Asia Foundation

Economic inequality has become a major roadblock in Thailand’s path to prosperity and democracy. The massive development gap between the prosperous central and eastern seaboards and outlying agricultural regions has been a source of political division and unmet economic potential for decades. In Thailand’s northeast, ...

For decades, the ethnically and linguistically diverse people of Isan, Thailand, have been the subject of pervasive bias, often described as docile and uneducated, or as “unsophisticated peasants” who can be bought and manipulated by ambitious politicians. Bordered by Laos and the Mekong River to ...