Description
The study of Thailand’s foreign policy remains an underexplored field, in which standard and somewhat uncritical assumptions have dominated for many decades. These include the recurrent trope of the country’s ‘bamboo diplomacy’, a stance that supposedly allowed Siam to avoid direct European colonisation. Latterly, bamboo diplomacy has been seamlessly incorporated into the popular notion of ‘hedging’, inter alia, to explain the ways in which Thailand balances the competing regional demands of China and the United States (see Alderman, McCargo, Gerstl and Iocovozzi 2024).
This paper argues for a more nuanced analysis of Thai foreign policy, which places emphasis on the veto power exercised by the influential and coup-happy military. Despite the attempts of the former Thaksin Shinawatra administration to subordinate foreign policy to civilian and trade-driven agendas (see Pavin 2010), I will demonstrate that on issues ranging from Cambodian border disputes to the ongoing civil war in Myanmar, neither the Ministry of Foreign Affairs nor indeed the Prime Minister’s Office is empowered to determine Thailand’s crucial stance on foreign policy matters. Foreign policy is a highly contested space that illustrates the fragmented nature of the Thai elite and the ultimate dominance of the military, along with its close ally the monarchical power network. Drawing on extensive Thai language research including elite interviews, the paper offers a bold and original argument that has a salience beyond the Thai case, given that many states in the Global South also experience comparable elite fragmentation and inter-agency contestation.
