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Abstract
The Cultural Practices on Conflict Resolution Among the Iu-Mien
This is a research into and compilation of knowledge concerning social relationship among the Iu-Mien people.
Observations were made in the events that actually happened in two communities, Phalang and Huay Chompoo villages,
in order to investigate their thinking patterns, principles, process and purpose in resolving conflict by the wisdoms of
members of each community. The investigations were compared and analyzed concerning the change and movement of
the conflict management and dispute conciliation, which had survived under a pressure of capitalism in this globalizing
era and the constitutional monarchy where the King is the leader adhering to codification of laws emphasizing a
bureaucratic principle. Due to the fact that the above mentioned conflict management or dispute conciliation as
convention is a time-honored system which had been used in the period the Iu-Mien established communities in China
then the time they moved to the border region in the northern part of Thailand, it was thought that in those days there
were not yet laws of Thailand effectual for them. However, since all the different Iu-Mien groups established
communities in the territory considered to be Thailand those days, they began to regard that a lawsuit party had right to
choose either conventional rules or the state’s law in conflict management or dispute resolution.
Thailand is a multi-stranded society consisting of different races and cultures in co-existence. Hence, some
original local communities had had their own rules in use before they were incorporated in the state of Siam. Once they
joined it as citizens, the written legal system, copied from western countries’ models, began to come into effect over
them. Thai education on law in the early period taught people to believe that the state law was the only legal system
imposed over them in the matter of justice to an extent that the long-used conventional rules were almost all demolished,
even though some facts were evident in a court that conventional rules hidden in the cases were far more effective to
remedy a problem of an individual in the locality than the state law. Many departments of the government have tried to
study the alternative justice: for example, studies on forms of dispute conciliation outside a court in both civil and
criminal cases. Thus, the academics in legal education in Thailand should pay attention to the systems of conventional
rules among the ethnic minorities of the country so that the Thai law education will be more perfected with rich
alternatives incorporated into it.