Five Years after the Youth Protests: The Thai Monarchy Strikes Back
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This public talk discusses the Thai monarchy鈥檚 strategic response to the 2020 youth-led protests which called for reforms to the royal family鈥檚 place in national life. The speaker argues that King Vajiralongkorn did not merely seek to restore the status quo but executed a profound transformation which he terms 鈥榦vert power codification and defensive hyper-personalisation.鈥� This shift converted informal influence into visible, legally codified, and personally commanded authority, entrenching absolute power within the constitutional framework to neutralise reformist momentum.
Professor Chachavalpongpun documents this pivot across four interconnected institutional axes: financial codification, achieved through the 2017鈥�18 legal restructuring that transferred Crown Property Bureau assets to Vajiralongkorn鈥檚 personal ownership; political gatekeeping, which used institutional proxies like the Senate and Constitutional Court to nullify electoral mandates; symbolic control, through a strategy of 鈥榙efensive hyper-personalisation鈥� that asserts a direct personal command over the state, military, and dynastic narrative; and legal coercion, identifying the systematic weaponisation of the l猫se-majest茅 law as it evolved from a criminal deterrent into a definitive constitutional veto.
He concludes that while the 2020 protests established royal reform as the central fault line of Thai politics, the monarchy鈥檚 aggressive consolidation has replaced the consensus-based network monarchy with a more confrontational and legally absolute model of rule.
This event will be moderated by Dr. David Matijasevich, Capilano University.
It is cosponsored by the Southeast Asia Research Initiative at SFU, Capilano University Institute of Interdisciplinary Studies, and 51猎奇入口David Lam Centre.