Editor’s Note: In this second part, the author proposes “Asian labour as a method” for a new, labour-centred historiography, viewing labour as a social change agent essential for understanding global capitalism’s totality. This approach rejects Eurocentrism and single-origin theories by demonstrating the interconnected role of global labour forms (waged and expropriated) in systemic formation.

(To read the First Part of this article, please click here)

Asian labour as a method for a new historiography 

By taking Marx’s incomplete but substantial epistemological shift as our new point of departure, I propose Asian labour as a method to overcome the nineteenth-century frame that still shapes academic discourse on Asia’s place in global capitalism and, more importantly, limits activist imagination for building transformative strategies to improve the welfare of East Asian workers. This labour-centred historiography of Asia is what I call the Continent of Labour. This approach departs from Euro- and capital-centric historiography to develop a labour-centred account of Asia and the global economy—one that recognises Asia and other regions as “continents of labour,” whose working populations have together built global capitalism and shaped world history.

The Continent of Labour approach has three critical implications for studying capitalist development within and beyond Asia. First, it problematises rather than celebrates the rise of East Asia and thereby offers a very different starting point for analysing East Asian capitalism compared to the global factory literature. The emergence of East Asia as a global factory and a growth engine of global capitalism is due, among other things, to the region’s emergence as a hub of global labour exploitation and expropriation. Only by problematising can we overcome the epistemological flaw of the global factory literature, which, fascinated by numbers showing what and how much is produced, has failed to see the giant lurking behind Asia’s dazzling economic growth: labour. This shift of focus allows us to ask how Asia’s emergence as a global factory—and the uneven and unequal nature of this process—relates to the quantitative, qualitative, and geographical changes in labour and employment.

Secondly, this approach enables us to see labour as an agent of social change shaping Asia’s capitalist development and, by extension, global capitalism. Labour is not only a rediscovered object of inquiry but also a window into Asia. This means we move beyond seeing labour in Asia and begin seeing Asia through labour. Bringing back labour’s agency into Asia’s history of capitalist development allows us to understand the forms and phases of that development not as mere consequences of capital investment, financial flows, or state interventions but as historical constructs shaped through interactions between labour and other domestic and international forces. In this regard, the bottom line is that Asian capitalist development (and global capitalist development) would have taken different shapes without the agency of Asian labour.

Third, seeing Asia through labour allows us to rebuild the totality of global capitalism because it is labour that connects Asia’s capitalist economies to one another and to the global system. The basic thesis of the Continent of Labour is that capitalism as a global totality requires connections between continents of socio-economic communities—and connections require labour on both sides to work for the whole. Labour is the fundamental condition for the socio-economic linkages between diverse continents of labour and thus a basic requirement for the formation of the global totality itself. The historical complexity of capitalism as a global totality is constituted by the different forms of labour that have worked for global capitalism in different parts of the world and, in so doing, mediated their connections to one another. Focusing on the connectedness created by labour, this historiography departs from methodological nationalism in mainstream understandings of global capitalist development, which attribute development to social interactions within nation-state boundaries.¹

If we acknowledge the connectedness between economies through labour, it becomes clear that Asia has not existed as “the other” outside European capitalism—at least not since the emergence of global capitalism in its infancy. This focus on connectedness forged through labour enables us to move beyond Eurocentric diffusionism, which portrays the history of global capitalism as the diffusion of European national capitalisms into the non-capitalist economies of the rest of the world. Such diffusionism also applies to labour: how capitalist relations and wage labour originated in Europe, facilitated the accumulation of capital within Europe, and subsequently expanded outward to supplant so-called “traditional” social relations and various forms of non- or semi-waged labour in the non-European world.

This diffusionist exposition of global capitalism begins with an understanding of the origins of capitalism up to the sixteenth century shaped by what Blaut calls “tunnel vision,” which fails to recognise “the history of the world outside Europe as the cause of changes within Europe.”² Marxist historian Robert Brenner, for example, traces the origin of capitalism “to a single geographical region—the English countryside,” where he observes a transformation of class relations and production.³ For him, capitalism originated in the “half-successful” class struggles of English peasants that led to “the dissolution of both serfdom and entrenched peasant property.”⁴ Brenner maintains that the subsequent emergence of new social property relations—built on a tripartite agrarian division between landlord, capitalist tenant, and impoverished agricultural wage workers in the late fifteenth century—propelled large-scale farm operations, significant capital inputs, and technological advance, resulting in an agrarian capitalism that distinguished England from all other European and global socio-economic communities once and for all.⁵ For Brenner, “a system of free wage labour where labour is a commodity” is the hallmark of capitalism.⁶ 

The distinctive feature of England’s transition to capitalism, in Brenner’s account, is that it was locally generated. The world market played a role by creating external demand during the transition from agrarian to industrial capitalism.⁷ However, external demand was a condition created not only for England; thus, it was undoubtedly secondary to the “already favourable social-productive or class relations” within England.⁸ Consequently, in Brenner’s historiography, the expropriated labour of Africa, Latin America, and Asia—both before and after the establishment of European capitalism—is neither “true” capitalist labour nor an essential, integral part of the emergence of capitalism.

This single-origin theory of capitalism results not only in disconnecting the diverse forms of labour that were historically linked in the making of global capitalism, but also in constructing an implicit hierarchy between workers living and working within the same historical moments of capitalist formation—often according to geographical, racial, or developmental differences. The implicit colonial hierarchy between expropriated “pre-modern” labour and exploited “modern” labour continues to be reproduced in accounts of postcolonial development and underdevelopment, now recast as a hierarchy between an “abnormal” peripheral labour force creating “underdevelopment” and a “normal” capitalist and industrial labour force creating “development.”

This perspective conflates the centrality of capital relations and wage labour in the capitalist world system—relations that are contingent and historically diverse—with their necessity,⁹ thereby failing to recognise the broader spectrum of labour forms involved in constructing the system. As Patel and Moore argue, the free labourers of the British Industrial Revolution depended on American agricultural products, and every global factory relied on global plantations.¹⁰ Behind Manchester, which led the Industrial Revolution through its cotton textile industry employing wage labour, stood Mississippi, which supplied cotton through Black slave labour.¹¹ In a nutshell, the European waged workforce—exploited to produce surplus value that allowed capital accumulation—was connected to the slaves and Indigenous peoples of Asia, Africa, and Latin America, who were expropriated to generate profits for European capitalism. Different modes of labour-surplus extraction were being created simultaneously in different places, connected rather than separated from one another. While wage labour is crucial to the extraction of surplus value, capitalism has historically evolved as a system capable of extracting surplus through a variety of methods, ranging from expropriation to exploitation. Although wage labour is a dominant mechanism within this spectrum, it is neither inevitable nor exclusive.¹²

Beyond Peipheralism 

The Continent of Labour perspective urges us to reconstruct the Asian and global history of capitalism with proper recognition of the contradictory roles played by Asia’s vast workforce throughout colonialism, Cold War industrialisation, and neoliberal globalisation—a workforce that not only built global capitalism but also challenged and thereby shaped it. Asian labour participated in the uneven and simultaneous making of global capitalism as a constitutive component, generating colonial profits during the colonial era. Unlike earlier Spanish and Portuguese intrusion, which aimed at securing Europe’s participation in east–west trade and had to compete with Asia’s booming commercial, colonialism in Asia from the seventeenth century onwards—led by the Netherlands, Britain, and France—gradually destroyed the intra-continental connections maintained by Asian economies and created an inter-continental colonial division of labour between Asian colonies supplying raw materials and Europe’s emerging industrial. 

Meanwhile, the China-centred tributary interstate order was also dismantled by the colonial expansion of European capitalism. After China’s defeat in the Opium War, its declining hegemony over East Asia was replaced by European empires and by an emerging Japan, which embraced European modernity and pursued state-led industrialisation. Japan’s imperial expansion led to the colonisation of Joseon Korea and Taiwan and the occupation of Manchuria, turning these regions into production hinterlands dependent on cheap agrarian and industrial labour and on producing low-cost goods.

The inter-continental division of labour generated colonial profits through the expropriation and exploitation of Asian labour, expanded the monetary economy across Asia, and destroyed local relations of production.¹³ Early colonial profits were generated through surplus extraction from subsistence peasants working under various colonial cultivation systems,¹⁴ while profits at the height of colonialism were produced in multiple ways: by smallholders experiencing colonial primitive accumulation, by migrant labourers bound to plantations and mines, and by wage labourers employed in limited colonial industrial facilities.¹⁵ While playing a constitutive role in the formation of capitalism by feeding Europe’s industrial expansion from the eighteenth to the twentieth century, most of the colonised population did not experience immediate integration into capitalist relations; and those who did rarely fit the narrow definition of capitalist labour as “free” wage labour, as they were subjected to various physical restraints and private punishments.

Asian workers, however, were not silent toilers. If they had been, Asians would still be living as colonial subjects today. Asian workers fought brutal imperialist powers. Nearly every community in Asia has a history of forming anti-imperialist trade unions and peasant organisations and of seeking alternatives to colonial capitalist development. Many communities across the continent share histories of successful struggles that removed colonial regimes and gained independence from powerful empires. Often, these struggles were directed not only against the peripheral nature of capitalist development but also toward diverse alternatives to that development.

During the Cold War industrialisation period, labour in Asia’s newly industrialising countries (NICs) was co-constituting the post-war boom in the global North by producing cheap consumer goods for American and European markets. While most post-colonial Asian economies remained primary commodity producers based on what colonialism left behind, the working populations of Asian NICs—such as Taiwan, Singapore, South Korea, and Hong Kong—laboured for emerging export manufacturers participating in the new international division of labour under patriarchal and authoritarian developmentalist states. These states prioritised disciplining young workers, particularly women from rural backgrounds, to toil in harsh and dangerous labour processes. It was this labour regime that dominated industrialisation in East Asia until the democratisation wave of the 1980s and that underpinned the post-war boom and the welfare of consumer-workers in the global North. Workers endured extremely long working hours, horrendous working conditions, and low wages. Hundreds of thousands died in unsafe work environments, and many were denied opportunities for education and self-fulfilment. 

Yet workers in those America’s East Asian allies were not merely the industrious “warriors” depicted in development myths. They were also progressive democracy-builders. Trade unions continued to emerge despite violent state repression. By the 1980s, they had begun to demand not only political democracy but also economic democracy, and they initiated democratisation in at least two of the most brutal developmentalist regimes in East Asia—regimes led by dictators whom developmental state theorists still praise today. In South Korea and Taiwan, ordinary workers became an important force behind the pro-democracy movements from the 1970s onward.¹⁶ Historically and empirically, they have demonstrated that there is no long-standing anti-democratic tradition in East Asia, contrary to the claims of political leaders in the region and the advocates of oriental despotism.

During more recent neoliberal globalisation, Asian labour was a key to the making of global neoliberalism built upon a temporary and awkward combination between Asia’s hyper-economic growth and the American rhetoric of freedom, democracy, and good governance. Neoliberalism as a doctrine of economic development was never genuinely popular or efficient, as its introduction produced rising inequality within and between national economies through austerity, the Third World debt crisis, and the East Asian economic crisis of 1997–1998. The early failures of neoliberalism provoked an emerging anti-globalisation movement across the world. In response to these challenges, neoliberalism integrated the agendas of good governance, poverty reduction, and environmental sustainability into the so-called post-Washington Consensus and “inclusive” neoliberalism. 

However, it was not this revision of neoliberalism but Asia—particularly China—that prevented neoliberalism’s premature death. By aggressively pursuing export-oriented industrialisation and supplying transnational corporations, especially those from East Asia, with tens of millions of rural migrant workers, China grew by 10 percent annually from 1998 to 2007, leading East Asian and global economic recovery. At the same time, Chinese export industries supported the livelihoods of poor American workers by providing cheap consumer goods.

Underpinning global neoliberalism until the global financial crisis of 2007–2008 with the sheer number of the new capitalist workforce, Asia finally became an undisputed continent of labour for global capitalism. Yet it was not the quantitative expansion of Asia’s workforce that sustained global neoliberalism. At the heart of global neoliberalism was Asia’s labour “paradox”: workers in Asia—especially in developing countries—bear little resemblance to the archetypal industrial working class that once enjoyed stable and protected employment in the heartlands of global capitalism during the post-war “golden age.” The rise of Asia rested on a segmented working class comprising a diverse range of informal labourers working in neoliberal sweatshops, swidden fields, plantations, and on the streets, unmasking the “humanitarian” face of capitalist development. This Asian labour continues to underpin the global economy today.

Asian workers also acted upon the labour “paradox” of East Asia’s neoliberal development. Early struggles for dignity by the newly created precarious workforce were often isolated and lacked solidarity from established labour institutions. Yet Asian workers have continued to assert agency through a wildflower-like pattern of labour activism—spontaneous, autonomous acts of resistance undertaken by the marginalised and oppressed, who fall outside the narrow constituency of “legacy” trade unions. Emerging across both formal and informal economies, and in both rural and urban settings, these acts recur despite repression, disappearing and reappearing like wildflowers. Often dismissed as sporadic or ineffective, they nonetheless hold transformative potential, particularly when state repression of such activism begins to erode authoritarian legitimacy.

Wildflower resistance has surfaced across the region, from relatively open societies to brutal military regimes, marked by its ubiquity and resilience. Examples include the mobilisation of garment workers in Cambodia;¹⁷ youth protests and unionisation in Hong Kong;¹⁸ workers’ organising and participation in Myanmar’s civil disobedience movement;¹⁹ street demonstrations, workplace occupations, and strikes in Indonesia;²⁰ the self-organisation of irregular workers in South Korea;²¹ wildcat strikes by migrant workers in China and Vietnam;²² activism among precarious youth in Taiwan and China;²³ and poor people’s movements and youth protests against the military in Thailand.²⁴

Outcomes vary: some struggles face violent suppression; others falter due to union indifference; still others gain momentum, especially when linked to broader social movements and unions. While patterns differ, the key lies in creating a virtuous cycle of collaboration—self-mobilisation by irregular and precarious workers, active engagement from unions, and wider support networks involving civil society. Though dispersed and seemingly spontaneous, wildflower resistance, when nurtured and connected, carries the potential to become a transformative force for Asia’s precarious working classes.

This diverse labour activism in Asia, together with the long history of exploitation, demonstrates that Asian workers have never been merely a peripheral workforce but have been central to shaping global capitalism’s current and future landscape. If Asian labour is not labour at the margins but labour underpinning global capitalism, and if Asia’s capitalism is not external or peripheral to global capitalism but constitutive of it, then there is no justification for Asia’s labour experts—researchers and activists alike—to fix their eyes on European and North American labour in search of models for the future. As Fanon once said, if we want to build our future according to Europe, perhaps we should “entrust the destinies of our countries to the Europeans.”²⁵ 

The future is to be found in Asian history—richer and larger than European history, where existing norms of employment relations, labour movements, and trade unionism were forged. It is time for these norms to be rethought altogether. We must find our norms in Asian workers’ wildcat strikes rather than in institutionalised collective negotiations in advanced economies; in the history of anti-imperial struggles of Asian workers rather than the history of co-option and collaboration of Europe’s organised labour in imperial projects; in the fights against Asia’s brutal authoritarian states rather than unions’ incorporation into welfare states. Asia’s labour movements should not be understood as peripheral movements whose strategy must be geared toward mimicking labour movements at the “core.” Asian labour has always been a constituent of global capitalism. The historiography of the Continent of Labour urges us to move away from the deeply rooted “peripheralism” limiting our imagination of the future of Asian labour. This peripheralism has made us see Asian labour as somehow “abnormal” and backward compared to labour in the global North. It has told us that Asian labour must first be made as “normal” and “contemporary” as labour in the global North before we can even imagine moving further. In this old frame, Asian labour is condemned to remain in the past. It is time for labour movements in Asia to say: this is it; this is the capitalist labour the world actually has; this is the “normal” labour the labour movement is supposed to organise. We need a strategy that begins by recognising Asian labour as normal rather than abnormal, central rather than peripheral. It is not someone else’s labour but Asian labour that has its hands on the throat of global capitalism.

Notes:

1. For critiques of methodological nationalism, see Chernilo, Daniel. 2006. “Social theory’s methodological nationalism: Myth and reality.” European Journal of Social Theory, 9(1): 5–22; Van der Linden, Marcel 2008. Workers of the world: Essays toward a global labor history. Leiden: Brill; Wallerstein, I. 1992. “The Concept of National Development, 1917-1989: Elegy and Requiem.” The American Behavioral Scientist 35 (4/5): 517-529; Wimmer, Andreas and Schiller, Nina Glick. 2002. “Methodological nationalism and beyond: Nation-state building, migration and the social sciences.” Global Networks, 2 (4): 301–334.  ↩︎
2. Blaut, J. M. 1994. “Robert Brenner in the tunnel of time.” Antipode 26(4): 351-352. ↩︎
3. Anievas, Alexander, and Kerem Nişancıoğlu. 2015. How the West came to rule. London: Pluto Press,., 23. For Brenner’s Eurocentric diffusionism see Brenner, Robert. 1977. “The origins of capitalist development: A critique of neo-Smithian Marxism.” New Left Review, 1(104): 25–92; 
   Brenner, Robert. 1985a. “Agrarian Class Structure and Economic Development in Pre-Industrial Europe.” In Aston, T. and Philpin, C. (eds.) The Brenner Debate: Agrarian Class Structure and Economic Development in Pre-Industrial Europe. Cambridge University Press: 10-63; Brenner, Robert. 1985b. “The agrarian roots of European capitalism.” In The Brenner debate: Agrarian class structure and economic development in pre-industrial Europe, edited by T. Aston and C. Philpin, pp. 213–328. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ↩︎
4. Brenner 1977. 76. ↩︎
5. Brenner 1985a, 49. ↩︎
6. Heller, Henry. 2011. The birth of capitalism: A twenty-first-century perspective. London: Pluto Press, 84. ↩︎
7. Brenner 1977, 76. ↩︎
8. Brenner 1977, 76. ↩︎
9. Selwyn, Benjamin. 2012. “Beyond firm-centrism: Re-integrating labour and capitalism into global commodity chain analysis.” Journal of Economic Geography, 12(1): 205–226, 211. ↩︎
10. Patel, Raj, and Jason W. Moore. 2017. A history of the world in seven cheap things: A guide to capitalism, nature, and the future of the planet. Berkeley: University of California Press, 101–104. ↩︎
11. Fraser, Nancy. 2023. Carnival capitalism: How our system is devouring democracy, care, and the planet – and what we can do about it. London: Verso, 35. ↩︎
12. Anievas and Nişancioğlu 2015: 218. See also Banaji, Jairus. 2010. Theory as history: Essays on mode of production and exploitation. Leiden: Brill, 4–5; Fraser 2023: 7–8; Tomich, Dale W. 2004. Through the prism of slavery: Labor, capital, and world economy. New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 54. ↩︎
13. Elson, Robert E. 1992. The politics of colonial exploitation: Java, the Dutch, and the cultivation system. Ithaca: Cornell Southeast Asia Programme; Fasseur, Cornelis. 1986. “The Cultivation System and its Impact on the Dutch Colonial Economy and the Indigenous Society in Nineteenth-Century Java.” In C. A. Bayly and D. H. A. Kolff (eds.), Two Colonial Empires: Comparative Essays on the History of India and Indonesia in the Nineteenth Century (pp. 137-154). Dordrecht: Springer Netherlands.  ↩︎
14. Breman, Jan. 1983. Control of land and labour in colonial Java. Dordrecht: Foris Publication; Elson, Robert E. 1997. The end of the peasantry in Southeast Asia: A social and economic history of peasant livelihood, 1800–1990s. Basingstoke: Macmillan. ↩︎
15. Breman, Jan. 1989. Taming the collie beast: Plantation society and the colonial order in South East Asia. Oxford: Oxford University Press; Datta, Anindita. 2021. Fleeting agencies: A social history of Indian coolie women in British Malaya. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press; Kaur, Amarjit. 2004. “Labour dynamics in the plantation and mining sector.” In Becky Elmhirst and Ratna Sapptari (eds.), Labour in Southeast Asia: Labour processes in a globalised world, London: RoutledgeCurzon; Wolf, Eric. R. 1982. Europe and the People Without History. University of California Press.  ↩︎
16. Chang, Dae-oup. 2022b. “Korean labour movement: The birth, rise and transformation of the democratic trade union movement.” In Sojin Lim and Niki J.P. Alsford (eds.), Routledge handbook of contemporary South Korea (pp.159–174). London: Routledge; Hsiao, Hsin-Ming. 1992. “The labor movement in Taiwan: A retrospective and prospective look.” In Denny Roy Simon and Michael Y. M. Kau (eds.), Taiwan: Beyond the economic miracle. Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe; Koo, Hagen. 2001. Korean workers: The cultural and politics of class formation. Ithaca: Cornell University Press; Minns, John and Robert Tierney. 2003. “The labour movement in Taiwan.” Labour History, 85: 103–128. ↩︎
17. Asia Monitor Resource Centre (AMRC). 2014. A week that shook Cambodia: The hope, anger and despair of Cambodian workers after the general strike and violent crackdown.  http://www.amrc.org.hk/sites/default/files/FFM-Cambodia-Report-022014-amrc_0.pdf; Arnold, Dennis. 2017. “Civil Society, Political Society and Politics of Disorder in Cambodia.” Political Geography 60: 23-33; Salmivaara, Anna. 2018. “New governance of labour rights: The perspective of Cambodian garment workers’ struggles.” Globalizations, 15(3): 329–346. ↩︎
18. Au, Loong-Yu. 2020. Hong Kong in Revolt: The Protest Movement and the Future of China. Pluto Press.  ↩︎
19. Arnold, Dennis and Stephen Campbell. 2017. “Labour Regime Transformation in Myanmar: Constitutive Processes of Contestation.” Development and Change, 48(4): 801-824; Campbell, Stephen. 2020. “In Post-Coup Myanmar, Workers Assert Workplace Democracy amid Suspension of Electoral Rule.” Asian Labour Review. https://labourreview.org/in-post-coup-myanmar-workers-assert-workplace-democracy-amid-suspension-of-electoral-rule/  ↩︎
20. Caraway, Teri L. and Michele Ford. 2020. Labour and politics in Indonesia. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press; Panimbang, Fahmi and Abu Mufakhir. 2018. “Labour Strikes in Post-Authoritarian Indonesia, 1998-2013.” In Nowak, Jörg, Madhumita Dutta, and Peter Birke (eds.). Workers’ Movements and Strikes in the Twenty-First Century: A Global Perspective (pp. 21-44). Rowman and Littlefield Publishers. ↩︎
21. Lee, Byoung-Hoon. 2016. “Worker militancy at the margins: Struggles of non-regular workers in South Korea.” Development and Society, 45(1): 1–37; Lee, Yoonkyung 2021. “Labor Movements in Neoliberal Korea: Organizing Precarious Workers and Inventing New Repertoires of Contention.” Korea Journal, 61(4), 44-74; Yun, Aelim. 2022. “Transportation workers’ mobilization against the gig economy: Korea”. In Immanuel Ness (Ed.), Platform Labour and Global Logistics (pp. 153-166). London: Routledge. ↩︎
22. Buckley, Joe. 2022. Vietnamese labour militancy: Capital–labour antagonisms and self-organised struggles. London: Routledge; Do, Quynh Chi. 2017. “The regional coordination of strikes and the challenge for union reform in Vietnam.” Development and Change, 48(5): 1052–1068; Leung. Pak Nang and Ngai Pun. 2009. “The Radicalisation of the New Chinese Working Class: a case study of collective action in the gemstone industry.” Third World Quarterly, 30(3): 551-565;  Pringle, Tim. 2015. “Labour as an agent of change: The case of China.” In Lucia Pradella and Thomas Marois (eds.), Polarising development: Alternatives to neoliberalism and the crisis (pp. 192–202). London: Pluto Press; Tran, Angie N, Jennifer Bair, and Marion Werner. 2017. “Forcing change from the outside? The role of trade-labour linkages in transforming Vietnam’s labour regime.” Competition and Change, 21(5): 397-416.  ↩︎
23. Ho, Ming-sho. 2020. “From unionism to youth activism: Taiwan’s politics of working hours.” China Information, 34(3): 406-426;  Friedman, Eli. 2022. “Foxconn’s Great Escape.” Asian Labour Review.  https://labourreview.org/foxconns-great-escape/ ↩︎
24. Baker, Chris. 2000. “Assembly of the poor: Background, drama, reaction.” Southeast Asia Research, 8(1): 5–29; Horatanakun, Akanit. 2024. “The network origin of Thailand’s youth movement.” Democratization, 31(3): 531-550;  McCargo, Duncan. 2021. “Disruptors’ dilemma? Thailand’s 2020 Gen Z protests.” Critical Asian Studies, 53(2): 175-191;  Missingham, Bruce. 2003. “Forging solidarity and identity in the Assembly of the Poor: From local struggles to a national social movement in Thailand.” Asian Studies Review, 27(3): 317–340; Teeratanabodee, Wichuta. 2025. “Thailand’s 2020–2021 Pro-Democracy Protests: Diversity, Conflict, and Solidarity.” Journal of Contemporary Asia, 55(1): 3-27.  ↩︎
25. Fanon, Frantz. 1963. The Wretched of the Earth. New York: Grove Press, 316. ↩︎