JCA is producing a Special Issue titled Military, Monarchy and Repression: Assessing Thailand’s Authoritarian Turn, edited by Veerayooth Kanchoochat and Kevin Hewison.
The first article in the Special Issue is now available at the JCA publisher’s website. “Thailand’s Deep State, Royal Power and the Constitutional Court (1997–2015)” (DOI: 10.1080/00472336.2016.1151917) by Eugénie Mérieau, a PhD student at INALCO Paris.
This is an important article assessing the way in which a conservative elite has ruled Thailand and how it seeks to manage succession. Her abstract states:
This article challenges the network monarchy approach and advocates for the use of the concept of Deep State. The Deep State also has the monarchy as its keystone, but is far more institutionalised than the network monarchy accounts for. The institutionalised character of the anti-democratic alliance is best demonstrated by the recent use of courts to hamper the rise of electoral politics in a process called judicialisation of politics. This article uses exclusive material from the minutes of the 1997 and 2007 constitution-drafting assemblies to substantiate the claim that the Deep State used royalists’ attempts to make the Constitutional Court a surrogate king for purposes of its own self-interested hegemonic preservation.
JCA 