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1. Fighting for the Disability Rights through Vernacularization in Bangkok

Author:
Swe Zin Linn Phyu
Publication Date:
12-2019
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
Review of Human Rights
Institution:
Society of Social Science Academics (SSSA)
Abstract:
In many non-Western societies there are still challenges to the legibility, and hence applicability, of international human rights law. This is partly due to the gap between Western legal regime and local cultural contexts. However, with the process of vernacularization some of this gap has been bridged, especially in issues of relating to women rights. This paper explores how NGOs and Human Rights defenders in Bangkok have adopted the process of vernacularization to enhance disability rights.
Topic:
Human Rights, International Law, Disability, and NGOs
Political Geography:
Asia, Thailand, Southeast Asia, and Bangkok

2. Uneven Humanitarianism: Abandoned Refugees along the Thai-Myanmar Border

Author:
Tani Sebro
Publication Date:
12-2016
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
Review of Human Rights
Institution:
Society of Social Science Academics (SSSA)
Abstract:
This essay considers the case of uneven humanitarian aid distribution along the Thai-Myanmar border, where forcibly displaced migrants from Myanmar have been abandoned by the UNHCR and international humanitarian organizations. Based upon long-term ethnographic fieldwork along the Thai-Myanmar border amongst Tai migrants from the Shan State in Myanmar, I attend to the effects of the inequitable distribution of rights and privileges in an international humanitarian system that is predicated on the neoliberal logic of uneven development. After two centuries of British colonial occupation and later Burman authoritarian rule, the ethnic minority groups along the Thai-Myanmar border are now facing another crisis – that of abandonment as NGOs search for new and more pressing humanitarian disasters elsewhere. The essay addresses a concept I call uneven humanitarianism as a neocolonial condition for peoples living in the Thai-Myanmar borderlands by specifically focusing on Tai peoples who are living in unofficial refugee camps that lost foreign funding in 2017. I argue that the ad hoc treatment and eventual abandonment of these vulnerable groups – that are currently in the midst of the world’s most protracted civil war and displacement situation – constitutes a failure of the “responsibility to protect” humanitarian project.
Topic:
Refugees, Displacement, NGOs, and Humanitarian Crisis
Political Geography:
Asia, Thailand, Southeast Asia, and Myanmar