New Mandala

Sometimes even members of the New Mandala team need a good serve of McGai and fries.  This Ronald “Kon Muang” McDonald greets customers in the Night “Bizarre” who swing by to “up size”.�
�
He is New Mandala’s “Clown of the WeeK”. 

[Read more →]

Just outside Pitsanulok is the delightful and well-signposted “Indochina Intersection”. 

Anybody fancy a road trip to Kunming? 

[Read more →]

Challenging Sustainability, a new book published by Marshall Cavendish, provides an interesting series of essays on the environmental and social challenges of urban life in Southeast Asia. The back cover notes that “over the next decade, Southeast Asia will complete its transition from being ovewhelmingly rural to being dominantly urban.” An interesting thought!
 

[Read more →]

Taka Furuichi is a PhD Scholar at the ANU. He is conducting fascinating research on sedimentation in the Lake Inle catchment in Burma. This is an important issue, in Burma and throughout the region, as upland agriculture is often blamed for producing downstream sedimentation. These claims are often made in the absence of good research [...]

[Read more →]

Today in a small town, where the mountains rise from the plain, the yellow shirts are out in force.  These celebrations have potency and on-going interest far from Bangkok.  I am almost expecting that for the rest of the year, up until the King’s birthday and beyond, this current generation of yellow shirts will continue [...]

[Read more →]

Local wisdom - in its various incarnations, and political guises - will remain a focus for this blog as we try to examine politics, economics and agriculture throughout rural Southeast Asia.  A flurry of stories about “local wisdom” have dominated Thai and English-language media over the past weeks.  Andrew and I will be providing some more commentary on this issue in the next [...]

[Read more →]

There are many ways to leave Bangkok.  You know, the old story: plane, train, automobile…tuk tuk.  Yesterday I made my way out of the Big Smoke in the front seat of a generic inter-provincial bus – the transport of choice for millions of lower and middle income Thais looking to get away from their primate capital. The grip of [...]

[Read more →]

One of the recurrent themes in attacks on the Thaksin government is that “populist” policies (the term often used to refer to policies that allocate resources to rural areas rather than Bangkok) have increased household debt. For example, Kasian’s important article on the political economy of the Thaksin government argues that policies such as the [...]

[Read more →]

An article by Kasian Tejapira from the New Left Review.

[Read more →]

Here is an interesting summary (in Thai) that provides the truth about Thaksin! It has been prepared by the Academic Network of Ubon Ratchatani University. An accessible two column format with popular beliefs about Thaksin set against the “real” situation. Note that in the heading Thaksin is referred to as “Maew Maew.” “Maew” is a rather derogatory Thai [...]

[Read more →]