The basis of Thailand's political security has been altered from time to time to meet the changing stresses and strains created by great powers in the Far East. In the process of political evolution the Thai people and their politicians have shown a great deal of flexibility.

Much of the work of political science revolves around institutions—the structures through which politics happens. Leaders enter the frame, of course, but often as institutions in human form: presidents, premiers, populists, and mobilizers who serve to channel and direct who does what and what they do, much like an agency or law. We might trace this pseudo-structural, largely mechanical reading of human agency to political scientists of an earlier era: the behavioralists of the 1950s and 1960s. James C. Scott began his career as just such a scholar. For his dissertation-turned-book, Political Ideology in Malaysia: Reality and the Beliefs of an Elite, Scott surveyed a gaggle of Malaysian bureaucrats to examine, effectively, the extent to which their values and assumptions supported or subverted the new democracy they served. Although itself fairly prosaic, that work foreshadows the political grime and games that soon pulled Scott in more promising directions theoretically, whether scrutinizing Southeast Asia or global patterns: disentangling structure from norms, finding agency around the margins of class and state, and rethinking how power looks and functions.

In July 1976, slightly more than five years after the collapse of the 1971 insurrection in Sri Lanka (then Ceylon), the protracted series of trials of alleged insurgents wound to a conclusion. Except for the cases of a small number of suspects not in custody, some of whom are probably dead, and a handful of cases the disposition of which was postponed, the complex and painful process of determining guilt and imposing punishments for the armed rebellion had come to an end. The uprising that erupted on 5 April 1971 had been staged by an organization called the Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna QVP), which had been formed five years earlier as a revolutionary movement by a small clique of young dissidents who had broken away from the tiny pro-Peking Communist Party, but which by 1970 had attracted a significant following among rural Sinhalese Buddhist youths.