| Date | Time | Location |
|---|---|---|
| Monday, March 12, 2018 | 4:00PM - 6:00PM | Seminar Room 208N, 1 Devonshire Place |
Abstract:
Max Weber famously characterized the state as the entity holding the monopoly on legitimate violence in the polity. What if, instead, the state is formed through the exercise of impunity, or the persistent and repeated failure to be held to account for illegitimate violence? In this paper, I develop a framework of impunity as state formation grounded in a new history of post-absolutist Thailand. Three key moments since the end of the absolute monarchy in 1932 – a 1958 coup that claimed to respect the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, an investigation into state violence at the height of the Cold War that enhanced its cover-up, and the emergence of a dialectic of who can be killed with impunity and who cannot be impugned in the late reign of Rama IX – are key components of this history and invite new approaches to the study of law, human rights, and sovereignty.
Biography:
Tyrell Haberkorn is an Associate Professor of Asian Languages and Cultures at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and writes about state violence and dissident cultural politics in Thailand. She is the author of Revolution Interrupted: Farmers, Students, Law and Violence in Northern Thailand (University of Wisconsin Press, 2011) and In Plain Sight: Impunity and Human Rights in Thailand (University of Wisconsin Press, 2018). Her essays and translations have appeared in Dissent, Foreign Affairs, openDemocracy, and Prachatai.
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