Wednesday, March 21, 2018
4 p.m. – 5:30 p.m.
McKinney Conference Room
Since the end of the Cold War Thailand has been the poster child of democratization processes in Southeast Asia. Students protests, farmers' activisms, a thriving civil society and expanding middle classes seemed to make the country to a model of successful democratic transition. In the last decades, however, many of the forces that supported that process have turned sour toward electoral politics. This talk explores how that happened--in term of new class alliances, discourses of corruption and morality, and legalism--and casts Thailand as a space of experimentation for a new model of authoritarianism, inspired by Beijing and spreading throughout the region.
Claudio Sopranzetti is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at All Souls College at the University of Oxford. He received his PhD in anthropology from Harvard University in 2013. He is the author of Owners of the Maps: Motorcycle Taxi Drivers, Mobility, and Politics in Bangkok (2017, University of California Press) and Red Journeys: Inside the Thai Red Shirts (2012, University of Washington Press). He is currently working on Awakened, an anthropological graphic novel on Thai politics.