Rights Beautiful Collection of Professor Saneh Chamarik relevance to mainland Southeast Asia where a great number of natural resource rich communities, large and small, have per force been converted into “minorities”. More of this, to be later touched upon. In short, the principle and practice of exclusive state sovereignty itself turns out to be infringing upon human security and potential creativity. It is precisely against this background of the current nation state regime that the phenomenon of minorities is being artificially created. It is merely man-made under a specific structure of power relationships that counts only the two levels of authoritative value: nation state and internations community. And all this, with no due regard to the most basic social and political entities at the grassroots. That is why, under such domineering and oppressive structure, the number of minorities keeps on proliferating into quite a variety of forms and predicaments. This is well demonstrated, for example, in the case of those in the frontier areas between “Myanmar” and Thailand. Presumably, it is not much different elsewhere. The areas accommodate a good number of ethnic and tribal groups and communities, large and small, with socio-cultural identities and governing structures of their own independent of the others. A few like Shan, Kachin, and Chin, for instance, do have a high level of culture and governing structure as city state. As a matter of fact, all these “becoming minorities” have been struggling for centuries to preserve their identities and autonomy. And then suddenly under the newly-formed nation statism, there emerge new categories of minorities, lawfully dubbed “refugees” and “internally displaced peoples”, now numbering some 13 millions and 21.8 millions respectively all over the world, according to the U.S. Committee for Refugees’ Report. Of this, about 1 million within the nation state of Myanmar, and of course a good number unavoidably encroaching into the neighbouring Thailand. All these phenomena have already been well known. It is the moot point as to how to deal with them. Sympathy and humanitarian aid abound and tirelessly keep on going. What is glaringly lacking is a kind of holistic OFFICE OF THE NATIONAL HUMAN RIGHTS COMMISSION OF THAILAND 45