Recent political events, such as the coup of 2006 or the ‘Red Shirt’ uprisings of 2010 underlined the divisions in Thai society between the provinces and the capital. As one of the world's most primate cities, Bangkok exerts a tremendous political, economic and cultural force upon the rest of Thailand. But how is such pressure interpreted, internalised and/or subverted? In this article, I look at Thailand's second-largest city, Chiang Mai, in Thailand's North, and the struggle to cure an increasing sense of urban crisis and thereby assert the former independent capital's symbolic authority vis-à-vis Bangkok. I examine this by looking at two specific discourses: that of architecture and spirit mediumship. Northern Thai architects attempt to cure Chiang Mai's ills through recourse to the ‘cultural heritage’ of the city's urban space, while spirit mediums call upon the sacred power of that space in order to restore Chiang Mai's ‘lost’ prosperity. The focal point for each effort lies at the city's centre: the Three Kings Monument and its surrounding plaza (khuang). Here, each group casts themselves as those most able to put Chiang Mai's past in physical form and thereby ensure Chiang Mai's future. In this article, I examine how ideas of cultural heritage become entwined with magico-religious concepts of power (sak). In each, there is a search for efficacious power in the face of political and cultural domination from Bangkok.

In this article, I provide a preliminary analysis of Buddhist–Muslim coexistence in the Songkhla Lake area in southern Thailand as it unfolds on the margins of a violent conflict in the Deep South (Patani, Yala and Narathiwat provinces). I argue that in the Songkhla Lake area, social, religious, economic and political alliances are reflected in multi-religious ritual traditions that have the potential to transcend cultural difference or manage difference constructively. The article then analyses the transformation of multi-religious coexistence and concludes that the revitalisation of Theravada Buddhism and Islam results in the uneasy coexistence of old and new practices and in a dialectic of sharing and competition.

The mainstream discourse on the political economy of drugs has emphasised the negative correlation between drug production and state capacity, with the presence of a thriving drugs trade seen as both a sign and a cause of weak states. Through an analysis of the drugs trade in Burma this study argues that such an approach is deeply flawed. Focusing on the period since the 1988 protests it argues that the illicit nature of the drugs trade has provided the state with an array of incentives (legal impunity, protection, money laundering) and threats (of prosecution) with which to co-opt and coerce insurgent groups over which it has otherwise commanded little authority. Although the state's involvement in the drugs trade was initially driven by an expedient desire to co-opt insurgent groups following the 1988 protests, this study also argues that over time it has provided an arena in which more immanent and largely unanticipated processes of state formation, namely the centralisation of the means of violence and extraction, have gradually been built. Rather than being a sign of corruption-induced state incapacity, the state's involvement in the drugs trade has thus become a central arena through which state power has been constructed and reproduced.