Imagining the Polity - Protest, Law and History in Thailand - Prof. Dr. Tyrell Haberkorn - University of Hamburg
- Lecture2Go
- Catalog
- F.5 - Geisteswissenschaften
- Asien-Afrika-Institut
- Democracy and Civil Society in Southeast Asia
Catalog
979 Views
06.05.2022
Imagining the Polity - Protest, Law and History in Thailand
Beginning in July 2020, youth-led protests filled the streets of Bangkok and other cities in Thailand. Fed up with the remnants of dictatorship that lingered despite the elections in March 2019, the protestors made three demands: 1) The current prime minister, Prayuth Chan-ocha, who first came to power in the May 2014 coup, must resign and a new election held; 2) The 2017 Constitution, drafted by a junta-appointed body, must be revised; and 3) The institution of the monarchy must be reformed. The third demand is both what has made the protests potentially socially and politically transformative – and has caused the state to respond with repression. Since November 2020, hundreds of people, including many secondary school and university students, have been accused of lèse majesté, or insulting, defaming or threating the king, queen, heir-apparent or regent, a crime that carries a sentence of up to 15 years imprisonment per count. Then, in November 2021, the Constitutional Court ruled that the activists’ peaceful protests and calls for reform of the institution of the monarchy equals overthrow of rule. Through the activists’ protests and the courts’ prosecutions, they are all engaged in imagining and working to create the polity in which they wish to live. This talk examines the ideas and actions of both the activists and the state as a contest over the meaning of sovereignty, rights, and freedom in the Thai present and past.
Tyrell Haberkorn is Professor of Southeast Asian Studies at the Department of Asian Languages and Cultures at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She is also coordinator of the Justice in Southeast Asia Law and editor of the Justice in Translation series in the Center for Southeast Asian Studies at UW-Madison. She researches and writes about state violence and dissident cultural politics in Thailand from the end of the absolute monarchy in 1932 until the present. She is the author of Revolution Interrupted: Farmers, Students, Law and Violence (University of Wisconsin Press, 2011) and In Plain Sight: Impunity and Human Rights in Thailand (University of Wisconsin Press, 2018). She is currently writing a microhistory of law and injustice during the coup years un¬der the National Council for Peace and Order (NCPO), the military junta that took power in the 22 May 2014 coup, and translating Prontip Mankhong’s prison memoir, All They Could Do To Us. Tyrell also writes and translates frequently about Southeast Asia for a public audience, including Dissent, Foreign Affairs, Mekong Review, Los Angeles Review of Books, openDemocracy, and Prachatai. She has received fellowships from Fulbright, Fulbright-Hays, Association for Asian Studies, Australian Research Council, Einstein Forum, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, the Institute for Advanced Study at Central European University, the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts.
Share
This video may be embedded in other websites. You must copy the embeding code and paste it in the desired location in the HTML text of a Web page. Please always include the source and point it to lecture2go!
Technical support
Please click on the link bellow and then fill out the required fields to contact our Support Team!
RRZ Support Link