Beyond the rural betrayal: lessons from the Thaksin era for the Mekong region

When I prepared the title and the abstract for this paper in mid-September last year I had no idea that, within days, the three-time elected Thaksin government would be overthrown by a military coup. This coup was very unfortunate for democracy in Thailand but it was rather more fortunate for my paper as the coup, and the reaction to it, underlined many of the points I was planning to make about what I call “the rural betrayal.” This paper is an extension of my previous work in which I have been critical of the strategies pursued by NGOs and activist academics who seek to defend the rights of rural people in Thailand (Walker 2001, 2004). My view has been that these strategies too readily resort to simplified and romantic images of communal solidarity, subsistence orientations and other-worldly pursuits. Here I will suggest that these activist perspectives—given a recent boost by the military regime’s enthusiastic promotion of the royalist “sufficiency economy” approach—provide a poor basis for defending the economic and political rights of rural people in Thailand and elsewhere in the Mekong region. I propose that the key lesson from the Thaksin and postThaksin era is that many common approaches to rural politics, society and economy in the region need to be rethought.