New Mandala

Amnat phunthi lae attalak thang chatphan: kanmuang watthanatham khong rat chat nai sangkhom thai 2 (Power, space and ethnic identity: cultural politics  of the nation state in Thai society) (2008) by Yot Santasombat et al (ISBN: 9789740541387). Published by the Princess Sirinthorn Anthropology Center, this 339 page volume is the result of field work by a new generation of [...]

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The conviction and sentencing of Thailand’s former Deputy Interior Minister, Vatana Asavahame, on corruption charges bought back some fond memories for me.
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Visiting Chiang Saen in 1994 I was struck by the sight of this tour boat on the banks of the Mekong River. A little bit of research uncovered that it was owned by a company called MP Tour [...]

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If you want to get yourself into the nationalist mood while on your way to a PAD rally, here is some current reading from the PAD reading list. Technical constraints prevent me from scanning it all, but the Preface and the “list of Thai territories lost to France” should be enough to get you hot [...]

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For those of you interested in the sometimes arcane debates that occasionally break out on New Mandala on the relationship between forests and catchment hydrology, here is an interesting article. It examines the relationship between land cover, soil moisture and run-off in the Mekong basin. The results are based on a “macro-scale hydrologic model.” I won’t go into [...]

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A chinese boat unloading apples in Chiang Saen in 1994

Timothy Hamlin of the Stimson Center has written this update on commercial navigation on the upper-Mekong.  It seems that the environmentally dubious project of blasting the Mekong rapids between southern China and northern Thailand is now all but complete, making the way for a greater influx [...]

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In envisioning an integrated Greater Mekong Sub-region (GMS), the governments of the six riparian countries and the Asian Development Bank (ADB) regard the “connecting of nations” as contributing to the “linking of people” and vice-versa.Strategy papers and other programme documents reiterate that the goals of regionalisation are not only to enhance “connectivity” and “competitiveness” of [...]

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Courtesy of Des Ball at the ANU here is the Burmese crossed-loop HF/VHF DF system located about 500 metres up the Mekong from Ban Sop Ruak (the so-called “golden triangle”). It is presumably for tracking the radio communications of vessels moving up and down the Mekong, but can be used for locating any HF or VHF transmissions in northwestern [...]

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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 [...]

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Late last month I attended the conference on A Greater Mekong: Poverty, Integration and Development at the University of Sydney. The conference was organised by the Australian Mekong Resource Centre and AusAID and hosted a range of bureucratic, academic and activist presentations on the state of Mekong region development (a list of papers is available [...]

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[Johpa Deumlaokeng is the nom de plume of a long-time Southeast Asia resident and commentator]
This roving correspondent attended the University of Washington’s (UW) 20th Anniversary celebration of their Southeast Asian Center with a series of seminars honoring noted anthropologist Prof. Charles “Biff” Keyes.  Prof. Keyes is a Cornell grad (as are most American Southeast Asian specialists of his [...]

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