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This article considers the contexts and processes of forensic identification in 2004 post-tsunami Thailand as examples of identity politics. The presence of international forensic teams as carriers of diverse technical expertise overlapped with bureaucratic procedures put in place by the Thai government. The negotiation of unified forensic protocols and the production of estimates of identified nationals straddle biopolitics and thanatocracy. The immense identification task testified on the one hand to an effort to bring individual bodies back to mourning families and national soils, and on the other hand to determining collective ethnic and national bodies, making sense out of an inexorable and disordered dissolution of corporeal as well as political boundaries. Individual and national identities were the subject of competing efforts to bring order to,the chaos, reaffirming the cogency of the body politic by mapping national boundaries abroad. The overwhelming forensic effort required by the exceptional circumstances also brought forward the socio-economic and ethnic disparities of the victims, whose post-mortem treatment and identification traced an indelible divide between us and them.
of everything and not all behaviour fits within the framework; it is not economic determinism by another name. Indeed, this logic is often closely intertwined with, and operates alongside, other political logics, such as the logic of exclusionary identity politics ( Kaldor and de Waal, 2021 ). Moreover, political markets, like all other markets, are socially embedded; societal norms shape the market, and certain actions are clearly proscribed. In South Sudan’s civil war, for instance