SEAC hosted Visiting Fellow Dr Kanokrat Lertchoosakul (Associate Professor, Chulalongkorn University who presented The Cutting-Edge Youth Movement in Thailand and Unfinished Democracy.
During the past decade, countless mass youth street protests campaigned for democracy, environmental protection, equality and social justice in country after country across the globe. This talk highlighted the youth movement in Thailand between 2019 and 2021. Dr Lertchoosakul analysed the development, dynamics, and impacts of the recent Thai youth forces in party politics, mass protest, and online movements. She examined how they promoted and called for democracy, challenged the powerful conservative establishment, and pushed forward structural reform. At the same time, the talk touched upon its effect on the bigger picture of unfinished and unconsolidated democratisation in Thailand. Understanding the case of Thailand enhances our idea about cutting-edge contentious politics, demographic change and conflict, and the political impact of global disruptions on Southeast Asia.
This seminar was recorded and the video can be watched here.
Speaker and Chair Biographies:
Dr Kanokrat Lertchoosakul is an assistant professor at the department of government, faculty of political science, Chulalongkorn University, Thailand. During the past two decades, she has focused her research on various social movements in Thailand and other countries in Southeast Asia. Her PhD thesis at LSE, The Rise of the Octobrists: Power and Conflict among Former Left-Wing Student Activists in Contemporary Thai Politics, was awarded by the Thailand National Research Committee in 2016. It was later published as a book by the Council on Southeast Asia Studies, Yale University. Her later researches were on the contemporary conservative mass movements and the 2020-2021 youth movement in Thailand.
Prof. John Sidel is the Sir Patrick Gillam Professor of International and Comparative Politics at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE). Professor Sidel received his BA and MA from Yale University and his PhD from Cornell University. He is the author of Capital, Coercion, and Crime: Bossism in the Philippines (1999), Philippine Politics and Society in the Twentieth Century: Colonial Legacies, Postcolonial Trajectories (2000), Riots, Pogroms, Jihad: Religious Violence in Indonesia (2006), The Islamist Threat in Southeast Asia: A Reassessment (2007), Thinking and Working Politically in Development: Coalitions for Change in the Philippines (2020, with Jaime Faustino) and a forthcoming book Republicanism, Communism, Islam: Cosmopolitan Origins of Revolution in Southeast Asia.