Monarchism and Militarism

Despite his record of scandals and erratic behavior, it is extremely dangerous to criticize King Maha Vajiralongkorn, Rama X. While his father, King Bhumibol Adulyadej, who reigned from 1946 to 2016, was a genuinely popular and revered figure, the son enjoys no such popularity and has resorted to authoritarian measures to silence dissent and criticism.

Hundreds of Thai citizens have received stiff penalties for such banal acts as sharing social media posts of clips from John Oliver’s Last Week Tonight HBO series. For this seemingly trivial offense, political activist “Busbas” Mongkhon Thirakot received fifty years in prison. The United Nations and international human rights attorneys have condemned this and many other cases.

Before a 1932 army coup, the Thai kings were absolute monarchs. For the next few decades, a series of military leaders displaced the power of the crown. During the Cold War, however, an alliance was struck between the military and the monarchy. A series of generals used a combination of monarchism, Buddhism, and militarism to forge an anti-communist alliance, thus ensuring right-wing nationalist unity and a seemingly bottomless flow of US military aid and capital investment.

With a $43 billion net worth, Rama X is now the wealthiest monarch in the world, and many of the generals have also amassed substantial fortunes. Exploiting Thai Buddhist reverence for the monarch’s sacred authority, the country’s rulers have made voicing concern over obvious corruption, opposition to military rule, or calls for democratic reform serious offenses under Section 112.

In January 2025, a panel of United Nations human rights experts condemned the law and demanded its immediate repeal:

Under international law individuals have the right to criticise public officials, including a King, and to advocate peacefully for the reform of any public institution, including the monarchy. . . . The Thai lèse-majesté law is both harsh and vague, giving wide discretion to the authorities and the courts to define the offence broadly and has led to the detention, prosecution and punishment of over 270 persons since 2020, many of whom have been given long consecutive sentences by the courts.

Paul Chambers is not the first foreigner to have been accused of insulting the monarchy, but he is the most high-profile one to have been arrested and charged to date.

Chambers has devoted most of his career to critical studies of the political alliance of the Thai military leadership and the Chakri Dynasty, dating from 1782 to the present. However, these specific charges focus on a brief online description of an October 2024 webinar sponsored by ISEAS: Yusof Ishak Institute, one of Singapore’s most prestigious scholarly organizations.

The promotional blurb for the event, “Thailand’s 2024 Military and Police Reshuffles: What do They Mean?,” appeared in English on the Singapore-based website but has since been edited. It supposedly described Thailand’s king as having authority over changes to the military leadership, a political observation that it seems scholars could support with evidence. The attorneys representing Chambers maintain that he did not write the text in question.

Solidarity Against Authoritarianism

Described as “soft-spoken, empathetic and enthusiastic” by the venerable Foreign Correspondents’ Club of Thailand, Chambers teaches political science at Naresuan University and specializes in Thai politics, particularly the role of the military and the royal family. He also serves as a special advisor on international affairs at Naresuan University’s Center of ASEAN Community Studies. He is a well-known public intellectual in Southeast Asia. Fluent in Thai and married to a Thai national, Chambers has some thirty years of experience in Thailand.

Chambers has an impeccable international reputation as a serious and politically engaged scholar. Holding a doctorate from Northern Illinois University’s prestigious Center for Southeast Asian Studies, Chambers is internationally respected for his years of research on civil–military relations in Southeast Asia. He has developed the model of the “monarchized military” to theorize a national armed force whose legitimacy, authority, and power are inseparable from the monarchy that it is sworn to protect. Chambers argues that in these cases, the army’s loyalty to the monarch supersedes its support for constitutional law, democracy, and civilian rule.

In addition to his work in Thailand, Chambers has held positions at the Peace Research Institute Frankfurt, the German-Southeast Asian Center of Excellence for Public Policy and Good Governance, the Cambodian Institute of Cooperation and Peace, Heidelberg University, and Hamburg’s German Institute for Global and Area Studies. He has worked as an advisor to the South Asia Democratic Forum, giving testimony to the European Parliament in 2017.

His extensive publications include numerous academic journals and several important books. In 2017, Chambers and Napisa Waitoolkiat edited Khaki Capital: The Political Economy of the Military in Southeast Asia, a collection of essays that showed how economic power can flow out of the barrel of a gun.

His 2024 Praetorian Kingdom: A History of Military Ascendancy in Thailand is arguably the most detailed critical history of how the armed forces and the monarchy have become the most powerful institutions in Thailand. In 2023’s Beer in East Asia: A Political Economy, coedited with Nithi Nư̄angčhamnong, he explored the history of imperialism and capitalism in Asia, the world’s largest beer-consuming and beer-producing region. Clearly, it was his studies of the militarist–royalist antidemocratic alliance that led to his egregious arrest.

Even Marco Rubio’s State Department has declared itself “alarmed” by the arrest of Chambers:

This case reinforces our longstanding concerns about the use of lèse majesté laws in Thailand. We continue to urge Thai authorities to respect freedom of expression and to ensure that laws are not used to stifle permitted expression.

International scholars immediately rallied to the defense of Chambers. Mark S. Cogan, associate professor of peace and conflict studies at Japan’s Kansai Gaidai University, organized an online petition to pressure his release. The exiled Thai scholar Pavin Chachavalpongpun remains one of the most vocal opponents of Section 112.

We must view the case of Paul Chambers in the context of scholars being arrested at US universities, the silencing of intellectuals in Germany, the assault on scholars by Paul Kagame’s government in Rwanda, and the intimidation of professors from Indonesia to Turkey. In this era of increasing global authoritarianism, international solidarity with its targets is essential.