SEO Version
“An elegant and convincing account of
change in northern Thailand. Walker
dismantles and challenges some of the
ingrained assumptions about agrarian change
and its impacts on ordinary people in rural
areas.”
—Jonathan Rigg, author of
Southeast
Asia: The Human Landscape of Modernization
and Development
Of related interest
Farmers, Students, Law, and Violence in Northern Thailand
Foreword by Thongchai Winichakul
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“Tyrell Haberkorn’s courageous book tells an open-ended, evocative narrative about the
violence and radicalism of the 1970s in Thailand.”—Tamara Loos, Cornell University
Copublished with Silkworm Books.
Customers in Thailand and Southeast Asia should order from Silkworm Books.
Published July 2011
LC: 2010038909 DS 240 pp. 6 x 9 1 map
ISBN 978-0-299-28184-7 Paper $24.95 s ISBN 978-0-299-28183-0 e-book $14.95 s
Power in the Modern Rural Economy
“The first book to offer a detailed view of the socio-
economic changes underlying the tumultuous events in
Thailand’s twenty-first-century politics. Andrew Walker
shows why the upsurge of rural politics in Thailand cannot
be ignored.”
—Chris Baker, author of
A History of Thailand
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 dramati-
cally 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 develop-
ment 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, resist-
ance, and evasion are becoming less useful for understanding emergent
forms of political society.
is senior fellow in the Department of Political and So-
cial Change in the College of Asia and the Pacific at Australian
National University. He is the coauthor of
Forest Guardians, Forest De-
stroyers: The Politics of Environmental Knowledge in Northern Thailand
and
the cofounder of New Mandala, an influential blog that comments on
contemporary Southeast Asian politics.
THE UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN PRESS
• SPRING 2012 •
Asian Studies / Politics / Anthropology
June 2012
LC: 2011042652 DS
280 pp. 6 x 9
16 b/w illus., 8 charts, 4 tables, 1 map
Paper $29.95 s
ISBN 978-0-299-28824-2
e-book $21.95 s
ISBN 978-0-299-28823-5
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Alfred W. McCoy, R. Anderson Sutton,
Thongchai Winichakul, and Kenneth M. George,
Series Editors
PAPERBACK
ORIGINAL
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