating to expand political and social rights, articulating challenges to ongoing development projects and transforming the constitution through their involvement with the 1997 draft of that document. In 2006 when many of these same activists supported the military coup that ousted Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra, it was surprising to say the least.

Key NGO activists not only supported that coup, but also the People's Alliance for Democracy (PAD) movements that followed it. They spoke out against the Red Shirt demonstrations in 2010 and continued their support for curtailing electoral democracy through their involvement with People's Democratic Reform Committee (PDRC) in 2013. Their varied and ambiguous responses to the most recent military coup in May 2014 highlight the depth and complexity of the nation's ongoing political transformations. (2) Yet at the same time, many of these same activists have continued their work organizing the poor across shifting political regimes. The question is not simply how Thailand's civil society activists (pracha sangkhom] come to align with forces working against democracy, but rather how we might reframe our understanding of these realignments to better understand the complex social realities animating contemporary Thai politics. (3)

This article addresses this question in two different but related ways. In the first portion of the article, I re-examine the arguments that proposed civil society would consolidate Thai democracy. I argue that such scholarship was frequently both analytical and normative. While analytical frames sometimes offered complicated perspectives on democratization, noting its non-linear progression for example, normative aspects of these studies often flattened that complexity by downplaying the shifting and contested relations between activists, government officials and their constituencies. In doing so, this body of scholarship ended up narrowing democratization to a specific set of proper agents of civil society, thereby narrowing the terrain of politics more generally. In the process, these analyses created a large residual category by eliminating those actors not already contained within the confines of Pracha Sangkhom. By removing the residual from the realm of proper politics, this literature made democratic transition seem more certain. However, it also had the effect of perpetuating the restriction of those voices from entering politics and shaping the new political landscape in unforeseen ways.

The second portion of the article demonstrates precisely the effect of these unexpected voices. To do so, I ethnographically explore the residual spaces of the civil society narrative. Specifically, I describe how democratization shifted the relationships between Thai NGO activists, new state agencies and their reconfigured constituencies by opening up the possibility for new kinds of dissident voices to enter into politics in ways that previous narratives of civil society could not accommodate. This analysis draws on my ongoing research (since 2007) on struggles over citizenship and development in squatter settlements located in the Northeastern Thai capital city of Khon Kaen. (4) That broader research explores how residents of settlements built on land owned by the State Railway of Thailand (SRT) have been engaged with a variety of state and non-state actors in their efforts to gain access to development funds, to secure rights to their land, to make the city sustainable, and to demonstrate the legitimacy of their claims to citizenship. Here, I focus on the shifting relations between the poor, activists and the state to show how democracy itself was a contested ideal. In fact, the disagreements emerging from the residual spaces of Thai civil society were precisely where some of the clearest expressions of the debates over the future of the polity were taking place. I argue that these disagreements are not simply over formal aspects of democracy as a mode of governance. Rather, these conflicts (and the voices articulating them) are indicative of ongoing contestations surrounding deeper questions of who is a legitimate political subject, how such subjects might be allowed to participate, and what the broader meaning of democracy might be.

Governmentality and Politics

Following Jacques Ranciere, I argue that politics is the act of disrupting the "distribution" of roles and bodies within society. Politics stands in contrast with what Ranciere calls "policing" or efforts to maintain the current distribution of bodies (which I examine here using the framework of governmentality). Politics occurs through disagreements and is how those not deemed "speaking beings"--those whose voices cannot be heard as legitimate speech, but only noise--reconfigure this distribution. (5) In the act of disagreeing, these voices struggle to gain grounding as both audible and intelligible speech. Benjamin Arditi argues that in democracy such emergent, disruptive speech often occurs from "internal peripheries", interrupting "closure as a gentrified or domesticated political order". (6) Thus, in order to understand the emergence of such new distributions, it is necessary to understand the terms upon which new disagreements take place and the practices that seek to foreclose them. This conceptualization of political change does not necessarily take the mold of those proposed by pre-existing social projects. Politics, in this sense, is transformative. The turn against democracy among activists in Thailand reveals more than simply dissatisfaction over a coopted civil society. Rather, it speaks to these fundamental disagreements, which highlight the shifting terrain of politics itself. It also demonstrates the emergence of new political subjects whose demands suggest that what is occurring in Thailand is a broad transformation with uncertain implications for future social formations.

Below, I show how a specific, but contested, notion of civil society became central to the forms of "good governance" that were institutionalized under Thaksin. These projects incorporated a range of NGOs and their methodologies into state institutions under that seemingly singular, but actually quite diverse, category. (7) This incorporation took place alongside a shift in the political economy of NGO work that routed activist funding through the state, splintering grassroots networks by altering the relationships between groups within them. By diminishing the strength of older activist networks and providing alternative state-centred social support schemes, Thaksin's policies weakened the influence of NGOs in spaces where they were accustomed to working. However, beyond arguing that the state co-opted the NGO agenda, I show how even amidst these changes, both activists and new state agencies such as the Community Organizations Development Institute (CODI) continued to collaborate in a tense, but shared project of "governmentality" that sought to manage the political claims of poor citizens by administering their organization and regulating their conduct in specific ways. (8)

By bringing the Foucauldian language of governmentality into conversation with questions of emergent politics, my intentions are to emphasize the ways in which the asymmetries of power that persisted during the periods following democratization created the grounds for new emerging claims to politics. Thus, to understand the divergence between NGOs and the poor citizens who turned to the Red Shirts to express their political demands, it requires a closer consideration of the sort of power relations animating those coalitions. As Ferguson and Gupta have pointed out, governmentality often diffuses power reshaping both vertical and horizontal modalities of power. (9) By exploring the shifting relations between these related modes of power, it is possible to discern how disagreements over government articulate with emerging claims to the political order.

As I describe below, Thailand's housing movements have had complex effects vis-a-vis democracy. On the one hand, they enabled many poor citizens to negotiate with the state authorities, which cultivated a new sense of political legitimacy among participants. Such a project included the cultivation of new skills and dispositions that enabled residents to better understand the uneven relations between themselves and the development experts and activists with whom they collaborated and frequently learned from. On the other hand, these networks of power became self-justifying, reaffirming developmental narratives of citizenship and bolstering paternalistic attitudes within the development community to continue the practice of intervening on behalf of these citizens whom they see as perpetually unable to speak on their own. The results of this process have been deepening schisms between activist NGOs and development experts and the groups they seek to help over the emergence of demands for new forms of democracy that substantively includes the poor as legitimate political actors.

In Thailand, disagreements between poor citizens and the various state and non-state agents that govern them reveal how NGO activists continue to move towards visions of social justice that seek to empower the poor, but nevertheless enlist them as subordinate trainees. Thus, such projects extend a longstanding historical sense of the poor as not yet properly political. These projects remain important in poor communities seeking to become legitimate because they...

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