Most studies of Southeast Asian economic change focus on the phenomenal growth experienced by a few large cities, such as Jakarta, Bangkok, Hong Kong, Kuala Lumpur, and Singapore. Big business has been viewed as the economic engine fueling the region's growth and prosperity. Studies of the rural areas have concerned themselves with the social and environmental impact of metropolitan growth--villages emptied by migration to the big cities, cultures crushed by tourist development, and agribusiness and lush landscapes destroyed by the devastation of natural resources. The literature reveals that few analysts have examined the middle distance between metropolis and countryside. The contributors to this book have addressed the issue by concentrating on the intermediate level of economic, political, and social life--the world of Thailand's provincial cities and market towns. In the past decade the rise of frequently violent competition for business and political leadership in the Thai provinces, and the growing importance of provincial support for national powerholders, has drawn attention to the way in which these town and village centers are being transformed by capitalist development. This volume brings together some of the research inspired by this, drawing on a variety of disciplinary approaches, national backgrounds, and sites of study. Contributors: Daniel Arghiros, Chris Baker, Sombat Chantornvong, Kevin Hewison, Jim LoGerfo, Ruth McVey, Michael J. Montesano, James Ockey, Pasuk Phongpaichit, Maniemai Thongyou, Yoko Ueda.

During the 1990s, the Thai provinces saw the rise of a frequently violent competition for business and political leadership. This examination of economic change focuses on this middle ground between metropolis and countryside, an arena being transformed by capitalist development.

The powerful Thai politician Banharn Silpa-archa has been disparaged as a corrupt operator who for years channeled excessive state funds into developing his own rural province. This book reinterprets Banharm's career and offers a detailed portrait of the voters who support him. Relying on extensive interviews, the author shows how Banharm's constituents have developed a strong provincial identity based on their pride in his advancement of their province, Suphanburi, which many now call "Banharm-buri," the place of Banharm. Yoshinori Nishizaki's analysis challenges simplistic perceptions of rural Thai voters and raises vital questions about contemporary democracy in Thailand. Yoshinori Nishizaki's close and thorough examination of the numerous public construction projects sponsored and even personally funded by Banharn clearly illustrates this politician’s canny abilities and tireless, meticulous oversight of his domain. Banharn’s constituents are aware that Suphanburi was long considered a "backward" province by other Thais—notably the Bangkok elite. Suphanburians hold the neglectful central government responsible for their province’s former sorry condition and humiliating reputation. Banharn has successfully identified himself as the antithesis to the inefficient central state by promoting rapid "development" and advertising his own role in that development through well-publicized donations, public ceremonies, and visits to the sites of new buildings and highways. Much standard literature on rural politics and society in Thailand and other democratizing countries in Southeast Asia would categorize this politician as a typical "strongman," the boss of a semiviolent patronage network that squeezes votes out of the people. That standard analysis would utterly fail to recognize and understand the grassroots realities of Suphanburi that Nishizaki has captured in his study. This compassionate, well-grounded analysis challenges simplistic perceptions of rural Thai voters and raises vital questions about contemporary democracy in Thailand.

Why have Taiwan, rich parts of China, and Thailand boomed famously, while the Philippines has long remained stagnant both economically and politically? Do booms abet democracy? Does the rise of middle “classes” promise future liberalization? Why has Philippine democracy brought no boom and barely served the Filipino people?This book, unlike most previous studies, shows that both the roots and results of growth are largely political rather than economic. Specifically, it pays attention to local, not just national, power networks that caused or prevented growth in the four places under consideration. Violence has been common in these polities, along with money. Elections have contributed to socio-political problems that are also obvious in Leninist or junta regimes, because elections are surprisingly easy to buy with corrupt money from government contracts. Liberals should pay more serious theoretical attention to the effects of money on justice, and Western political science should focus more clearly on the ways non-state local power affects elections. By considering the effects on fair justice of local money and power (largely from small- and medium-sized firms that emerge after agrarian reforms), this book asks democrats to face squarely the extent to which electoral procedures fail to help ordinary citizens. Students and scholars of Asia will all need this book — as will students of the West whose methods have become parochial.

'The book offers a broad survey of political parties’ financing strategies in Southeast Asia.'Contemporary Southeast AsiaPolitical activities, the running of party organisations, branches and headquarters, and especially election campaigns, are becoming increasingly costly, and no party can survive without money. Political power provides access to funding from public and private sources. Political parties have become more and more like businesses, including the temptation to maximise the income and the war chests, thus opening the doors for vested interests and influence peddling. As a result, money politics is pervasive, and the public is becoming increasingly critical of it. Trust in political parties, politicians, governments, and key state institutions has fallen to unprecedented levels. In most countries in the region general and political corruption, graft, and influence peddling are all too visible for the voters, while good governance remains an ideal too often out of reach.This book, Power Broking in the Shade: Party Finances and Money Politics in Southeast Asia, provides an overview of the strategies for financial survival of the parties in the region and the importance of stable cash flows for their political success. The book fills the void of a comparative approach towards party financing that covers the whole of ASEAN and offers accessible facts and understandable analysis for anyone interested in the politics of Southeast Asia.

This definitive study of electoral politics and democratic decentralization in provincial Thailand investigates how democracy is unfolding in the context of emergent capitalism, exploring the relationships between the politics of the locality, the province and the nation from 1950.

Business, Government and Labor in the Economic Development of Singapore and Southeast Asia analyzes the inter-linked and evolving roles of private sector business, government public policy, and labor markets in the economic development of Singapore and its Southeast Asian neighborhood. It does this through 16 essays written by Prof. Linda Y C Lim, an early and long-established scholar of these subjects, and published over a 35-year period. For Singapore, often considered the world's most successful economy, the essays highlight the determining role of government's industrial and social policy through to the present day, when the growth model of the past faces many external market and domestic resource constraints. In the rest of Southeast Asia, in contrast, the essays explore how private sector business, dominated by the locally-domiciled ethnic Chinese minority, thrived and drove economic growth in underdeveloped markets with imperfect institutions, and consider if and how this might change with China's increasing presence in the regional economy. A final set of essays analyzes the forces underlying women's employment, from labor-intensive Southeast Asian export factories in the 1980s to Singapore's foreign-labor-dependent economy and its current productivity challenges. Taken together, the essays show how government, business and labor interact in the process of economic development.

War, famine, poverty, organized crime, environmental catastrophes, refugees, epidemics and pandemics, modern slavery – all these affect people in the non-Western world to an increasingly disproportionate extent. It is also where wealthy governments wield economic leverage and military force to renegotiate existing norms of international relations. Under these circumstances, it is difficult to overestimate the importance and urgency of comprehending the mechanisms and motivations driving these phenomena. This book is the outcome of a decade-long effort to advance both theoretical and empirical understanding of what motivates non-Western governments’ decisions to cooperate/not cooperate regionally. It starts by acknowledging the Western-centrism of prevailing international relations theories, abandoning deeply entrenched assumptions regarding the nature and roles of states, and redefining state weakness. The inquiry continues by elaborating this new concept and applying it to Southeast Asian polities while positing that it creates governments vulnerable to internal and external threats, in line with Joel S. Migdal’s well-known findings on the topic. A set of regional cooperation strategies is then inferred, based on the survival needs of insecure governing elites and its empirical validity is tested against the experience of regional organizations in Africa, Asia, and the Americas. The second part of the book provides an in-depth examination of how Southeast Asian governments’ shared security needs and interests shaped the emergence of the identified regional cooperation pattern and its evolution over 50 years of cooperation within the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN). Overall, this book is a call to international relations scholars to do our part in understanding non-Western experiences and making a substantive contribution to addressing humanity’s most intractable security threats.

When a populist movement elected Thaksin Shinawatra as prime minister of Thailand in 2001, many of the country’s urban elite dismissed the outcome as just another symptom of rural corruption, a traditional patronage system dominated by local strongmen pressuring their neighbors through political bullying and vote-buying. In Thailand’s Political Peasants, however, Andrew Walker argues that the emergence of an entirely new socioeconomic dynamic has dramatically changed the relations of Thai peasants with the state, making them a political force to be reckoned with. Whereas their ancestors focused on subsistence, this generation of middle-income peasants seeks productive relationships with sources of state power, produces cash crops, and derives additional income through non-agricultural work. In the increasingly decentralized, disaggregated country, rural villagers and farmers have themselves become entrepreneurs and agents of the state at the local level, while the state has changed from an extractor of taxes to a supplier of subsidies and a patron of development projects. Thailand’s Political Peasants provides an original, provocative analysis that encourages an ethnographic rethinking of rural politics in rapidly developing countries. Drawing on six years of fieldwork in Ban Tiam, a rural village in northern Thailand, Walker shows how analyses of peasant politics that focus primarily on rebellion, resistance, and evasion are becoming less useful for understanding emergent forms of political society.

This text examines the politics of culture and the culture of politics in Pacific Asia through case studies on the South Pacific, China, South Korea, Thailand and Southeast Asia. The contexts and cultures of the chapters are wide-ranging and Callahan skilfully ties them together with the objective of analyzing the relation between the state’s cultural governance and resistance to it. The themes covered include: governmentality and cultural production popular culture and resistance East/West relations gender, identity and democracy civil society, social movements and democracy national and transnational identity production. Cultural Governance and Resistance in Pacific Asia addresses the dynamics between Asian studies and cultural studies, and the overlap between comparative politics and international relations, and as such will appeal to students and scholars of Asian studies, cultural studies, comparative politics, sociology and anthropology alike.