Description
Although Thailand and Cambodia share close social and cultural ties, their longstanding border disputes have fostered hostility between the two nations. The ongoing conflict, which began in early 2025, has catalysed waves of nationalist sentiment among Thais, who have perceived the Thai government's ineffectiveness in swiftly implementing responsive countermeasures to the emerging crisis. This erodes public trust and provides other social actors with an opportunity to exploit the heightened tensions to build nationalist political identities and rally Thai civilians to support their actions against Cambodia. However, extensive research has examined how nationalism is expressed and mobilised during political crises to vie for political influence through media outlets, politicians, and activists, it overlooks the activism of political influencers who benefit from the participatory affordances of social media to amplify nationalist ideology, shaping perceptions of the conflict. Therefore, the project aims to investigate how Thai political influencers use social media to shape nationalist narratives and imagination that explain why the Thai people manifest hatred and hostility towards the Cambodian government and its civilians, disregard human rights and peaceful coexistence, and encourage retaliatory actions against Cambodia. The Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) is utilised to examine media content produced by political influencers on social media from the start of the conflict in May 2025.
