Five Years after the Youth Protests: The Thai Monarchy Strikes Back
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This talk discusses the Thai monarchy’s strategic response to the 2020 youth-led protests which called for reforms to the royal family’s 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 ‘overt power codification and defensive hyper-personalisation.’ This shift converted informal influence into visible, legally codified, and personally commanded authority, entrenching absolute power within the constitutional framework to neutralise reformist momentum. The speaker documents this pivot across four interconnected institutional axes: financial codification, achieved through the 2017–18 legal restructuring that transferred Crown Property Bureau assets to Vajiralongkorn’s personal ownership; political gatekeeping, which used institutional proxies like the Senate and Constitutional Court to nullify electoral mandates; symbolic control, through a strategy of ‘defensive hyper-pe
