New Mandala

A conference on “Sufficiency Economy, Participatory Development, and Universities” will be held in Bangkok on 15 - 16 December 2007.  According to the conference blurb:
Outside academia, it is interesting to observe the resurgence of alternative thinking and practice–an attempt by people at the grassroots level to search for solutions to problems produced by imbalanced development–with the [...]

[Read more →]

A big proportion of New Mandala’s readers and contributors have a serious interest in Thai politics.  Unsurprisingly, many of those people are based in Thailand. �
To my mind, they are perfectly placed to take advantage of Deputy Prime Minister Sonthi Boonyaratglin’s generous offer to those who inform on vote buyers: “Pending the issuing of new regulations, informants [...]

[Read more →]

The Australian government has beefed up financial restrictions on those they classify as “Burmese regime figures and their supporters”.�
The full list of 418 individuals is available here.  It includes 13 members of Than Shwe’s family.  It also covers the families of every member of the State Peace and Development Council, Regional Commanders, Deputy Regional Commanders, Ministers, Deputy Ministers, [...]

[Read more →]

The bilateral trade agreement between Thailand and China came into force on 1 October 2003. As has been pointed out, ((Bangkok Pundit provides an informative discussion of Thailand’s trade agreements. Pundit’s research provided me with a lot of pointers for this post!)) calling it a “free trade” agreement is something of a misnomer as it only applied to [...]

[Read more →]

Critics can be pessimistic about Thailand’s political future. But shouldn’t they take comfort from all the signs that Thai politics is returning to “normal” again? After all, since when did we not have vote-buying, political horse-trading and betrayal? They have all been part and parcel of Thai politics.So at end the day, there shouldn’t be [...]

[Read more →]

Yesterday I attended the Medhi Krongkaew’s seminar on Corruption and Current Political Developments in Thailand. ((As usual, this summary is based on my notes and memory. If anyone else who was at the seminar wants to add material or challenge my interpretation please submit your comments.)) Medhi, who was sporting the compulsory yellow tie, spoke about his [...]

[Read more →]

[Kyi May Kaung (Ph.D.) focuses on the pathologies of command systems.  She has worked in international radio, with activist organizations and as a senior researcher affiliated with the Burmese democratic government in exile.  She now works as a consultant on Burma.]
In the last seven weeks, Burma (now called officially Myanmar) has been in the throes [...]

[Read more →]

�
Last week I wrote about the adoption of contract farming by farmers in northern Thailand. In the village where I have been working since late 2002 one of the reasons for this adoption is the decline in garlic cultivation. Problems faced by garlic farmers are complex and they include environmental, agronomic, economic and political factors. [...]

[Read more →]

Ideology, intolerance and outright ignorance often lead commentators to attribute electoral behaviour to vote buying. Having little experience of grass-roots political behaviour, elite commentators often like to paint simplified pictures of an electorate that is readily mobilised by the power of money. So, I was pleased to see this photo and the accompanying caption on The Nation’s website [...]

[Read more →]

This post updates my previous effort to bring together some of the statements that have been made by academics on the uprising in Burma.  Over the past week, there have been some substantial opinion pieces and a number of articles that New Mandala readers may want to keep track of.  As a start, here are some extracts: 

By the late ’50s, [...]

[Read more →]