With Dr. Jim Glassman, Associate Professor, Department of Geography, University of British Columbia

1 to 4 July 2008, Palma Hall, University of the Philippines - Diliman

Sponsored by Focus on the Global South, Third World Studies Center, the University of the Philippines - Political Science Department, and the Philippine Political Science Association

 

 

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Urban social movements are often associated with what are considered “progressive” causes, and most activists involved in such movements are inclined to describe themselves in such terms. The Thai coup of September 2006, and the ongoing street demonstrations of the People’s Alliance for Democracy in 2008, pose problems for any such easy identification. Though executed by the military, on behalf of royalist interests, the coup was supported by an array of primarily Bangkok-based and middle class groups, many of them associated with organizations such as NGOs and state enterprise unions, and such groups have again been at the center of the 2008 demonstrations. Although some of these groups claim anti-neoliberal political orientations, their support for the coup, and now for the ouster of the government elected in 2007, effectively places them on the side of forces opposed to populist spending policies and in favor of specific forms of neo-liberalism—at least for Thai villagers. This lecture explores this development by focusing on the Bangkok/up-country and urban/rural divisions in Thai politics—which, though socially constructed, have taken on political substance, in part because of their grounding in regionally differentiated class structures.

Reading list:

Thongchai Winichakul, 2008. Toppling Democracy.  Journal of Contemporary Asia 38, 1 (February): 11-37.
Pasuk Phongpaichit and Chris Baker, 2008. “Thaksin's Populism,” Journal of Contemporary Asia 38, 1 (February): 62-83.
Ukrist Pathmanand, 2008. “A Different Coup d'État?,” Journal of Contemporary Asia 38, 1 (February): 124-142.
Michael K. Connors, 2008. “Article of Faith: The Failure of Royal Liberalism in Thailand,” Journal of Contemporary Asia 38, 1 (February): 143-165.
Porphant Ouyyanont, 2008.  “The Crown Property Bureau in Thailand and the Crisis of 1997,” Journal of Contemporary Asia 38, 1 (February): 166-189.
 

 
After September 11, 2001, the administration of George W. Bush showed renewed interest in Southeast Asia, putatively because of the presence within the region of “terrorists” connected to the attacks on the US. However, as during the Cold War period, US interests in Southeast Asia are shaped heavily by US interests in Northeast Asia—especially Japan and China. US interests are also conflicted, involving different political blocs, with different interests and ideologies, grounded in different specific class groupings. These blocs, sometimes called “neo-liberal” and “neo-conservative,” have agendas that overlap but also contain significant tensions. Those tensions shape not only US policies towards Northeast Asia, but Southeast Asia as well, with varied consequences throughout the latter region. I explore and analyze some of the tensions in US policies with the help of ideas from Nicos Poulantzas, whose conception of the state as part of the social division of labor can be expanded to help specify relations between US neo-liberals and neo-conservatives, as well as to indicate the reasons for limited changes in US policies over time, in spite of the tensions.

Reading list:

Jim Glassman, 2005. “The ‘War on Terrorism’ Comes to Southeast Asia,” Journal of Contemporary Asia 35, 1 (February): 3-28.

Jim Glassman, 2005. “The New Imperialism?  On Continuity and Change in US Foreign Policy,” Environment and Planning A 37, 9 (September): 1527-1544.

 
The Greater Mekong Subregion (GMS)—a project of transborder economic integration between Burma, Cambodia, Laos, Thailand, Vietnam, and Yunnan province (China), funded by the Asian Development Bank (ADB)—has been portrayed by the ADB as reflecting the natural geographic expansion of market processes after the end of the Cold War and the re-orientation of Communist Party regimes. I argue that a better interpretation of the development of the GMS is that it reflects a power-laden struggle by different investors and states to procure a “spatial fix” for problems of overaccumulation. Among other things, this means (1) that the GMS is not a “natural” market area but is socially produced as a space of investment by various political economic processes, (2) that large-scale capitalist forces from both inside and outside the GMS are central to its production and do less to integrate it internally than to selectively integrate key sites within the GMS into a broader East Asia regional economy of which they are a part; and (3) that the entire process is marked by conspicuous forms of socio-spatial uneven development, rather than by the equal opportunity for betterment sometimes suggested in neo-classical and neo-liberal literature on the GMS.

Reading list:

Jim Glassman, 2007. “The GMS and Thailand’s ‘Spatial Fix’”, presented at the international conference on Critical Transitions in the Mekong Region, Chiang Mai, Thailand, January 30.

Medhi Krongkaew, 2004. “The Development of the Greater Mekong Subregion (GMS): Real Promise or False Hope?,” Journal of Asian Economics 15, 5 (2004): 977-998. 
 

 
The recent explosion of studies by economists on global measures of poverty and income distribution has received somewhat less attention from non-economists and social activists than it should. There are various problems with measures of either poverty or inequality, but there are also tentative conclusions that can be drawn from the empirical evidence regarding both long-term and short-term trends. Interpretation of the evidence, however, also depends upon the goals and assumptions of the interpreters. In this talk I argue that for groups involved in social movements favoring redistribution of wealth and income, the implications are important and point to the necessity of shifting strategies in response to shifting geographies of global inequality.

Robert Hunter Wade, 2004. “Is Globalization Reducing Poverty and Inequality?” World Development 32, 4 (2004): 567-589.

ABOUT JIM GLASSMAN

Jim Glassman is Associate Professor in the Department of Geography at the University of British Columbia. He received his PhD in Geography from the University of Minnesota in 1999. His main research interests include political economy of development in Southeast Asia; regionalization in the Greater Mekong sub-region; geo-politics and social conflict in East and Southeast Asia.  He has written on topics ranging from Thai democracy and politics to globalization and US foreign policy in the region. He is the author of Thailand at the Margins (Oxford, 2004), a study of uneven development and the transformation of labor processes in Thailand since the Second World War. His current research is on socio-spatial uneven development in the Greater Mekong Sub region.