Organizer: University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Center for Southeast Asian Studies 

Lecture Series: Thinking Rights, Writing Justice: JSEALab Spring 2022 Lecture Series

Description:

Published in 2021, When I Was Tortured… An Ensuing Search for Justice (เมื่อผมถูกทรมาน... จึงมาตามหาความยุติธรรม Bangkok: CrCF) recounts a decade-long struggle to hold policemen in Prachinburi accountable for the 2009 torture of an unassuming young man, Ritthirong “Chopper” Chuanjit, whom they had accused of theft. It illustrates how law and administration in Thailand counter appeals for justice when state officers are accused of wrongdoing while undertaking routine work. How does it do this? And how does it hold out the possibility that from its narrative of state injustice an alternative narrative of justice might emerge? In this lecture, Nick Cheesman uses these questions to prompt a reading of When I Was Tortured that, following Paul Ricoeur, tacks back and forth between reading as the restoration of meaning and as an exercise of suspicion, or rather, demystification. Adopting the former stance, Cheesman absorbs and communicates what the book’s protagonists tell about the practice of torture in Thailand and the obstacles that have stood in the way of people like them wanting to hold torturers accountable there. Adopting the latter, he reads for what remains unsaid or unsayable about a kind of state violence that is inherently difficult to communicate and dangerous to describe. The goal of this dual reading is not to criticize the book’s authors, or query Chopper’s claims, which are by now beyond doubt. On the contrary, it is to learn, through this reading, how to write other narratives of torture in Thailand, and Myanmar.

Speaker:

Nick Cheesman is an Associate Professor in the Department of Political & Social Change, Australian National University.

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