Papers

• The Affective Turn to the Right: Emotional Regimes and the Vicious Cycle of Threat in Thailand’s Authoritarianism (1932–2022) Malinee Khumsupa Chiang Mai University

  This paper examines the persistent pattern of democratic backsliding and regime instability in Thailand from the 1932 Revolution to 2022. While conventional explanations emphasize structural factors such as military intervention and elite conflict, it argues that shifts toward authoritarianism are fundamentally rooted in collective affect.
  The study contends that conservative forces and political elites strategically deploy emotional regimes to preserve the status quo and drive democratic regression. These regimes shape public sentiment by cultivating loyalty and amplifying fear of chaos and existential threats, thereby legitimizing authoritarian institutions and actions. During periods of political conflict, these mobilized emotions intensify affective polarization, transforming political disagreement from ideological contestation into visceral hostility toward opponents.
  Using a qualitative approach that combines sequential historical political analysis and emotional discourse analysis across three key periods (1932–1957, 1958–1997, and 2001–2022), the paper identifies a recurring vicious cycle. State-led emotional management erodes democratic norms such as tolerance and compromise, producing a polarized public increasingly willing to accept the dismantling of democratic institutions—through coups or judicial intervention—in the name of eliminating opposition.
  By advancing an affective lens, this research highlights democratic failure as an emotionally driven structural phenomenon and underscores the central role of emotional manipulation in sustaining authoritarianism.

• Solidarity After the Overthrow of Democracy: Arnon Nampa, Lèse Majesté, and the Horizon of Justice in Thailand Tyrell Haberkorn University of Wisconsin-Madison

  On 24 June 1932, a civilian-military coalition, the People’s Party, fomented a transformation from an absolute to a constitutional monarchy in Thailand. Despite this transition, the place of the monarchy in the Thai polity has remained unclear and the very shape of the polity unresolved since then, as evidenced by the thirteen coups and twenty constitutions during the last 97 years. On 3 August 2020, a lawyer and human rights defender, Arnon Nampa, dared to call for clarification of the role of the monarchy in a public speech. Subsequently, Arnon, along with nearly 300 other dissidents active in the 2020-2021 democracy movement, has been prosecuted for violation of Article 112 of the Thai Criminal Code, or lèse majesté, for his peaceful speech. Imprisoned since September 2023 and repeatedly denied bail although none of his cases are final, Arnon’s sentence has already reached nearly thirty years. Arnon maintains that the questions he asks about a key institution are necessary for democracy, while the judges who have found him guilty insist that those questions endanger that very institution. This paper juxtaposes close readings of recent Constitutional Court and Criminal Court judgments with close readings of the letters that Arnon writes and sends from prison to his family, legal and activist colleagues, Thai citizens and supporters around the world. In the widening gap between how the judiciary and Arnon understand the meanings of law and justice, the possibility of human rights and democracy hangs suspended.

• Reframing the Right: Life Histories, Rural Memories, and Women’s Political Experiences in Northern Thailand Waraporn Ruangsri Chiang Mai University

  Drawing from visual and oral history methods developed through the ethnographic documentary Turning the Bhumi: The Uprising of Peasants in Northern Thailand, 1974–1976, this paper interrogates how ordinary people in rural Northern Thailand have experienced and perceived state violence enacted in the name of the “Right.” The study integrates anthropological and historical approaches to explore how the notion of the Right has been largely constructed through structural perspectives and elite political narratives, while the lived experiences of rural subjects have remained marginalised and unrecorded.
  Preliminary findings reveal that the emotional and affective dimensions of these encounters with state violence constitute an affective turn that continues to shape local lifeworlds and contemporary political movements. Special attention is given to women’s political experiences and its practices, arguing that a gendered lens allows for a more nuanced understanding of authoritarianism and right-wing mobilization. By foregrounding the voices and sensibilities of ordinary people, this study contributes to rethinking visual historiography and the politics of memory in post-authoritarian Thailand.

• Multiculturalism as Governance : Authoritarianism and Ethnography of the Colonial Legacy of Race in Malaysia Sorayut Aiemueayut Chiang Mai University

  This paper examines authoritarianism in Malaysia through an anthropological and ethnographic lens, focusing on how state power operates through multicultural policies and the everyday management of ethnic diversity. Based on over years of fieldwork in bureaucratic settings and community life, the study shows how state categories of race are not only articulated in policy but also lived, negotiated, and reproduced in daily interactions. Rather than fostering pluralism, multiculturalism functions as a technology of governance that organizes social life along racial lines.
  Ethnographic encounters with civil servants and local communities reveal how colonial-era racial classifications continue to structure access to resources, shape moral expectations, and define political belonging. These classifications are embedded in routine administrative practices and everyday social relations, making race both institutional and experiential. In postcolonial Malaysia, such frameworks are reworked within an Islamically inflected state ideology that governs through the recognition and regulation of difference. Multiculturalism does not mitigate ethnic tensions but stabilizes them by rendering difference legible and governable, sustaining authoritarian rule through the ongoing management of racial distinctions.

• Courts in Electoral Governance: Judicial Roles and Democratic Consequences in the Philippines, Thailand, and Indonesia Fei Huang Xiamen University

  Recent scholarship on courts in Southeast Asia has moved beyond institution-centered accounts that treat courts primarily as formal legal bodies insulated from politics. In Courts and Politics in Southeast Asia, Bjoern Dressel argues that courts in the region are better understood as “institutional hybrids,” whose behavior is shaped not only by constitutional authority and formal rules, but also by historically produced critical junctures, oligarchic structures, and clientelist political relations. He further develops a relational theory to explain judicial recruitment, judicial decision-making, court performance, and perceptions of judicial legitimacy. Building on this insight, this article extends Dressel’s framework into the study of electoral governance. Rather than asking only how courts are embedded in political power networks, it asks what role courts come to play within the governance of electoral authorization itself. I argue that courts may operate as dispute absorbers, authorization certifiers, or electoral veto players, and that variation across these role types mediates the democratic consequences of electoral judicialization. In this sense, the paper seeks to move from a general theory of courts and politics in Southeast Asia toward a more specific account of how judicial power reshapes electoral competition and the conversion of votes into governing authority.

• Conservative Turn, Flawed Democracy, and Refugee Politics in East Asia: A Comparative Analysis of Korea and Japan Yoojin Lim Kangwon National University Young Hoon Song Kangwon National University

  This study analyzes how the conservative turn in post-democratization East Asia has reshaped the humanitarian dimension of refugee policy, focusing on South Korea and Japan. Using a country–year panel dataset covering 2000 to 2025, it examines how political conservatism—measured by the ideological orientation of governing parties—affects key indicators of refugee politics, including recognition rates, humanitarian protection, and rejection ratios. The study further introduces an interaction term between political conservatism and the quality of democracy, based on the V-Dem index, to explore how institutional democratic strength moderates the effects of ideological change. This analysis aims to explain both convergence and divergence in refugee governance across East Asian democracies, where formal democratic institutions coexist with growing ideological conservatism and selective humanitarianism. By linking regime quality and ideological orientation, the study provides a comparative framework for understanding how post-democratization politics shape humanitarian commitments in East Asia.

Abstract

Keywords

• Article 112
• Malaysia
• Northern Thai peasants
• Thailand
• affective polarization
• affective politics
• authoritarianism
• colonial legacy
• democratic backsliding
• emotional regimes
• gender
• human rights
• lese majeste
• life history
• lived experience
• multiculturalism
• political prisoners
• race
• right-wing politics