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Research Interests: My research takes place in Thailand, primarily in Bangkok, and concerns the reception of human rights there. This involves, on the one hand, examining how a set of imperatives that move through international institutions and networks becomes (or fails to become) ‘domesticated’ in Thailand, while on the other hand, recognizing what sorts of political strategies have a place for, or are sustained by human rights. In contrast to the dominant debate about human rights (taken up by universalists and cultural relativists), this approach looks at the specificity of uses of human rights, how the authority of international institutions is invoked or rejected, and how ethical authority of human rights may be grounded or denied with respect to those specific uses and strategies. That is to say, the call to human rights or their rejection will generally have some local, immediate specificity, and appeal to particular justifying precepts, even while issues of universality and relativism may figure in either of these moves. My interest is to start from these uses and, through attending to them, to try to understand the grammar of human rights in Thailand. |
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