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ABSTRACT
Thailand currently suffers from high levels of political polarization; parties associated with former Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra have won every election since 2001, based partly on strong support from voters registered in the populous North and Northeast regions. Many of these voters are migrant workers who spend much of their time working in Greater Bangkok, yet remain legal residents of their home provinces. This article argues that Thailand’s political polarization could be reduced if many of these “urbanized villagers” either took up formal residence in the capital city, or were encouraged to share in the creation of new small-scale urban communities in their places of birth.
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Acknowledgements
Warm thanks to Michael Connors, Ardeth Thawnghmung, and Saowanee Alexander for their excellent comments on an earlier draft of this article, which also formed for the basis for my keynote address to the International Conference on Thai Studies, Chiang Mai, July 15–18, 2017.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes on contributor
Duncan McCargo is professor of political science at the University of Leeds and visiting professor of political science at Columbia University. His books include the award-winning Tearing Apart the Land: Islam and Legitimacy in Southern Thailand (Cornell 2008).
Notes
1 This is a composite encounter; I have had similar conversations on numerous visits to Bangkok over the past twenty years.
2 For an English version, see Anek Citation1996, 201–223.
3 A classic text is Sombat Citation1993; see also Callahan and McCargo Citation1996.
4 See McCargo Citation2002.
5 See McCargo, Saowanee, and Desatova Citation2017.
6 On the redshirt village movement, see Khajornsak Citation2017.
7 For a detailed discussion, see Montesano, Pavin, and Aekapol Citation2012.
8 For a variation on this argument, see Apichat et al. Citation2010.
9 Author’s fieldnotes, Kandal and Prey Veng Provinces, July 27–28, 2013.
10 According to the National Statistical Office, in 2013, eighty-four percent of all internal migrants were five year migrants from the Northeast. Cited in Piyawat Citation2015, 3.
11 See Naruemon and McCargo Citation2011.
12 The Abhisit Vejjajiva government was a Democrat-led coalition administration that assumed power in December 2008, without benefit of an election, as a result of a back-room political deal. It ended when the Democrats lost the July 2011 general election.
13 See Prawase Citation2010.
14 Informal discussion by Naruemon Thabchumpon with Ammar Siamwalla and Porpan Ouiyanont, Bangkok, June 28, 2010.
15 The definitive account of the politics of skin-whitening creams in Thailand and other Asian countries has yet to be written. See Iverson Citation2016.
16 To confuse matters, much of the literature in English refers to SAOs as TAOs, or “Tambon Administrative Organizations.”
17 Prachatai Citation2011.
18 See London Citation1977.
19 See Wallace Citation2016.
20 Wallace Citation2014, 50.
21 Wallace Citation2014, 67.
22 The city had a registered population of 5.6 million in 2011.
23 In 2015 the International Organization for Migration estimated there were at least up to four million foreign migrants in Thailand, most of them migrant workers. This figure might well be too low. See https://www.iom.int/news/thailand-migration-report-highlights-social-economic-challenges-migration.
24 See World Bank Group Citation2010.
27 For a discussion of these trends, see Briggs Citation1963, especially Chapter IV.
28 See World Bank Employment in Agriculture Dataset Citation2017, http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SL.AGR.EMPL.ZS. Lower levels of Malaysian self-identification as farmers are also linked to different landholding patterns and the prevalence of large plantations.
29 McCargo and Krisadawan Citation2004; Saowanee and McCargo Citation2014.
30 Piyawat Citation2015, 70.
31 Mulubrhan et al. Citation2012, 10–11. Migrants in this study came from the three Northeastern provinces of Buriram, Nakhon Phanom and Ubon Ratchathani.