Violence on the Periphery of the Thai State and Nationhood
State violence in Thailand is one of the main targets of human rights advocacy. Activists, lawyers and scholars address both the violence as events and the deficiency in institutional processes for holding authorities accountable. Violations of rights are
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State violence in Thailand is one of the main targets of human rights advocacy. Activists, lawyers and scholars address both the violence as events and the deficiency in institutional processes for holding authorities accountable. Violations of rights are generally understood as belonging within the juridical realm, taking as point of reference a citizen or group of citizens in relation to a state or union of states. From that perspective the most violent space of the state is where non-citizens and marginalized groups are identified. These are people whose claims matter little to the state.1 Human rights organizations and reports are on agreement that Thailand repeatedly breach the rights of refugees and fail to protect them from abuse.2 Among the non-nationals on the margins of the Thai state there are more than half They are the precarious workers from Laos, Burma and Cambodia (but also lower classes of Thai citizens, notably ex-convicts) in construction and in the fishing industry; the Rohingya refugees from Burma being towed out at sea by Thai authorities or, if they manage to enter Thailand, detained under questionable conditions Indefinite detention in accordance with Immigration Act, B.E. 2522 [1979], men are held in detention centers, women and children in social community centers (UNHCR 2015). For a comprehensive report on “push back” and “help on” strategies, see The Equal Rights Trust, 2014, 3.2.; Letter to Prime Minister of Thailand from The Equal Rights Trust, 23 January 2009. 2 While being party to core international human rights treaties, including the ASEAN Human Rights Declaration, 19 November 2012, Thailand is not a signatory party to the international Refugee Convention nor to its additional protocol (1951; 1967). 1
Following the custom in Thai language, Thai scholars are referred to by their first name. This custom is also reflected in the bibliography. K. Zackari () Historiska institutionen, LUX, Lunds Universitet, Box 192, 221 00 Lund, Sweden e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden 2016 B. Koch (ed.), State Terror, State Violence, State – Sovereignty – Nation, DOI 10.1007/978-3-658-11181-6_5
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a million stateless persons residing within the Thai borders (UNHCR 2015). The state-violence Thailand performs towards these groups of people construes a clear cut between nationals and non-nationals. The Thai state is however also notorious for committing state violence against those regarded as nationals. The seeming conflation of national and citizen is not a mere lapse in juridical terminology. “Belonging” in the state is formally a judicial status, whereas belonging to the nation is first and foremost a social construct. The legal definition of a Thai national identity is not equivalent to the nationalist identity called Thainess (kwampenthai), or being Thai. The cultural social construction of the later can lend itself to legitimization of violations of the judicial status—making national belonging not a simple case of citizenship. State violence is
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