Foreword

Summary

Infiltrating Society opens up new and valuable perspectives on three concerns central to serious understanding of modern Thailand. The first of these concerns is the means by which the military in fact involves itself in the country's politics and governance. The second concern is the specific challenge posed to Thai democracy by the military's employment of those poorly understood means. The last concern is Bangkok's relationship with the Thai provinces—and by extension the country's and society's historically fraught quest for and contest over what, with apologies to modernization theorists of yore, it is appropriate to call national integration.

The closing years of the reign of King Bhumibol Adulyadej and the opening years of that of his successor King Vajiralongkorn have aroused renewed interest in relations between Thailand's military and its monarchy. Attention has focused above all on the inactivity to which King Bhumibol's infirmity condemned him during the last years of his life and its consequences for the partnership of palace and Army, on the loyalty to the royal institution of the high command of that latter force, on the apparent strength or weakness of various senior officers’ ties to King Vajiralongkorn, and on the new king's decision to assume direct control of certain units of the country's military.

Puangthong Pawakapan denies the importance of none of these foci. But she argues in Infiltrating Society that an effort to understand the bonds between military and monarchy demands that we look well beyond coup plots hatched among senior officers in Bangkok and those same officers’ extravagant poses of loyalty to a notionally timeless and essential Thai monarchy. For the bonds between soldier and sovereign in recent history have in fact owed much to the era of counterinsurgent operations—focused on the perceived security threat of the Communist Party of Thailand (CPT) and undertaken above all in rural and even remote reaches of the Thai provinces—from the 1960s into the 1980s. At levels both institutional and personal, rural counterinsurgency brought monarchy and military into close and sustained collaboration.

While violence and coercion most marked Thai counterinsurgency, it was not in the main their use that gave rise to this collaboration.