We might describe this as paternalistic democracy. Voters choose a candidate with whom they have a reciprocal relationship rather than evaluating the candidate’s ability or past performance. A vote may be an expression of loyalty, not a civic judgment. Voters may believe (but we will not know without more research) that an elected official is entitled to his or her office and non-accountable. It is possible that personal gain, preferential treatment of relatives and business associates, and other self-serving acts common among local office holders, are considered irrelevant to this relationship, and may have little effect on the legitimacy of the office-holders’ authority. Likewise, the particular relationship between supporters and office-holders may legitimate favoritism, so that candidates are not expected to serve the general public but rather the interests of loyal clients. If such interpretations prevail (and we do not yet know the answer), Thailand’s practices of democracy and the rule of law may be embedded in traditional patron–client relationships and function differently from democracy and the rule of law in societies where these practices are thought to be corrupt, even though they occur with some regularity.⁸⁴

A second ethnographic study describes emergence of a movement to resist displacement from the land in Thailand’s rural Northeast. Calling itself the “Assembly of the Poor,” the movement is the latest of several movements that reflect the growing economic marginalization of agricultural communities during Thailand’s industrialization from the 1960s to the present. The Thai word meaning “assembly” was deliberately chosen to evoke the succession of rural movements over the previous twenty-five years that also called themselves “assemblies.” The movement reflects not only the growing activism among rural Thai and the effectiveness of the committed NGO organizers who have assisted them, but also the special meaning of the environment in Thai culture.⁸⁵ Respect for the environment is deeply embedded in Buddhism, and Buddhism in turn is one important element of the culture that underlies Thai legality.⁸⁶ The underlying culture, Thailand’s “civic religion,” also includes discourses of national identity, and the monarchy.⁸⁷ The civic religion establishes taken-for-granted values and ideas that are fundamental to political exchange about the welfare of the Thai people and legitimate use of authority, and it provides a powerful discourse for social movement participants as well as officials, politicians, and other power holders.⁸⁸ Buddhist values embedded in the discourse of Thai national welfare can be mobilized by environmental movements to greater advantage than civil rights or property rights that might be considered more fundamental in Europe or the United States. Social change in Thailand provided an opportunity for the leaders of the Assembly of the Poor to deploy Buddhist environmental values to support their claim that the movement represented the nation in its struggle against the devastating and illegitimate forces of development. The claim drew support not only from other beleaguered villagers, but also from the increasingly politically active middle class.

The engine of social change has been Thailand’s booming economy following the end of the Vietnam War and the decline of communist influence in the rural areas of Eastern Thailand.⁸⁹ Rapid growth accelerated exploitation of timber, waterways, and other natural resources, has had two profound political effects. First, the former political periphery, including the rural poor and ethnic minorities living within the forests, or on its margins, or whose villages were in the future floodplain of a proposed dam, has become politically active. After years of contact with activist NGO workers, they have been motivated to seek redress from the government, and if none is forthcoming, to undertake direct action to save their homes and livelihoods.⁹⁰ They have been supported by international human rights and environmental NGOs opposing massive development projects worldwide that are planned and carried out without input from the communities they destroy. A particular target of NGO opposition has been one of the world’s chief dam builders, the World Bank, a source of funding for the Pak Mun Dam in Northeast Thailand, which threatened to inundate many villages and became the focus of the Assembly of the Poor’s most widely known campaign.⁹¹

Thailand’s boom has had the further effect of increasing the size of Thailand’s “middle class.” Although Thailand’s varied social strata do not correspond easily to Europe and America’s property owners and salaried tiers, an emerging middle class comprised of salaried and professional workers in government, universities, and industries, together with the rapidly growing numbers of entrepreneurs, is beginning to flex its political muscle. They support causes that express their values and their often critical views of government. On one hand, the environmental movement has been characterized by rural activism, supported by transnational and Thai NGOs and, significantly, activist monks whose actions and words mobilize the Thai civic religion with great power. On the other hand, a more technocratic, non-onfrontational environmentalism is supported by the contributions of the “salariat,”⁹² including entrepreneurs who have found environmentalism a useful cause, and by transnational NGOs advocating “sustainable” or “responsible” development.⁹³ Like environmentalism in the late 1960s in the United States⁹⁴ and the activism for women’s rights in countries which Merry studied,⁹⁵ environmentalism in Thailand has brought together urban and rural, middle class and economically marginal, and rights conscious middle class Thai and more traditional rural Thai, notwithstanding survey data that reveal differences between their general perspectives on participatory democracy and the rule of law.

After a long campaign by the Assembly of the Poor in opposition to the Pak Mun Dam, demonstrations and petitioning by the Assembly of the Poor achieved its greatest visibility just as the drafting of the new constitution reached its final stages. Perhaps as a result of this growing political activism in Thailand on these two broad fronts — rural activism and middle class mobilization — the 1997 constitution provides special protections for environmental rights and for public participation in environmental decision-making.⁹⁶ Thai environmentalism may be consistent with international rights advocacy but it also has roots in movements like the Assembly of the Poor that draw on non-legal perceptions of justice and local claims grounded in unofficial law — the law of custom and tradition in rural communities.⁹⁷ Perceptions of the environment that prevail in rural communities and resonate with traditional Thai culture have had their influence, combining the language of customary law and justice with the technical language of sustainable development to contest the power of the government. Thus, political activism is beginning to give meaning to participatory democracy through practices that will evolve step by step, adapting the universal rights framework to the complex and varied Thai culture and Thai institutions.

These are case studies of “translation into the vernacular,” and they draw attention to the power of the translators, or interpreters, of social injustice, rights, and the meaning of democracy. Some local election practices may reinforce existing hierarchies of deference and power-holding unless a persuasive translator reinforces the belief that office holders are accountable to voters and to the law.

The establishment of a unique National Election Corruption Commission by the new constitution shows that the drafters understood that the translation of democracy into practice would have to be regulated. The Assembly of the Poor succeeded in part because movement leaders translated the movement’s social justice claims into a traditional discourse of responsibility to the environment that pre-dated the constitution and was more meaningful than a legal discourse borrowed from international environmental rights advocates. Voters and movement participants who “take on” rights make difficult choices, and translators who influence perceptions of risks and benefits play a critical role. Success is critical as well. As Merry observed, when rights succeed, rights consciousness is reinforced; when they do not succeed, individuals may be more reluctant to take them on the next time, and rights consciousness weakens.

Finally, the two case studies show that the process by which rights take hold is variable. The local context in which transplanted institutions or rights are deployed creates strategic choices for the Thai who accept, reject, or reinterpret the alternatives they are afforded by their new rights. Democracy as it is perceived by some Thai voters can be understood only in the context of a unique meaning of paternalistic representation. Likewise, social justice among the rural poor was grounded in the unique importance of the environment rather than a general belief in rights or democracy. We are learning a great deal about the different ways that rights can be perceived in other cultures. This variation was anticipated by Merry’s observations of New Englanders, who constituted local property rights in a unique way. As we apply the methods of legal anthropology to law in developing societies, we are proceeding down a path blazed by the research of law and society scholars who have studied how rights become active in our own society,
and whose methods and insights may now help us understand the prospects for the development of rights throughout the world.

Footnotes

84. The thoughtful observer may see a similarity between paternalistic democracy, as I have described it in Thailand, and loyalty of American voters to parties or to patronage. These apparent similarities raise important questions about what it means to establish a civic culture that creates a meaningful democracy. The answer has to do with trust in the electoral system. American voters may violate the norm of civic responsibility, but they do so knowing they have the power to “vote the bastards out.” And they do vote them out with some regularity. In Thailand, this idea of civic behavior — and of the possibility of accountability — may still be taking shape. Some Thai voters described in the study may believe they are
obligated to vote for a patron or vote buyer while others may believe that voters have no legitimate role in directing office holders’ performance of their job.
85. Some parts of rural Thailand, especially the impoverished, ethnographically distinct Northeast, have had a long relationship with NGO workers who have encouraged rights consciousness. See Prudhisan Jumbala & Maneerat Mitprasat, Non-governmental Development Organizations: Empowerment and Environment, in POLITICAL CHANGE IN THAILAND: DEMOCRACY AND PARTICIPATION 195 (Kevin Hewison ed., 1997).
86. See Philip Hirsch, Environment and Environmentalism in Thailand: Material and Ideological Bases, in SEEING FOREST FOR TREES: ENVIRONMENT AND ENVIRONMENTALISM IN THAILAND 15, 33 (Philip Hirsch ed., 1997); see also Frank Reynolds, Dhamma in Dispute: The Interactions of Religion and Law in Thailand, 28 LAW & SOC’Y REV. 433 (1994).
87. Reynolds, supra note 86, at 440–42.
88. Id. at 443–44.
89. See Philip Hirsch, The Politics of Environment: Opposition and Legitimacy, in POLITICAL CHANGE IN THAILAND: DEMOCRACY AND PARTICIPATION 179 (Kevin Hewison ed., 1997); see also Hirsch, supra note 88.
90. See Jumbala & Mitprasat, supra note 85; see also BRUCE MISSINGHAM, THE ASSEMBLY OF THE POOR IN THAILAND (2003).
91. MISSINGHAM, supra note 90.
92. Pasuk Pongpaichit & Chris Baker, Power in Transition: Thailand in the 1990s, in POLITICAL CHANGE IN THAILAND: DEMOCRACY AND PARTICIPATION 21, 32–35 (Kevin Hewison ed., 1996).
Pongpaichit and Baker use this term to describe one of the relatively educated and well to do groups that make up the middle class in Thai society.
93. Jumbala & Mitprasat, supra note 85.
94. See generally KIRKPATRICK SALE, THE GREEN REVOLUTION: THE AMERICAN ENVIRONMENTAL MOVEMENT, 1962–1992 (1993).
95. MERRY, supra note 4, at 208–17.
96. CONST. OF THE KINGDOM OF THAIL.  56, 59.
97. In terms suggested by Santos, supra note 11, at 63. Environmental rights link local perceptions of justice to transnational environmentalism. The linkage includes transnational environmentalism associated with pro-development interests, but also to progressive transnational conceptions that include respect for local determination and participation. Santos and Rodriguez-Garavito call this mix of transnational human rights and local liberatory interpretation “subaltern cosmopolitan legality.” Id. at 44.