Buddhism,Democracy and Power in the 1932 Thai Revolution

The People’s Party toppled the Siamese absolute monarchy and introduced constitutional democracy in Thailand in June 1932. Scholars have generally denied that the revolution had any popular resonance, but this article shows that in Buddhism, the country’s premier cultural form, democratic rhetoric in the 1930s resonated among young monks marginalised by the ecclesiastical hierarchy. A group of young monks within the Mahanikai, or Great Order, rebelled against the palace-established Thammayut order that exercised the most power in institutional Buddhism. A “thin” or formal democracy established in 1932 – one displaying the main trappings of a regime of popular sovereignty but purposefully limited in scope by the People’s Party – thus inspired an assertion of a “thick” democracy, or democracy as a much older social value that governed both the Sangha internally and its relations with local communities, which the Mahanikai activists claimed was the core of original Buddhism.

     

Dead Certainty: Ethnic Violence in the Era of Globalization

This article explores the links between globalization and ethnic violence in comparative perspective. By looking at ethnographic material from Central Africa, Europe, India and China, the paper suggests that bodily violence between social intimates may be viewed as a form of vivisection, and as an effort to resolve unacceptable levels of uncertainty through bodily deconstruction. This approach may cast light on the surplus of rage displayed in many recent episodes of inter-group violence. At the same time, the study suggests that the conditions for such extreme and intimate violence may partly lie in the deformation of national and local spaces of everyday life by the physical and moral pressures of globalization.     

Realizing the Right to Development

The Right to Development as established in the 1986 UN Declaration on the Right to Development has now been recognized, through an international consensus arrived at in Vienna in 1993, as a universal and inalienable right and an integral part of fundamental human rights. That has not, of course, settled all the controversy regarding the nature and the content of the Right to Development, but the inter‐governmental debate has shifted more to the methods of implementation of that Right. This article reviews the nature and contents of the Right to Development by virtue of which every individual is entitled to a process of economic, social, cultural and political development in which all human and fundamental freedoms can be realized. It spells out a programme for implementation of the Right, step by step, through national efforts supported by international co‐operation. While the states are primarily responsible for realizing this Right for their citizens, the international community has the obligation of enabling the states to do so. A mechanism is proposed through international compacts to design, promote and monitor the process of implementation.     

The Evolution of India's Industrial Labour Share and its Correlates

There has been substantial recent interest in the decline of labour shares across many countries. For the most part, attention has been focused on developed countries. This article examines the evolution of India's labour share in its formal industrial sector from 1983 to 2016. Using two datasets corresponding to sectoral aggregate data and plant-level data respectively, the authors document a secular decline in the labour share across all sectors from 1983, with a stabilization at very low levels (around 8 to 10 per cent) starting around 2007. The plant-level data are used to identify correlates that illuminate reasons for the overall decline in the labour share. The authors find strong evidence to support multiple causes, including increased capital intensity, greater informalization, greater privatization, and productivity increases in larger firms; they therefore suggest that the declines in labour share experienced are due to a composite set of factors. Conversely, other potential explanations (such as regional variation in the labour share) have less explanatory power.     

Trump and the death of the Image

We would be wrong to imagine that Trump belongs in the long tradition of American politicians who are deeply concerned with managing their images. The idea of the image as a central feature of American life has been a popular axiom of the last seven decades and has not been adequately rethought. Trump has successfully found a following that likes him unvarnished and unadorned, and thus he has no hesitation to reveal his most repellent moral and social qualities. This indifference to the image is anchored in a deeper indifference to sociality itself and signals both the death of the image and the evacuation of any socially-grounded morality from public life.