Turning Subject Squatters into Citizen Capitalists: Land Tenure, Political Populism, and Ethnic Identity in Thailand.

In Thailand, the extension of formal property rights to squatters on state lands has been one high-profile element of the ruling Thai Rak Thai (Thais Love Thais) party's platform. The paper argues that while this neoliberal populism has been regarded as a manifestation of the recent global rise of market-centered conceptions of citizenship and approaches to rural poverty, this policy orientation preceded the rise of neoliberalism (and its Third Way reformulation) in international development circles. The paper examines the political underpinning the state's efforts to formalize rural land rights since 1960 through the lens of two strands in the literature, selectorate theory and external threat-induced models of institutional change. It finds that the threat of communism served as a catalyst for an expansion of both formal land rights and political participation. After communism ceased to be a serious threat to the Thai state, the political dynamics predicted by selectorate theory took over as driver of populist property rights policies. This has led to continued expansion of effective land rights for the rural population. However, even in Thaksin's Thailand there are limits to the production of "citizen capitalists": large numbers of so-called hill tribe farmers remain disenfranchised and their land claims unrecognized by the state. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]