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Project summary
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This doctoral project examines how NGOs working for human rights practice and embody human rights, contest and accommodate the state, and relate to donors and target groups. I undertook ethnographic fieldwork for one year in Thailand, and focused my research on Forum-Asia, a prominent regional human rights NGO in Bangkok.
In examining the social and political processes in Forum-Asia, I focus on how political space ebbs and flows through its practices. I contend that political space is constituted through practice, that is, engagement between actors within and across multiple sites. I explore how discourses and practices shape the ebb and flow of political space. Such discourses include democracy, participation, good governance and global governance, whereas practices comprise human rights advocacy, transnational campaigns and professionalising NGOs. These processes impact not only how NGOs operate and the activities they focus on, but also how political space is constituted.
The construction of political space within a linear fashion distorts how political space is constituted through practice. That is political space does not just ebb and flow over time, but rather is context specific, and is determined by the actors contesting power, the issues and discourses involved and in which sites this takes place. To investigate the political spaces Forum-Asia constitutes I conceptualise it as a site intersecting multiple spaces and levels. By doing so I treat critically the idea of political space and the dominant spatial-scalar model used to construct polities. I examine how Forum-Asia's practices interconnect the local and global, and in doing so, reify and bypass the nation-state in different ways, as well as altering the hierarchical configuration of local/global spaces. This questions the bounding and bordering, and nested hierarchies of political spaces, as naturalised by the doctrine of sovereignty, and its geographic signifier territoriality. Instead such processes reveal practices that intersect unevenly, and at different times, multiple sites.
My research has enabled me to enter important debates concerning tensions and relations between the state and civil society, how political space is constituted through practices, how opposition is being defined and contested, the role of NGOs in promoting human rights, and the influence of global discourses, such as good governance on NGO practices.
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