Rethinking state-village relations : positive forms of everyday politics and land occupation in Thailand (1997-2010)

Abstract

This dissertation examines why and how Thai villagers occupied privately held lands illegally in the years 1997 and 2000, and how their land occupation movements developed throughout the decade beginning in 2000. It argues that in Thailand, land occupations that superficially appear to confront state authorities and institutions develop from positive forms of everyday political action by which the villagers take or adjust for their own purposes the resources and institutions of the state. These actions include everyday adoptions, evasions, modifications of and adjustments to state policies, schemes, apparatus, resources and discourses. The dissertation is based on a comparative analysis of land occupations in four villages in Lamphun province; in-depth interviews with 161 villagers, officials, NGOs and academics; and a review of contemporaneous documents and reports on the land occupations. It demonstrates that villagers' take-over of the lands and their following movements occurred within the context of a spectacular increase in Thai villagers' engagement with state agencies in agricultural and community-based development, elections and decentralised-local administration in the 1990s and the 2000s. These positive engagements distinguish their land occupations from those in other countries, which are described as being oppositional to state authorities and institutions. Moreover, in revealing how non-antagonistic relations between state and villages and subtle, unorganised everyday politics are linked to overt, collective land occupations, the study offers an alternative explanation of the dynamics and resourcing of rural politics to what has been written previously on these matters. The findings of this study are presented in two parts. The first part identifies villagers' ideational and economic incentives and their political reasons for occupying land. It suggests that villagers' inspiration to take over land emerged in the course of their evasion of and modifications to state land policies; and was motivated by their adjustment to new economic opportunities and the availability of financial resources and technologies provided by government agricultural support schemes. Further, changes in local electoral politics and in relations between local officials, business people and villagers led villagers to use local officials as mediators in bargaining with business landowners. When bargaining failed to achieve villagers' goals, they resorted to land occupation. This part of the dissertation sheds light on villager's tactical responses to the implementation of top{u00AD}down land policies; the diverse livelihood strategies of the land occupiers, most of whom were from middle-income, small-farm households; and the non-antagonistic relationships between villagers, business landowners and local officials prior to land occupation. The second part of the findings reveals the institutional and ideational tools that the villagers used to develop their land occupation movements. It describes how villagers capitalised on state-provided resources and official administrative apparatus to mobilise their movements; modified and incorporated into their discourses laws and development ideas endorsed by international and state agencies and NGOs to justify/legitimise their movements; and made use of the democratic procedures and development projects implemented by the state to channel decision-making capacity and resources to elected local authorities and villagers; and utilised laws to manage occupied lands and improve the agricultural productivity of the lands.