The Border Patrol Police of Thailand (BPP) was formed as paramilitary intelligence police to assist the American anticommunist counterinsurgency in the early 1950s. In the early 1960s, the force transformed into a rural development agency sponsored by the U.S. government and the Thai monarchy and extended its area of operation from the border areas to the entirety of Thailand. It finally inscribed its name as the major perpetrator of the October 6 Massacre in Bangkok in 1976. In the process of multiple transformations, the BPP has become a symbolic missionary of royalist nationalism that safeguards the border of Thainess. The BPP’s transformations and evolving missions vividly show how the Thai ruling elite indigenized the American Cold War crusade in Southeast Asia to build a royalist Thai nation in the second half of the twentieth century.
Speaker and Chair Biographies:
SINAE HYUN is a research professor in the Institute for East Asian Studies at Sogang University, Seoul, specializing in the Cold War, nationalism, and Southeast Asian studies. Her doctoral research titled, ‘Indigenizing the Cold War’ surveys the history of the Thai Border Patrol Police and shows how the Thai ruling elite used the American Cold War foreign policies to their cause. Her book based on the research will be published by the University of Hawaii Press in 2023. She is currently preparing a book manuscript focusing on the histories of American Protestant missionaries in Southeast Asia and their dealings with overlapping empires of Britain, China, and "Others".
Dr Qingfei Yin is Assistant Professor of International History (China and the World) at LSE. As a historian of contemporary China and inter-Asian relations, her research focuses on China’s relations with its Asian neighbours, Asian borderlands, and the Cold War in Asia. She is particularly interested in how the global Cold War interacted with state-building in marginal societies. She is currently working on her book manuscript Comrades and Competitors: State-Building at the Sino-Vietnamese Border during the Cold War. Subsequent projects are on China’s border regions during the reform era and historical memory of the Sino-Vietnamese Cold War partnership in the two countries. Her research has been funded by the Association for Asian Studies China and Inner Asia Council and Henry Luce Foundation/ACLS Program in China Studies.