• DOI:10.1080/10357820308713381
• Corpus ID: 144927656

Forging solidarity and identity in the assembly of the poor: from local struggles to a national social movement in Thailand

@article{Missingham2003ForgingSA,
  title={Forging solidarity and identity in the assembly of the poor: from local struggles to a national social movement in Thailand},
  author={Bruce David Missingham},
  journal={Asian Studies Review},
  year={2003},
  volume={27},
  pages={317 - 340}
}

• B. Missingham
• Published 1 September 2003
• Political Science
• Asian Studies Review

Philip Hirsch (1997a; 1997b; Hirsch and Warren 1998) has pointed out that environmental movements in Thailand and elsewhere in Southeast Asia are largely based in local struggles by the poor to defend their livelihoods and access to local resources. For such poor, less powerful groups, environmental discourse has provided an ideological means for villagers to seek to legitimate their claims over land and other resources, and to make alliances with other local groups and outside social forces such as environmental non-government organisations (NGOs). But Hirsch sees such alliances between rural groups, urban-based institutions and middle-class NGOs as contingent and transient, involving "a coalescence of diverse social actors that has ultimately proven short-lived" (Hirsch 1997a, 192). He characterises environmental action in Thailand as diverse, fragmented and unorganised. Precisely because environmentalism is grounded in widespread local conflicts, Hirsch argues that this militates against the emergence of "a unified and entrenched environmental movement" (1997a, 192). In other words, Hirsch doubts that grassroots movements based on diverse local conditions and cross-class alliances will be able to establish shared material interests or cohesive ideological goals that will unify and sustain them in the longer term. This doubt raises important issues for environmental and grassroots movements in Thailand and elsewhere in the Third World.