Networked insurgence and an anti-electoral democracy: Bangkok space 2014–2020

Abstract

Bangkok presents a rich history of popular uprisings directed against its periodic military dictatorships. Then, in 2006 and 2010 there were uprisings of increasing theatricality, playing to a hoped-for global audience, but now against democratically elected governments. January 2014 saw this insurrectional performance art raised to a new plateau where the city itself became the stage and the portrayed villain no longer the government, but government as such— against electoral democracy and for some vague, imagined ideal that might be seen as post-electoral democracy based in civil society rather than political parties. An ensuing military-drafted constitution built on this rejection, leading to manipulated elections in 2019 and a new, quasi-elected, monarchist-military government scarcely understandable outside the context of the dark euphoria of 2014. Then in 2020 the tide of insurgence turned again, against the military hegemony but also against the monarchy—a seismic shift. The paper’s focus is on these events of 2014 and their 2020 denouement, also on their implications for both the space and the form of the city in a digital age.

Re-writing history, re-inscribing the city: Thailand and delusions of democracy

“…A royalist-conservative eye (and melodramatic imagination), nostalgic and mourning for an imagined “better” time, will see the new court building as expressing the eternal truth of a royal-Buddhist descent; a dissident eye (from a more ironic imagination) will focus on the overthrow of democracy and denial of a secular descent. The dissident classes, thus challenged, assemble in 2020 to demand the end of the junta, “reform” of the monarchy and the restoration of democracy (King, 2021).…”

“…Since the 2001 election of the populist, province-supported government of Thaksin Shinawatra, a royalist-conservative elite has confronted an era of seemingly dystopic “electoral dictatorship” (King, 2021). Redemption would be sought in the imagined memory of a lost past; in that “collective unconscious,” class division would be imagined away under the rubric of “reconciliation”.…”

“…The experiences of this society, which have their store-place in the collective unconscious, interact with the new to give birth to the utopias which leave their traces in a thousand configurations of life, from permanent buildings to ephemeral fashion. (Benjamin (1973): 159) Since the 2001 election of the populist, province-supported government of Thaksin Shinawatra, a royalist-conservative elite has confronted an era of seemingly dystopic "electoral dictatorship" (King, 2021). Redemption would be sought in the imagined memory of a lost past; in that "collective unconscious," class division would be imagined away under the rubric of "reconciliation".…”

“…In 2006 a rare interval of parliamentary democracy was ended in one of Thailand’s intermittent military coups, to be followed by a sequence of popular uprisings variously of the conservative, Bangkok-centred, monarchist Yellow Shirts and the mostly regions-based, pro-democracy Red Shirts. There was again a brief period of unstable democracy from 2011 to 2014, confronted from early 2014 by an altogether novel, mass insurgency, directed not against a government but against government as such—against what was portrayed as the spectre of elective democracy (King, 2021).…”

“…The notion of emptying and openness does, however, assist a reading of the Supreme Court's political effect. The emptying (destruction of the People's Party building) and the subsequent evocation of an earlier, absolutist "truth" (justice as royal gift) produces the new openness-the new resistance to monarchy and the assembling dissidents at the razorwire defending Parliament against the people (King, 2021).…”