1,721,007 research outputs found
Southern Thailand: from conflict to negotiations?
Full text linkSummary: In this Analysis, University of Leeds professor Duncan McCargo argues that the recent Malaysian-backed Southern Thai peace initiative has now run into some serious problems. He argues that despite its various shortcomings the initiative is still worthy of support, since it has gained far more traction that any previous attempts to address the decade-long insurgency. Thailand needs to maintain focus on the southern conflict despite its current preoccupation with a national-level political crisis that threatens to topple the government of Yingluck Shinawatra.
Key findings
The conflict in Southern Thailand is one of Asia’s most serious insurgencies, with over 6,000 dead over the last 10 years.
The Malaysian government sponsored negotiations represents the best hope for reaching a political settlement and bringing peace to the region.
However, both sides need to show greater commitment to the negotiations, introducing new structures and procedures
Against Wishful Scholarship: The Importance of Engel
Full text linkDavid Engel\u27s Article on global consciousness\u27 crystallizes a set of arguments he recently made in a number of publications, most notably in his coauthored book Tort, Custom, and Karma.2 To me, the main point of his argument is by no means limited to questions of law or globalism. Rather, he argues against the dominant mode of writing among scholars across a wide range of social science and related disciplines-a mode of writing that might best be termed wishful scholarship. In wishful scholarship, the starting point of the author is the world as she or he wishes to see it, or wishes to see it become
Punitive Processes? Judging in Thai Lower Criminal Courts
No full textThis article examines how Thai courts of the first instance deal with run-of-the-mill criminal cases. How do judges deal with criminal trials of a rather routine nature, often involving defendants from ethnic minorities and reflecting the particular conditions in the provinces concerned? Drawing on participant observation and interview research conducted mainly in two provinces in different regions of the country, the article examines the challenges faced by judges and court officials in dealing with heavy caseloads in a highly bureaucratized system where acquittal rates are extremely low. How far do such cases shed light on how judging is carried out in the majority of Thai courts? What kind of challenges do Thai judges face in adjudicating minor but often messy cases in order to fulfil societal expectations in line with their own understandings of justice
The real deal: results versus outcomes of the 2023 Thai general election
No full textThailand’s 2023 election outcome did not correspond with the results: the Move Forward Party “won” the polls, but runner-up Pheu Thai ended up forming the government. How could this have happened? This article offers two explanations. First, results and outcomes have typically differed in recent Thai elections: in itself, the substitution of Pheu Thai for Move Forward was nothing unusual. Second, in 2023 an elite pact was in place to ensure that Pheu Thai and the country’s conservative elite could engage in a form of promiscuous power-sharing following the May 14 polls. The article explains the politics behind this deal-making, and argues that the creation of the Srettha Thavisin government may not have been an accidental electoral outcome, but could have formed part of a deliberate strategy by the Thai establishment.Fieldwork for this article was supported by the grant “Popular Participation and Leadership in Asian Democracies,” funded by the Research Council of Norway (Project Number: 314849)
Fighting for Virtue: Justice and Politics in Thailand
No full textFighting for Virtue investigates how Thailand's judges were tasked by the late King Bhumibol Adulyadej (Rama IX) in 2006 with helping to solve the country's intractable political problems—and what happened next. Across the last decade of Rama IX's rule, Duncan McCargo examines the world of Thai judges: how they were recruited, trained, and promoted, and how they were socialized into a conservative world view that emphasized the proximity between the judiciary and the monarchy.
McCargo delves into three pivotal freedom of expression cases that illuminate Thai legal and cultural understandings of sedition and treason, before examining the ways in which accusations of disloyalty made against controversial former prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra came to occupy a central place in the political life of a deeply polarized nation. The author navigates the highly contentious role of the Constitutional Court as a key player in overseeing and regulating Thailand's political order before concluding with reflections on the significance of the Bhumibol era of "judicialization" in Thailand. In the end, posits McCargo, under a new king, who appears far less reluctant to assert his own power and authority, the Thai courts may now assume somewhat less significance as a tool of the monarchical network
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Full text linkThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Jepun masa kini
No full textJepun merupakan sebuah negara yang amat penting di dunia tetapi tidak ramai yang betul-betul mengetahui tentang masyarakatnya.Buku ini akan memperkenalkan dengan sejelas-jelasnya semua aspek politik, ekonomi, dan kehidupan sosial di Jepun menurut konteks sejarah. Pengarang memberikan pelbagai perspektif pilihan-aliran utama, revisionis dan budayawan yang memperlihatkan Jepun sebagai sebuah negara dengan masyarakat yang unik. Pengarang turut menyamakan negara ini dengan negara demokrasi lain yang maju. Seterusnya, beliau menerangkan dengan panjang lebar tentang sejarah, ekonomi, kerajaan, politik, masyarakat dan budaya Jepun itu sendiri
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