Frank W Munger

Trafficking in Law: Cause Lawyer, Bureaucratic State and Rights of Human Trafficking Victims in Thailand

Abstract In this case study of a young, Thai “cause lawyer”, advocacy for human rights is considered in context. The most important elements of that context are the path of development of Thai political and legal institutions, globalisation of law, and the networks of relationships that penetrate the state. The case study shows that human rights advocacy by NGO lawyers can adapt creatively to unpromising conditions under which courts provide little access or oversight. At the same time, the case study raises profound questions about the ultimate independence of cause lawyers when the state must be made a partner in order to establish the authority of law needed to make human rights advocacy possible. The ambiguity of the lawyer’s position is apparent from the relative ineffectiveness of her interventions and her growing moral authority on behalf of best practices under law. Her position suggests the limitations on law imposed by the underpinnings of the Thai state itself.

Revolution Imagined: Cause Advocacy Consumer Rights and the Evolving Role of NGOs in Thailand

Abstract This article describes the founding and evolution of a “Thai-style” NGO dedicated to consumer protection. Through a description of the NGO and the career of its founder, the article brings to light features of the evolution of NGO-based advocacy in Thailand from the student uprising in 1973 to the present. The legacy of the 1973 October Generation of activists continues to influence development of NGOs but new emphasis on rights has emerged since the era of constitutional reform in the 1990s. Many NGOs now make use of litigation to attempt to achieve social change, but litigation, like other long-standing methods of advocacy involving reliance on networks that penetrate government itself, reflect the particular opportunities and pathways for change opened by Thailand’s politics.

Destinies of the Disadvantaged: The Politics of Teen ChildbearingDestinies of the Disadvantaged: The Politics of Teen Childbearing, by FurstenbergFrank F.. New York, NY: Russell Sage Foundation, 2007. 203 pp.

Yucatán is a fascinating example of what the authors call a “trampoline effect,” whereby prior internal movement of Yucatecos to meet construction and tourism labor demands associated with the spectacular growth of Cancún and the rest of the “Maya Riviera” Caribbean coast, in turn generated new skills and desires that spurred subsequent migration to the United States. Further secondary movement is likely should tourism enter a downturn. As recent entries to the “culture of migration,” communities like Tunkás also constitute a great natural laboratory for comparing experiences and testing assumptions generated elsewhere. Being newcomers to migration itself, as well as to the United States, these participants are already showing remarkable planning for the future. Besides expected individual and family considerations, there is evidence of concern for how the community will change, for identifying what is “authentic” about the town and its traditions, and for realism with respect to constraints and potential negative effects as well as expected benefits. For example, while local roots are affirmed in discourse and through expenditures on celebrations, so too migrants increasing express a sense of being poor and cite what is lacking in a hometown they may laud as well. Yucatán has a long history of structural inequities, and it remains to be seen whether migration will contribute to greater overall equity or reinforce existing asymmetries, insofar as indebtedness saddles many new migrants. Several chapters stand out for elucidating key migration issues. A strong opening chapter by Lewin Fischer sets the UCSD project within existing research, and points to the transnational nature of international migration that will continue to color further research. Student researchers then share ethnographic and comparative knowledge by authoring contributions that confirm the youthful and gendered basis of migration, while also revealing unanticipated findings, including how earlier community development enabled more, not less, migration. Vignettes and interviews provide good evidence that migrants, as well as those who stay at home, are increasingly sustained as well as changed by the growing web of relationships and knowledge associated with migration. The book can also contribute to wiser U.S. immigration policy. One chapter explores the interface of internal/international migration, leading us to question the distinction which holds sway in political debates, while another concludes that current enforcement priorities contribute to longer stays while doing little to reduce unauthorized entries. A notable chapter on settlement reveals complex links between family values and family reunification as the critical role of social anchors, safety considerations, and parental investment in their children. Collectively, the network-based and increasingly transnational experiences of people from places like Tunkás are creating not just imagined communities, but imagining communities. Herein lies some of the tremendous creative potential beneath flows that are too often treated as essentially economic. Economics may be determinant, but ultimately culture and family are equally decisive. We can anticipate further valuable research in this part of Yucatan, and increasingly in the “daughter” communities created in the United States. It remains to be seen whether and how larger social and political interests in Mexico as well as the United States either build on, or constrain, people’s sense of belonging and multifaceted motivations. Potentially, research-grounded case studies such as this contribute vital insights for addressing international human movement more sensibly through multi-scale, multinational efforts.

32.50 cloth. ISBN: 9780871542748.

focus on harm reduction actions, and interpretations of short and long term gains and consequences. Following essays address the diversity of subjective and community experiences. The section titled Cultivation of Fear includes three gendered stories. Low income Latina women in Texas tell of dealing with the experience of an “at risk” pregnancy as expressed in 29 interviews carried out by Hunt and deVoogd. The authors discovered that the ambiguity of “at risk” dissipated with definitive action and intervention of amniocentesis testing. Egyptian couples searching for a test-tube baby speak of fearing impoverishment, doctors, divorce, and unnatural offspring; this is discussed by Inhorn, who has carried out classic ethnographic research in this community for many years. Oaks examines the fear-threat efforts of antiabortion advocates seeking to link abortion to increases in breast cancer risk through documentary analysis. These compelling stories highlight diverse subjective experiences of risk and risk meaning and the social processes that create assaults on trust. The Health, Safety, and Hazard section includes three essays that examine community, group, and social perspectives on experiences of risk perception, risk experience, and risk regulation. Jerome, utilizing vivid ethnographic field research, analyzes the role of WHO in the cultural politics involved in regulating traditional medicines in Fortaleza in Northeast Brazil. Satterfield, in her ethnographic and qualitative research on a technological accident that led to arsenic pollution of an African American community, studies risk discourse, remediation, and stigma that merged fear of contamination of one’s neighborhood and home with fear of racial discrimination. Harthorn, arguing for a structural violence analysis in her study of the risk subjectivities of Mexican-origin farmworkers exposed to agricultural chemicals in California, critiques behavioral interpretations of “risk takers” and “risk makers” and proposed greater focus on the production of health inequality. Regulating Risk and the Public’s Health presents three chapters on public action and discourses on risk, intended to foster social regulation through changes in public behavior. Chua, in his essay on condom use campaigns in Southeast Asia, moves well beyond Asia in drawing on comparative data to argue for a managerial explanation to understand how sex workers and truck drivers (the identified carriers cross nationally) become the subjected site for monitoring, data collection, and public campaigns in AIDS policies in order to divert attention from the inequalities of capitalist development. Bray, a participant in the anti-GMO coalition takes on the biotech companies, as she reviews EU social responses as well as the hype around vitamin enriched “golden rice”: the food industry’s golden egg perhaps. Murphy-Lawless examines how citizens stand in relation to the state through her analysis of mad cow disease, foot and mouth disease, and general elections in Britain, in an excellent paper on “how food becomes a complex source of risk and danger” and how the state, in this case Britain, responds to secure public trust (p. 226). This collection brings together contemporary stories on risk and health. Most authors strongly state their positions, although variable in their success of organizing, documenting, and presenting substantive argument. Although the papers are uneven in the quality of analysis and empirical substance, they contribute new material of contemporary relevance, with an occasional innovative formulation, for our larger social and cultural discourse on the meaning and subjective and community experience of ever dynamic environments of risk.