Category: Past Events Published Date
Date: 15 Aug 2008
Title: THE THAI MUSLIM STRUGGLE AGAINST A GAS PIPELINE
Speakers: Larry Lohmann (Cornerhouse NGO)
Event Details
The ten-year struggle of Muslim villagers in southern Thailand to resist the construction of the Trans Thai-Malaysia gas pipeline and various spin-off industries illustrates some of the ways in which ethnic, religious and environmental conflict are closely connected. While Thai elites and international investors (including most, prominently, the UK's Barclays Bank) portray the project as "socially responsible", the protesting villagers have increasingly turned to Islamic principles of waqf - land designated as given over to God and therefore available for common use - to articulate and organise opposition.
Since 1997, Larry Lohmann has worked with the Corner House, a small research and solidarity organisation based in Dorset (www.thecornerhouse.org.uk). In the 1980s he lived and worked in Thailand, mostly working with local development and environment organizations. Lohmann is co-author of Carbon Trading: A Critical Conversation on Climate Change, Privatisation and Power (2006), Pulping the South: Industrial Tree Plantations and the Global Paper Economy (1996) and Whose Common Future? Reclaiming the Commons (1993) and co-editor of The Struggle for Land and the Fate of the Forests (1993). His articles on globalisation, racism, environmental conflict in Southeast Asia and the discourses of population and neoclassical economics have appeared in journals such as Race and Class, Science as Culture; Accounting, Organizations and Society; New Scientist; Asian Survey; Red Pepper; Development; International Journal of Pollution and Environment; Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars; Development Dialogue; Foreign Policy in Focus; Development Today; Comciencia and Environmental Conservation, as well as in many scholarly books. Lohmann has degrees from Cornell and Princeton and has been a scholar in residence at Yale and the Dag Hammarskjold Foundation.
FREE ENTRANCE - ALL WELCOME
This event is organised in association with the London Islamic Network for the Environment (LINE, www.lineonweb.org.uk)
For more information, please contact Usama on 07980 834 340.