Red Shirt Research Articles

Thai Politics in the Post-Thaksin Period

Thailand has been witnessing political uncertainties ever since the ouster of Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra. Although the 1997 Constitution of Thailand was one of the best in terms of evolving democratic institutions and Thaksin was one of the most popular leaders, yet the system could not work. Thaksin was disliked by the traditionally entrenched elite who joined together to remove him arbitrarily from power in which the military and the Royal Privy Council took a prominent part. The system that was adopted under military rule did not like to retain the 1997 constitution but decided to replace them with a new constitution (2007), in which the interests of the military were protected and promoted. In the evolving permutations and combinations, two groups—Yellow Shirts and Red Shirts—have emerged to oppose each other, often violently, to offer thesis and anti-thesis for and against Thaksin and his brand of politics. This article has tried to understand the dynamics of power politics in Thailand, the rise of the Yellow Shirts and Red Shirts and the emerging problems that Thailand will have to address in the future.

Noted: The twitter revolution


 
 Reviewed book edited by Philip Behnke
 
 
 
 Publication date: October, 2011
 
 
 
 
 This book provides an informative snapshot of where contries in and around Asia are with thier technology and how governments are responding. Behnke binds together reports from Pakistan to the Pacific, some of which include analyses of election such as the 2010 'Twitter election' in Australia, and more conflicting chapters of politics such as the Thai 'Red Shirts' political crisis during 2010, as well as the 2010 Philippne election. 
 
 

Re-centreing the city: Spirits, local wisdom, and urban design at the Three Kings Monument of Chiang Mai

Recent political events, such as the coup of 2006 or the ‘Red Shirt’ uprisings of 2010 underlined the divisions in Thai society between the provinces and the capital. As one of the world's most primate cities, Bangkok exerts a tremendous political, economic and cultural force upon the rest of Thailand. But how is such pressure interpreted, internalised and/or subverted? In this article, I look at Thailand's second-largest city, Chiang Mai, in Thailand's North, and the struggle to cure an increasing sense of urban crisis and thereby assert the former independent capital's symbolic authority vis-à-vis Bangkok. I examine this by looking at two specific discourses: that of architecture and spirit mediumship. Northern Thai architects attempt to cure Chiang Mai's ills through recourse to the ‘cultural heritage’ of the city's urban space, while spirit mediums call upon the sacred power of that space in order to restore Chiang Mai's ‘lost’ prosperity. The focal point for each effort lies at the city's centre: the Three Kings Monument and its surrounding plaza (khuang). Here, each group casts themselves as those most able to put Chiang Mai's past in physical form and thereby ensure Chiang Mai's future. In this article, I examine how ideas of cultural heritage become entwined with magico-religious concepts of power (sak). In each, there is a search for efficacious power in the face of political and cultural domination from Bangkok.

Red and Yellow Songs: A Historical Analysis of the Use of Music by the United Front for Democracy against Dictatorship (UDD) and the People's Alliance for Democracy (PAD) in Thailand

The increase in social protests in Thailand since 2005 has been marked by a dramatic rise in the use of music for protest. This article examines the use of music by the yellow and red shirts, and contextualizes the PAD and UDD within the history of two similarly named but very different genres of Thai song: phleng chiwit [life songs] and phleng phuea chiwit [songs for life]. Phleng chiwit was part of a flowering of satirical art forms during Field Marshall Plaek Phibunsongkhram's second term as Prime Minister (1948–57) before censorship forced many songwriters to change to the new commercial genre of lukthung [Thai country song]. Phleng phuea chiwit was the preferred music of leftist students in the pro-democracy movement of the 1970s. However, the rehabilitation of phleng phuea chiwit as the official Thai protest genre has disguised the role that lukthung played during the armed struggle of the Communist Party of Thailand (CPT). The article examines the use of satirical songs and lukthung during Thailand's most recent political struggle, from 2005 to the present. It appears that red-shirt protestors (the UDD) have accessed a wide range of memories, including the most powerful counter-hegemonic traditions, whereas their yellow-shirt opponents (the PAD) have drawn on a much narrower selection of hegemonic cultural memories.

Macbeth (review)

Reviewed by: Macbeth J. Caitlin Finlayson Macbeth Presented by Song of the Goat Theatre (Teatr Pieśń Kozła) at the Corn Exchange, Brighton, England. November 25-27, 2010. Directed by Grzegorz Bral. Designed by Mira Zelechower-Aleksiun and Grzegorz Bral. Lighting by Robert Balinski. Costumes by Cristina Gonzalez. With Gabriel Gawin (Macbeth), Anna Zubrzycki (Lady Macbeth), Ian Morgan (Macduff, Ensemble), Faroque Khan (Duncan, Ensemble), Ewan Downie (Malcolm, Ensemble), Kacper Kuszewski (Banquo, Ensemble), Anu Salonen (Witch, Ensemble), and Rafal Habel (Musician). Exploring "the musicality and muscularity of Shakespeare's poetry," (http://macbeth-thepoint.co.uk/about/) Song of the Goat Theatre's Macbeth stunningly translated the linguistic violence and psychological tension of Shakespeare's play into physical action and dance. Director Grzegorz Bral telescoped the play into approximately 75 minutes of riotous energy, ecstatic movement, incantatory recitation, and choreographed sword play combined with excerpts from Shakespeare's text. This was not a performance of Macbeth, but rather a presentation of the psychodrama and lyricism of Shakespeare's play through key scenes and speeches re-imagined with visceral action and vocal expression. First presented at the Swan Theatre in August 2006 as part of the Royal Shakespeare Company's Complete Works, Song of the Goat Theatre's Macbeth was subsequently developed over two years into its current touring production. Hamlet might be concerned with "word, words, words," but this production explored the physical, gestural, and musical dimensions of theatre, drawing our attention to the stage business beyond mere dialogue—that is, beyond or behind the words in the play-script. While the production highlighted the violence of the play inherent in its very language (e.g. Lady Macbeth's "dash'd the [babe's] brains out" shrieked to the accompaniment [End Page 442] of swooping swords) and contained strikingly visceral moments, overall it failed to maintain its audience's interest, becoming at points obscure. Lyric in both movement and song, the rhythm of Bral's production at its best fully involved the audience in the emotional turmoil and brutality of the play, but at times the inaudible vocalizations of the lines, the redundancy of frenetic movement, and a propensity toward wailing wore on the audience. Click for larger view View full resolution Anu Salonen as a Witch and Gabriel Gawin as Macbeth in the Song of the Goat Theatre's (Teatr Pieśń Kozła) 2010 production of Macbeth, directed by Grzegorz Bral. Photo courtesy of Krzysztof Bielinski. The nearly empty stage promised a stripped down production that focused on the seven actors' physical interpretations of the characters. A rectangular table, throne chair, five shields and candles comprised the sparse props retooled for multiple functions: shields, for example, symbolized castle battlements. The actors were clad in loose, unadorned Japanese hakama-inspired black pants, and brandished wooden swords reminiscent of Kendo swords, which, added to the music of a Korean kayagum (a stringed instrument), played by Rafal Habel, seemed to invoke Kurosawa's Throne of Blood. Gabriel Gawin (Macbeth) and Anna Zubrzycki (Lady Macbeth) were differentiated slightly by their red shirts from the more neutral shades worn by the ensemble, and were the only actors to play a single role; the remaining five actors performed individual characters and [End Page 443] doubled as the ensemble, which had a choric function in this production. The actors strode barefoot across the stage, and the minimalist design and the use of a spotlight to highlight their monologues emphasized the drama of the individual in emotional distress or conflict: monologues and even the majority of the dialogue were performed with the actors facing the audience rather than the other characters (a tradition suggestive of Kabuki theatre). Click for larger view View full resolution From left to right: Gabriel Gawin as Macbeth, Anu Salonen as a Witch, Anna Zubrzycki as Lady Macbeth, Iran Morgan as Macduff, and Ewan Downie as Malcolm in the Song of the Goat Theatre's (Teatr Pieśń Kozła) 2010 production of Macbeth, directed by Grzegorz Bral. Photo courtesy of Krzysztof Bielinski. The pitch of performance ran high in this production. Violent fiddling on the kayagum created tension and discordance and acted as a counterpoint to the unified chants of the ensemble. Lady Macbeth's...

Ut pictura poesis in konsi. Pesem kot slika, pesem kot prostor – nesporazumi

One could hardly agree that Kosovel’s konses anticipate visual poetry; that is, that they should serve as an obvious example of avantgarde poetry that synthesizes the semantic and visual dimension. Kosovel’s konses belong to constructivism. The apex of the constructivist’s scale of values is occupied by architecture, which is considered a synthesis of artistic, social, and technical practice and as such is also capable of reconstructing the world more rapidly than any other artistic current. In this synthesis, the limits between “spatial” arts such as architecture or sculpture and “temporal” arts such as music, dance, and poetry, as well as the limits between spiritual disciplines and technical engineering, disappear. There was no longer any chance of speaking about either Horace’s syntagm ut pictura poesis or Lessing’s theorem developed in his essay Laocoön: An Essay on the Limits of Painting and Poetry. Kosovel magnificently summarized this avantgarde tendency in Kons Z, and he recognized the synthesis of culture, politics, and arts in the domain of “new architecture for a man,” binding it with “a man with a red shirt”. Kons Sivo (Grey) articulates the basic tension of constructivism; that is, the dynamization and kinetization of poetry, and this is why the artist must act “with a sounding line in his hand, with eyes as precise as a ruler, with the soul as stretched as compasses” (Rodchenko). In this kons, sketches and letters also broke through the plane, growing into the space without losing their semantic dominating feature.

Ut pictura poesis in konsi. Pesem kot slika, pesem kot prostor – nesporazumi

One could hardly agree that Kosovel’s konses anticipate visual poetry; that is, that they should serve as an obvious example of avantgarde poetry that synthesizes the semantic and visual dimension. Kosovel’s konses belong to constructivism. The apex of the constructivist’s scale of values is occupied by architecture, which is considered a synthesis of artistic, social, and technical practice and as such is also capable of reconstructing the world more rapidly than any other artistic current. In this synthesis, the limits between “spatial” arts such as architecture or sculpture and “temporal” arts such as music, dance, and poetry, as well as the limits between spiritual disciplines and technical engineering, disappear. There was no longer any chance of speaking about either Horace’s syntagm ut pictura poesis or Lessing’s theorem developed in his essay Laocoon: An Essay on the Limits of Painting and Poetry. Kosovel magnificently summarized this avantgarde tendency in Kons Z, and he recognized the synthesis of culture, politics, and arts in the domain of “new architecture for a man,” binding it with “a man with a red shirt”. Kons Sivo (Grey) articulates the basic tension of constructivism; that is, the dynamization and kinetization of poetry, and this is why the artist must act “with a sounding line in his hand, with eyes as precise as a ruler, with the soul as stretched as compasses” (Rodchenko). In this kons, sketches and letters also broke through the plane, growing into the space without losing their semantic dominating feature.

Does a red shirt improve sporting performance? Evidence from Spanish football

Recent research has linked red shirts to sporting success. In this article, we analyse the relationship between the colour red and sporting performance in the Spanish Professional Football League. Our foremost conclusion is that once the effect of the different endowments of resources and the ability of managers have been discounted, teams with red shirts do not show greater performance than teams wearing shirts of other colours.

Perception of acoustic cues in contrastive focus.

This research examines the ability of native English speakers to identify meanings associated with contrastive focus. Two conditions are compared: adjective and noun focus. Subjects hear either “I want the RED shirt” or “I want the red SHIRT,” where the focused element receives an L+H* pitch accent and a longer duration. They must then choose which of two continuations best follows the auditory stimulus (e.g., “I don’t like the blue shirt” versus “I don’t like the red pants”). Preliminary results, based on 23 subjects listening to 10 sentences each, show that despite substantial acoustic differences between the focused and nonfocused words for both the adjective and noun conditions, each condition’s result is vastly different. As a group, they excel at identifying the adjective‐focused condition, but do poorly in the noun‐focused condition. Closer examination reveals a bimodal distribution on the noun condition: One group has a high success rate (between 80%–100%) and another has a low success rate (between 20%–40%). For the low success group, conflicting acoustic cues may result in a misinterpretation as phrase‐final lengthening and/or natural focus on the object, while these cues are being overridden in the high success group.

The Helping for Blood-Letting

The Helping for Blood-Letting

Cracking Hegemony in Thailand: Gramsci, Bourdieu and the Dialectics of Rebellion

Gramsci's notion of “hegemony,” like Bourdieu's concept of “habitus,” seems designed to explain accommodation to existing social structures, rather than resistance. In this paper, however, I draw from the Prison Notebooks some arguments that contribute to a Gramscian understanding of how hegemony may break apart under the weight of the same uneven development processes central to hegemony. Drawing also from Bourdieu, I argue that the conceptions of “hegemony” and “habitus” inscribe the possibility of resistance within the embodied experience of accommodation to class rule. I then elaborate a dialectical, Gramscian-Bourdieusian account of the Red Shirt movement in Thailand, showing that the seeds for the destruction of royalist hegemony in Thailand have been sown in the embodied processes of accommodation to ruling class hegemony. The breadth and depth of challenges to this hegemony, moreover, are evident not only from the activities of the Red Shirt movement and regional discontent in Northern and Northeast Thailand but from the resistance of working class women to attempts to police their sexuality and limit their consumerism. The refusal of Thai elites to accept the breadth and depth of Thailand's dispositional transformation has legitimised – in their eyes – the brutal crackdown on Red Shirt protestors that resulted in the April-May 2010 massacres. Yet repression can only kill off political leaders and specific parties; it will not likely derail the growing resentment of ordinary Thais over elitist class rule.

Thailand’s Legitimacy Conflict between the Red Shirt Protesters and the Abhisit Government: Aspects of a Complex Political Struggle

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The Bloody South Carolina Election of 1876: Wade Hampton III, the Red Shirt Campaign for Governor and the End of Reconstruction

The Bloody South Carolina Election of 1876: Wade Hampton III, the Red Shirt Campaign for Governor and the End of Reconstruction

Constructing the ‘Red’ Otherness: The Role and Implications of Thainess on Polarised Politics

The above statement was made by a dress-shop owner whose shop was located near the site of the destruction caused by the riot in May 2010. His statement is interesting in that he identified the Red Shirts, members of a political alliance opposing the current government, as not being Thai. While the Red Shirts and their supporters were accused of not being Thai due to violent behaviour, what about the Yellow Shirts, a group likewise formed in opposition to the former governments, who seized the international airport in 2008? Are they Thai? The question is: What constitutes being Thai or a Thai nationhood? Has Thainess really existed for a long time? If not, who constructed it for what purpose, and for whom was it constructed? In this article, I will give some background information on current politics in Thailand and review theoretical concepts of nation and nationhood as well as conceptualising Thai nationhood or Thainess. In addition, the role of Thainess that has been used by Prime Minister Abhisit and his patrons – the current power holders – will be explained, and I will demonstrate the implications of the application of

The Human Security Theory of Integrative Negotiation for Sociopolitical Conflicts: The Thai Color Divide as a Case Study

Complex negotiations between large socio-political groups tend to rely on distributive negotiation. This article explores how the human security approach could be used as the basis for selecting ‘standard objective criteria’ to foster more constructive integrative negotiations between the People’s Alliance for Democracy, also known as ‘Yellow Shirts,’ and the National United Front of Democracy against Dictatorship, or the ‘Red Shirts,’ in Thailand. The complexity of the conflict between the two groups in Thailand and the importance of the outcome make it a good representative case study on how to transcend realist/distributional methods of negotiation and conflict resolution. In conclusion, human security provides an ethical yet flexible framework to guide negotiations between large social movements. Finally, the study develops a tentative Human Security Theory of Integrative Negotiation for sociopolitical conflicts.

Unrest in Thailand indicates deeper problems

A crackdown by the Thai authorities on 19 May 2010 finally ended two months of major street protests by the United Front for Democracy against Dictatorship (UDD), known as the ‘red shirts’. The protests were part of a wider political crisis that has been raging for nearly five years. Demonstrators were challenging the legitimacy of the government of Prime Minister Abhisit Vejjajiva and demanding an election. More fundamentally, however, their actions seemed to be questioning the legitimacy of the Thai state itself and expressing fears about the royal succession. Thailand is a politically polarised nation plagued by anxieties about the future. It seems unlikely that even an eventual return to the polls can offer lasting solutions.

From Reds to Red Shirts: Political Evolution and Devolution in Thailand

From Reds to Red Shirts: Political Evolution and Devolution in Thailand

“Unity” as a Discourse in Thailand´s Polarized Politics

On the night of 19 September 2006, the military rolled its tanks onto the streets of Bangkok; it was Thailand's seventeenth military coup since the country abolished the absolute monarchy and adopted democracy in 1932. General Sonthi Boonyaratglin, leader of the coup, rationalized the military intervention by stressing, society has become polarised as never before, with mass confrontations between supporters and opponents of the former prime minister (Thaksin Shinawatra) threatening to turn violent.1 Sonthi was referring to the months-long protestations staged by the People's Alliance for Democracy (PAD) which began in late May 2006 against Thaksin. The PAD, similarly, claimed that the Thaksin government tended to seek benefits for itself in an illegal way which led to social disunity.2 Three years on, in a move to resolve the protracted political deadlock, Prime Minister Abhisit Vejjajiva called on his Cabinet members and all Thais to do their duty to help return Thailand to a society in harmony. Abhisit said, Everyone should think of what we can do to enjoy normality again.3 In reality, the gap between the two opposing political camps, one that supposedly supports Thaksin and the other that protects the interests of the Bangkok elite, has remained wide and is indeed threatening the much-celebrated Thai discourse of unity. This is taking place in the country which has never been officially colonized and is proud of its independence thanks to, as claimed by Thai leaders, the national trait of unity.4 Recent developments within the realm of Thai politics where the Bangkok elites and red shirts have competed fiercely in the safeguarding of their own interests seem to suggest that the underlying premises of the notion of unity might now be obsolete.

Thailand's Political Crisis: Which Color Is Conservative?

Thailand’s political crisis has raged since February 2006, when a new protest movement, the People’s Alliance for Democracy (PAD) or “Yellow Shirts,” took to the streets. Their goal was to depose Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra and his Thai Rak Thai (TRT) party, elected in 2001 and reelected in 2005 with substantial parliamentary majorities. Continuous protests culminated in the December 2006 military coup after which the TRT was dissolved and Thaksin went into exile. Following a year of military rule and the promulgation of a new, more conservative constitution, fresh elections were held and the Thaksin backed party, reformulated as the People’s Power Party (PPP), won for a third time. The PAD reactivated the protests and took over the international airport for eight days until a court ruling dissolved the PPP. The Democrats, the PAD backed main opposition party in parliament, were able to cobble together a fragile coalition government made up of defecting former Thaksin allies. Since Democrat Prime Minister Abhisit Vejjajiva took power in December 2008, Thaksin’s supporters, the “Red Shirts,” have taken to the streets to oppose what they claim is an undemocratic, illegitimate, and military backed government.

“That Little Incandescence”: Reading the Fragmentary and John Calvin in Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead

“That Little Incandescence”: Reading the Fragmentary and John Calvin in Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead Christopher Leise My intention, my hope, is to revive interest in Jean Cauvin, the sixteenth-century French humanist and theologian—he died in 1564, the year Shakespeare was born—known to us by the name John Calvin. If I had been forthright about my subject, I doubt the average reader would have read this far. —Marilynne Robinson (The Death of Adam 174) We ought not to rack our brains about God; but rather, we should contemplate him in his works. —John Calvin (I.v.9) Marilynne Robinson’s 2004 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel Gilead takes the form of a letter, written by the Rev. John Ames to his six-year-old son. Ames is in his seventies and his heart is failing, so the epistle has the strange effect both of looking back as well as looking forward: while recounting his past, he is writing to his not-yet-adult son, for a time when the boy will be mature enough to understand the dying minister’s more poignant observations on the world around him. At its outset, the letter seems somewhat directionless. It begins with a series of more-or-less unrelated fragments that are highly evocative, but confined largely to description. A characteristic meditation: I looked down at the yard and there you were, you and your mother, blowing bubbles at the cat, such a barrage of them that the poor beast was beside herself at the glut of opportunity....Some of the bubbles drifted up through the branches, even above the trees. You two were too intent on the cat to [End Page 348] see the celestial consequences of your worldly endeavors. They were very lovely. Your mother is wearing her blue dress and you are wearing your red shirt and you were kneeling on the ground together with Soapy between and that effulgence of bubbles rising, and so much laughter. Ah, this life, this world. (9) Such passages abound in Gilead, and might merely register as an attentive man’s attempt to capture the beauty of the world in prose. But they also emphasize a third aspect of temporality that the letter’s purpose might otherwise leave overlooked: past and future given due consideration, Ames is also deeply concerned with representing his most immediately present moments. While telling the story of his life to his son, Ames’s letter eventually crystallizes around the narrative of the Reverend’s best friend Robert Boughton, and the scandalous birth of a mixed-race child to Boughton’s ne’re-do-well son, Jack. (Jack, incidentally, is named for Ames.) It becomes, at times, a melodrama; at others, it is a morality tale about the need to forgive, lest one should forget how crucial a role family plays in a person’s happiness. And while that storyline serves as more than just an occasion for philosophizing, the irruptions of aesthetic appreciation nevertheless register as somehow more essential to the novel’s overall meaning than the plotted sequence of events making up the small-town scandal ever could be. These tableaus—these interruptions of the narrative characterized by rich, vivid imagery—are most concerned with immediacy. Though they occasionally appear within flashbacks, they are nevertheless intrusions on the Boughton narrative, and frequently disrupt the development of the story’s progress toward resolution. I offer that Gilead promotes the kind of aesthetic attention to the world that Ames exhibits in these digressions, as a vehicle to an experience of the divine in the immediate and the immanent: an experience that stops short of knowing through reason and is content with simply living the experience of the miraculous in the everyday. Despite the relatively small amount of scholarly attention that Gilead has garnered to date (as compared to Housekeeping, Robinson’s first novel), at least one critic has seen fit to seize on these moments as crucial to unpacking the novel’s overall effect. Laura E. Tanner sees Ames’s vignettes as the source of the novel’s “cultural force,” which she argues: “stems not only from [their] lyrical rendering of quotidian experience but from [their] powerful unveiling of...