New Mandala

The outspoken public intellectual and firey social activist, Sulak Sivaraksa, has a new blog to take his brand of commentary to an online audience.  Made famous by his encounters with Thailand’s lese majeste laws in the 1980s and 1990s, Sulak has given his site the motto “loyalty demands dissent”.  This is also the title of Sulak’s 1998 autobiography.
This [...]

[Read more →]

In the aftermath of the rare double veto to reject the United Nations Security Council resolution on Burma we have seen the expected flury of comment and criticism.  That South Africa sided with Russia and China to oppose the resolution is one part of this episode that has elicited special attention.  
Inside Burma only a handful of the country’s diverse ”civil [...]

[Read more →]

This is my final comment on the UNDP’s 2007 Thailand Human Development Report (for my previous post see here). My comments in this post focus on the final chapter (”Sufficiency going forward”) which explores the ways in which the sufficiency economy approach can help to “change the direction of thinking and practice on development” in [...]

[Read more →]

As a number of New Mandala readers have reported the CNN website (or at least the relevant parts of it) appears to have been blocked in Thailand as a result of the CNN interview with Thaksin:
My sources tell me that the link you give leads to a “The page can not be displayed” in Thailand [...]

[Read more →]

Thaksin’s interview with CNN is available here (but don’t tell the junta you are watching!). And a full transcript is available here (and reproduced at the end of this post). The Nation has written about the interview and reports the decision of some Thai TV stations not to broadcast it. And the Bangkok Post has an [...]

[Read more →]