Cultural Rhetoric and Social Practice in the Search for Social Justice in Thailand

Abstract

A Bangkok community that has successfully warded off the threat of collective eviction for over 20 years, Pom Mahakan – located in the symbolically dense historic old dynastic city, next to the wall associated with the latter's foundation – has aimed at a plan of accommodation between housing rights and historic conservation that deserves serious consideration as a model for emulation. Yet the community still struggles to stay on-site; its currently dubious legal status, resulting from an ill-advised acceptance of an eminent domain order on which the community subsequently reneged on the grounds of inadequate compensation, may typify other such cases, and this suggests an urgent need for legal reform so that the authorities can ratify the community's plan and enable other communities to follow its lead. This article thus explores the wider implications of the Pom Mahakan case for social justice as well as heritage conservation in and beyond the Thai polity, taking particular account of the tension between egalitarian and authoritarian impulses that continues to characterize this nation-state and especially its political and bureaucratic life.