State institutions in Northeast Thailand: Lao ethnics and the Thai identity

• Main Author: RICKS, Jacob
• Format: text
• Language: English
• Published: Institutional Knowledge at Singapore Management University 2024
• Subjects: Ethnic groups; Lao identity; Thailand; Asian Studies; Political Science; Politics and Social Change; Race and Ethnicity
• Online Access: https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/soss_research/3898; https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/context/soss_research/article/5156/viewcontent/2024_RICKS_StateInstitutionsinNortheastThailand.pdf
• Institution: Singapore Management University

In this last chapter on state representation, we focus on a case where there has been an absence of demands. In Northeast Thailand, the large ethnic Lao population has not demanded cultural concessions from the state. In fact, not only have the demands been absent, but most people in the region see themselves as Thai (the broader national identity) or Isan (a moniker meaning “northeast”)—as opposed to ethnically Lao. The absence of the Lao identity has less to do with the absence of civic associations from the bottom up than with the absence of political representation from the top down. The Thai government employed a two-punch strategy. The first was the rapid elimination of the Lao ethnic identity from the state records around the turn of the 20th century. The second was the concerted effort to create a unified Thai identity through the national education system. The success of these two efforts manifests in the absence of demands today in spite of the group size in Northeast Thailand.