PUBLICATIONS : "Strategic Engagement and Legal Pluralism: Navigating Knowledge and Expertise in Mining Disputes Author".

Publication Date :25 June 2026

Author: Sara K. Phillips

For further details on the article, visit the journal at

https://so08.tcithaijo.org/index.php/ssjpolsci/article/view/5038

Abstract

This article explores how community and civil society actors in mining conflicts strategically engage with legal and technical vocabularies to assert legitimacy, contest exclusion, and influence mining governance. Drawing on an empirical case study of Thailand's Chatree gold mine, the article analyzes how affected groups navigate overlapping normative systems, such as state law, transnational norms, and technocratic discourses, through informal learning and strategic appropriation of expert language. Framed through the conceptual lens of legal pluralism, the study highlights how actors interpret and mobilize diverse normative orders to articulate grievances, shape narratives, and attempt to gain access to decision-making spaces. These engagements unfold across scalar dimensions, from local to international levels, reflecting both selective alignment with, and resistance to, dominant legal and institutional frameworks. By foregrounding norm contestation and plural authority, the article contributes to socio-legal scholarship on resource conflict, illustrating how actors operate in contexts of institutional distrust to advance alternative visions of justice, development, and legitimacy in sites of mineral resource development.

PUBLICATIONS : "From Centralized Development to Local Dissent: Spatial Contestation in Ranong’s Landbridge under Southern Economic Corridor".

Publication Date :19 June 2026

Author: Wipawadee Phanyangnoi

For further details on the article, visit the journal at

https://so05.tcithaijo.org/index.php/polscicmujournal/article/view/282745

Abstract

The Landbridge, positioned as one of Thailand’s flagship infrastructure initiatives, aims to establish a strategic connection between deep-sea ports on the Andaman coast and the Gulf of Thailand through an integrated multimodal transport corridor. Like many national megaprojects, it embodies a centralized development paradigm, resulting in violations of community rights and long-term socio-environmental impacts. Focusing on the Ao Ang (Ranong) – Laem Rio (Chumphon) Landbridge, this article critically examines the policy trajectory, highlighting the predetermined nature of the master plan. The analysis draws on the conceptual frameworks of place-based development to examine how national infrastructure policies generate uneven spatial outcomes at the local level. Methodologically, the study adopts a qualitative research approach, combining data collection with the observation of everyday political practices to inform and shape the analysis. Through the lens of everyday politics, it illustrates how power is reproduced and contested across scales, from entrenched centralized authority to localized patronage networks. Ranong, a region with an ecologically fragile, resource-based economy, large-scale infrastructure projects contradict the territorial ecology and community potential. Public participation is constrained not only by top-down planning but also by local socio-political structures. The article shows how everyday resistance, through collective mobilization and subtle acts, serves as a strategy to contest imposed development and challenge entrenched power. The study argues that public policy analysis must move beyond centralized decision-making and engage with local dynamics that influence policy outcomes. Achieving spatial justice requires more than policy reform; it demands a fundamental restructuring of political space to allow communities meaningful participation in their own development.

PUBLICATIONS:"Territorialization-from-below: Community-rooted strategies towards public authority in Kamoethway, Myanmar".

Publication Date: 16 June 2026

Authors: Naw Pe The Law

For further details on the article, visit the journal at

https://journals.librarypublishing.arizona.edu/jpe/article/id/8618/

Abstract

This article analyses territorialization 'from-above' and 'from-below' in Kamoethway, Tanintharyi Region in relation to the public authorities of the Karen National Union (KNU) and changing Myanmar governments. Fieldwork in Karen villages of the Kamoethway area details how community-based organizations and community leaders organized a social movement, documented situated knowledge, and claimed rights to govern territory locally including resources and land, which we term 'territorialization-from-below'. We analyze how strategies of resistance, consent and co-option empowered Kamoethway communities after the 2012 ceasefire. However, following the 2021 coup, while KNU's public authority expanded, community-based activism reduced due to the ongoing conflict, KNU security policies, and restrictions on civil freedoms.

PUBLICATIONS: “A Critical Sister: Public Authority and the Role and Position of the Karen Women’s Organisation, Myanmar”.

Publication Date: 11 February 2026

Authors: Naw Pe The Law

For further details on the article, visit the journal at

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/08912432251415175

Abstract

The role of women’s organizations in producing public authority, and, conversely, the role of public authority in (re)producing gender norms, is often overlooked. Drawing on the case of the Karen Women’s Organisation (KWO) serving the Karen National Union (KNU) and the Karen people in Myanmar, we aim to understand how the gendered work of women’s organizations and women are included and excluded, as well as recognized and invisibilized, in the performance of public authority. We demonstrate that KWO acts as a critical sister, playing a vital role in co-producing KNU’s legitimacy through public service provision and revolutionary support, while simultaneously walking a fine line by criticizing the dominant patriarchal norms. At the same time, reflecting wider societal gender power structures, KWO’s work is often invisibilized in a male-dominated organization, and women remain excluded from key areas of public authority, including high-level decision-making and land and forest governance. We argue that these exclusions and invisibilizations reproduce masculine domination in the exercise of public authority and affect gender inequality in Karen society. Such findings underscore the importance of acknowledging the significant contributions of women’s organizations in producing public authority to challenge patriarchal norms and to more firmly center gender within future research on public authority.

PUBLICATIONS:"Multispecies relations on the green frontier: Care/care dynamics and Dayak Iban–orangutan coexistence in West Kalimantan.”

Publication Date: 05 Aug 2026

Authors: Hanna Nur Afifah Yogar

For further details on the article, visit the journal at

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/1683478X.2026.2706969

Abstract

This thesis examines shifting human–nonhuman coexistence amid global conservation mandates and agrarian capitalism in West Kalimantan, Indonesia. Drawing on multispecies ethnography within two Dayak Iban communities bordering Betung Kerihun and Danau Sentarum National Parks, it investigates how the contemporary green frontier alters historical relationships with the Mayas (orangutan). Fortress conservation and palm oil capitalism operate as mutually reinforcing mechanisms of state-sanctioned territorialization, executing a slow violence that unmakes indigenous, multispecies lifeworlds. Conceptually, the study introduces a Care/care dualism to unpack frontier governance. It contrasts techno-managerial, state-enforced “Care” with vernacular, relational “care”—the ancestral kinships and spiritual taboos sustaining multispecies coexistence. This framework exposes how top-down regimes dismantle local practices, reducing the Mayas from an ancestral relative into an administrative metric. Fundamentally, this thesis demonstrates that development outcomes are inherently multispecies phenomena. Rejecting techno-managerial fixes, it argues that genuine socio-ecological repair requires a longue durée perspective that recognizes cumulative historical disruptions. Ultimately, it positions relationality as the foundation for recovery, advocating for a commitment that honors lived, historical entanglements and actively restores multispecies agency to rebuild the frontier’s fractured kinships.