Infiltrating Society: The Thai Military's Internal Security Affairs

Puangthong Pawakapan's Infiltrating Society makes a significant contribution to our understanding of Thailand's ongoing political crisis. Pawakapan, a professor in the Department of International Relations at Chulalongkorn University, has herself made other such contributions in the past. But Infiltrating Society is the most systematic account I have read addressing the varied roles of the Thai military in not only policing but also shaping Thai civil society from the Cold War period to the present. To be sure, the issues Pawakapan addresses have received attention from a variety of authors in the past, as her own extensive bibliography reveals, and during the Cold War it wasn't unusual for critical scholars to note the ways the military was becoming omnipresent in all aspects of social life. But the repetitiveness with which the military has intervened to depose elected governments that are not to its leaders' liking has tended to train most observers narrowly on the military's role in repressing political antagonism to military rule. Against this backdrop, Pawakapan makes a systematic case for the importance of the military's wide-ranging internal security operations, including in such areas as development, natural resources management, policing of mass organizations, and of course its ubiquitous role in legitimizing and supporting the monarchy.The starting point for Pawakapan's presentation is the observation—long a commonplace, but still never to be forgotten—that the Thai military has never had a true external, national defense role and has been focused instead on internal security. Moreover, as Pawakapan notes, its internal security role has always been in open support of the entrenched power of conservative elites. Indeed, so open has this role been that Pawakapan rejects the applicability of the notion of “deep state” in discussions of Thailand's internal security affairs: the major actors in such affairs have operated right out in the open (6).The institution that takes center stage in Pawakapan's discussion is the Internal Security Operations Command (ISOC), originally known as the Communist Suppression Operations Command during the Cold War era. ISOC, as Pawakapan contends, is largely a political arm of the military (2), a role it came to play during the Cold War as part of the military's strategy of political offensive (24–27). It was in this period that the military began to take on the panoply of security roles that made it the political behemoth it has become, and Pawakapan provides a particularly rich account of this background and the evolution of today's ISOC from these foundations. Chapter 2 provides a detailed mapping of this process, and chapters 3–5 provide detailed expositions of ISOC's roles in development, policing, and shaping of mass organizations and promotion of the monarchy.Along the way, Pawakapan does much more than simply empirically recount ISOC's major activities, providing some challenges to theoretical and conceptual approaches that have been prominent in Thai studies. One of the most obvious examples is the author's interpretation of the significance of two well-known prime ministerial orders of the early 1980s (Prem's 1980 and 1982 orders, 66/2523 and 65/2525), which are often seen as introducing a less hard-line and more effective approach to defeating communism. Pawakapan persuasively argues that these orders had no significance in defeating the Thai Communist Party, which was falling apart internally of its own inertia well before the orders were issued. On the other hand, and more innovatively, Pawakapan argues that the orders did have crucial significance, not in facilitating the defeat of communism but in laying “the foundations for the military to continue its political intrusions into society in the post-counterinsurgency period” (113).This latter result is crucial and has helped inform the actions of subsequent regimes, whether or not they consciously intended to redeploy or expand ISOC—it was taken for granted by most leaders in the post-Cold War period that the military had important and natural civic responsibilities. Thus, when the reform government of Thaksin Shinawatra decided to try to repress methamphetamine trafficking, it allowed ISOC to expand and take charge of this effort, a process of “mission creep” that went further once the Thaksin regime became embroiled in war in the south by 2004 (49). As such, whatever Thaksin's intentions, his reform aspirations were largely done in by the acceptance of ISOC's central role in managing social affairs. Even more so, of course, regimes that have openly embraced ISOC's conservative role and used it to buttress royal legitimacy have accepted ISOC's imperial presence in all aspects of social life—this is markedly the case for the Abhisit regime, and especially the military dictatorship imposed under General Prayuth in 2014, both of these committed to repressing the pro-Thaksin Red Shirt movement.Not surprisingly, the political prospects for Thai democracy, in view of all this, are not especially bright, and Pawakapan summarizes them unflinchingly: “As long as the military's political apparatus remains intact, it will be impossible for Thai society to have a stable democracy” (150). I wish I could disagree, but Pawakapan's positioning statement in the preface makes clear why she may be right: “There are constraints on what I can say to the press and in open forums in Thailand. Writing in English allows me to put these constraints aside and write with greater freedom” (xx). Infiltrating Society is in this sense a gift for those of us who read English, one made necessary by the unfortunate conditions in Thailand that the book so ably analyzes.

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