Thailand

Thailand will go through the motions of free elections in March, but the likely result will be entrenched authoritarian rule and further instability.

By Pavin Chachavalpongpun Thai politics continues to be drawn along the monarchy’s fault lines, following the recent dramatic events, which exposed deep conflicts between opposing monarchical factions. The newly established party of former Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra, Thai Raksa Chart, tested the waters by proposing a candidate for the premiership. This candidate happened to be the eldest daughter of the late King Bhumibol Adulyadej, Princess Ubolratana. Princess Ubolratana accepted the invitation of the Thai Raksa Chart Party to serve as a candidate for the premiership in the upcoming elections to be held on March 24. Soon after the news was made public, the responses from Thais were mixed. Certainly, supporters of the Shinawatras were delighted, reasoning that Thaksin might finally make peace with the palace. Meanwhile, enemies of Thaksin condemned the party and him for politicizing the royal institution. As public debate went wild about the grand entrance of Ubolratana into the political ring, another event further shocked Thais. King Vajiralongkorn, younger brother of Ubolratana, released a statement preventing her from participating in electoral politics and essentially telling her to withdraw—claiming that her action defied the supposed tradition of the monarchy staying above Thai politics. The statement could be viewed as somewhat ironic given the fact that some members of the royal family have long interfered in Thai politics. There are two schools of thought about what happened with the nomination—and then rejection—of the princess’s candidacy. One school of thought is that Thaksin sought approval from King Vajiralongkorn for Ubolratana’s newfound role in politics. After all, Thaksin has wanted to reconcile with the monarchy rather than challenging it, and he needs a royal pardon in order to return to Thailand, after more than a decade living outside the kingdom as a fugitive from Thai justice. Somehow, the deal collapsed, perhaps simply because the palace underestimated the relatively positive popular response to the idea of Ubolratana’s political role. In other words, in this scenario the king approved the move, but then after Ubolratana’s popularity became apparent, the palace recanted—it feared a prime minister Ubolratana could reduce the power of the king and possibly bolster Thaksin’s position as the country’s most powerful leader. The other school of thought about what happened is that both Thaksin and Ubolratana ignored the king and made their dramatic move without obtaining his permission in advance. Her candidacy therefore surprised the palace and was seen as a direct challenge to the king and his allies in the military, where the king is consolidating power—as he is with other institutions in Thailand, as researcher Eugenie Merieau has shown. Hence, it was obligatory for Vajiralongkorn to condemn Thaksin for the politicization of the monarchy, Ubolratana for allowing herself to be manipulated, and the Thai Raksa Chart Party for breaking the royal tradition of supposedly avoiding politics—moves that allowed the king to portray himself as standing up for the monarchy’s constitutional role while simultaneously eliminating a threat to his power, at a time when the monarchy is becoming more clearly and deeply involved in politics. As this time, Thailand’s Constitutional Court, the top court, is considering whether to disband the Thai Raksa Chart Party. Should the party be dissolved, the other pro-Thaksin party, Puea Thai, would be politically vulnerable—by itself it might not be able to win a majority of seats in the lower house of parliament, and it too could face efforts to remove its members from politics or even dissolve it after the election in March. Meanwhile, Thaksin’s move to bring Ubolratana into politics might, in the long run, actually damage the power of the Thai monarch—even if, right now, the king is gaining strength and control of politics. The Ubolratana incident demonstrated certain fissures within Thai royalty—challenges that could eventually undermine the powerful institution. For one, the incident further revealed a seeming lack of unity within the royal family. Second, even if pro-Thaksin parties wind up banned or otherwise damaged by the Ubolratana incident, the event forced the king to directly involve himself in politics, fully revealing that the monarchy is not really a constitutional monarchy, and does not truly stand above politics. In so doing, the event may have further damaged the king’s credibility and, in the long run, made it easier for Thais to view the monarchy as simply another political actor. For many Thais, too, the Ubolratana incident reaffirmed that the monarchy and Thaksin are equally divisive, and both are willing to take major decisions about the future of the country without any consultation with the broader populace. Politics remain an almost entirely elite-dominated affair, precluding real democracy, no matter what happens in the March election. The incident also reminds Thais that the deep divisions that have corroded Thai politics for more than a decade will continue. Pavin Chachavalpongpun is an associate professor at Kyoto University’s Center for Southeast Asian Studies.

As I summarized in a blog post last week, Thailand has in recent days seen some of its most dramatic political developments in decades. After days of rumors, one of the pro-Thaksin Shinawatra parties, Thai Raksa Chart, nominated Princess Ubolratana as its candidate for prime minister. This abrupt insertion of the princess into the election season had some potential negative consequences; it could have led to Thailand having an elected prime minister who was basically impossible to criticize, which hardly would have helped boost accountability in a country where politicians’ impunity is a longstanding problem. However, the princess, at the head of a coalition of popular and populist parties, might have fostered stability in Thailand, at least for a time. The princess-led coalition likely would have stormed to election victory, and a massive victory further would have provided the government legitimacy. Instead, after the princess’s nomination was announced, Thailand’s king quashed it; on Monday, Thailand’s Election Commission formally rejected Princess Ubolratana’s candidacy. Although it is impossible to know for sure, given the opaqueness of the Thai monarchy, some longtime observers of the Thai royals, like journalist Andrew MacGregor Marshall, are suggesting that Thaksin and Princess Ubolratana went forward with this plan without consulting Thailand’s king, the princess’s younger brother. That initially seemed hard for me to believe, given how important the king’s approval was to this plan. But it is certainly possible, given how quickly and how bad Thaksin’s plan went, that MacGregor Marshall is right. The outcome of the election in March still remains unclear. As Jonathan Head of the BBC has noted, the pro-Thaksin party that nominated Princess Ubolratana may not be so easy to disqualify before elections; only Thailand’s top court can make this decision. So, it remains possible that pro-Thaksin parties, probably the most popular in the country, could still take a majority of seats in the March election, despite the blow of losing Princess Ubolratana as the Thai Raksa Chart prime minister candidate. And it also remains possible that a group of pro-military parties, with current junta leader Prayuth Chan-ocha as prime minister candidate, will put together a coalition that makes Prayuth prime minister. In either of these scenarios, though, stability is unlikely. A win cobbled together by pro-military parties would be very unpopular among supporters of pro-Thaksin parties; a victory by pro-Thaksin parties would probably lead to intense efforts by the military (and possibly the palace) to defang and hobble those parties, a tactic tried many times in the past. In the event of a win by pro-Thaksin parties, a royal-approved coup could happen; Thailand is already tense, with reports of movements of army vehicles around Bangkok sparking coup rumors, which have been denied by the armed forces. Continued instability is the most likely scenario, with no end in sight to the unrest that has damaged the country for nearly two decades, and has contributed to Thailand’s drift away from being a powerful regional actor and an attractive destination for foreign direct and equity investment. This political fracas further has clearly shown that Thailand’s most unaccountable actors remain the most influential in the country, and are actually gaining power. The military will remain extremely powerful, either with Prayuth at the head of government or with a very weak and hobbled pro-Thaksin coalition leading the lower house of parliament. And Thailand’s king has demonstrated that, even more than his father and mother were, he is willing to directly intercede in politics, and is amassing even greater power around himself. As Eugenie Merieau has shown, the king has increasingly gained the upper hand over the military, and also has consolidated power in many other ways, including taking direct control of the Crown Property Bureau, bolstering his power over Thailand’s most powerful monastic body, reducing the influence of the royal Privy Council—and now wading directly into the election campaign. The king’s increasing power will further damage Thailand’s possibilities of returning to real democracy—or any type of stability either.

In the run-up to Thailand’s elections on March 24, Thailand’s ruling junta initially seemed to have set the stage for the military and its allies to maintain power, one way or another, over the country. They would do so by ensuring, via the new junta-backed constitution, that no one party or coalition commanded control of the lower house of parliament, allowing pro-military parties to eventually cobble together control. Junta leader Prayuth Chan-ocha this week formally became the candidate for prime minister of the leading pro-regime party, according to the Bangkok Post, after months of playing it coy about whether he would try to remain in charge of the Thai government. But in recent weeks, the junta’s confidence may well have ebbed. The Puea Thai party and its allies in the campaign grew bolder on the campaign trail, and began to publicly announce their belief that the pro-Thaksin Shinawatra parties could indeed win a majority in the lower house, even though the new constitution seemed to have stacked the deck against them. Initial days of the pre-election period drew enthusiastic crowds, probably a positive sign for Puea Thai and its allies. Then, on Friday, the pro-Thaksin parties dropped what appeared to be a bombshell into Thai politics. The Thai Raksa Chart party, widely seen as another pro-Thaksin vehicle in addition to Puea Thai, announced that Princess Ubolratana, the older sister of Thailand’s King Vajiralongkorn, would stand as prime minister on the Thai Raksa Chart ticket. No such senior royal has ever stood for prime minister before, although Ubolratana formally gave up her title in the 1970s to marry a foreigner. Ubolratana long has had a seemingly friendly relationship with Thaksin. The announcement seemed to presage a tectonic shift in Thai politics, and could potentially lead to a cooling down of what has been one of the most chaotic political climates in Southeast Asia. The princess, who would be a popular choice, would head a government, supported by Thaksin (and presumably approved by the king), and defeat the pro-junta party and its allies. Power would swing away from the military and toward a populist/royalist nexus—although the king certainly has segments of the military who are loyal to him. A pro-Thaksin party would once again be in control in Thailand—pro-Thaksin parties have won every election since 2001—and Thaksin and his sister Yingluck, who was deposed in a coup in 2014, might return to Thailand and even once again play some kinds of roles in Thai politics. The announcement also held out the promise of some kind of truce in Thai politics. The military would likely lose in the election, and be forced to give up some significant control over politics—and would not launch measures after the election to try to nullify or undermine a win by pro-Thaksin parties. A shift in power away from the military—at least many segments of the military – might allow for national reconciliation among various segments of the Thai population, a government that could stay in power throughout its term, and thus a parliament that could focus on Thailand’s major needs on issues like education and economic reforms. At the same time, the announcement was still very dangerous for any return to real pluralistic democracy in Thailand. With a princess—even one who renounced her titles—potentially at the head of government, the press, the public, and civil society might be cowed to criticize the government, unsure whether the country’s harsh lèse majesté laws would endanger them for investigating and critiquing a prime minister Ubolratana. How would such a government be held accountable, given lèse majesté laws and the personality cult built around the monarchy? Then, a few hours ago, the king suddenly announced that it would be inappropriate and contrary to Thailand’s constitution for his sister to participate in politics as a prime ministerial candidate. (Of course, royals have long involved themselves in politics, albeit not openly, in a way that is not normal for a constitutional monarchy.) So, the kingdom was thrown into further turmoil. Did Thaksin, the princess, leaders of pro-Thaksin parties, and the king strike a deal, only for the king to walk away at the last minute—perhaps due to some royalists’ distrust of Thaksin, as Andrew MacGregor Marshall has suggested? Did Thaksin and his allies go forward with their plan with Ubolratana without the king knowing—which would be an unbelievably bold move, given the vast power of the Thai monarchy? So what happens now? I will cover the scenarios and the election in a further blog post and CFR Explainer.

While Thailand has struggled toward a much-delayed election, it finally looks like the vote is going to happen on March 24. The country’s election commission announced the March 24 date earlier this week, after the king promulgated a royal decree for the election to occur. Whether the election will be free and fair, and will result in any real progress putting Thailand back on the road to pluralist democracy, is unclear—and there is not a ton of reason for optimism. Although there is some possibility that a relatively free vote could be held on Election Day, and real progress could be made toward a return to democracy, there are many obstacles in that path. As Human Rights Watch has noted, the Thai authorities have utilized “unrelenting repression” against activists, dissidents, pro-democracy campaigners, and others in civil society in the run-up to the election. The constitution passed during this period of military rule further places massive obstacles to real pluralist democracy, and sets the stage for the army to continue to wield power behind the scenes for decades, and for Thailand to be “led” by a weak parliament. Meanwhile, the king has increased his power substantially in the two-plus years since the death of his father—a further roadblock that could prevent transparency and plural democracy. Although theoretically a constitutional monarch, he has gained complete control of the Crown Property Bureau (CPB); Forbes has written that the CPB holds assets worth as much as $30 billion, including prime real estate in downtown Bangkok. The king’s control over the military is growing as well; together, these trends clearly belie the idea that he is a constitutional monarch. Now, in the run-up to the vote, another one of Thailand’s serious challenges is coming to the fore again. After a period of (relative) quiet in Thailand’s southernmost provinces in recent years—“relative” in an area where there is still an ongoing insurgency and seven thousand people have died in the past two decades—violence is flaring up again. Deep South Watch, a group that monitors the conflict, said that the death toll in the southernmost provinces in 2017 was its lowest in fourteen years, for instance, and levels of violence were relatively low through most of 2018 too. Last week, attackers killed two Buddhist monks at a temple in southern Thailand. It was the first time a monk had been attacked in the south since 2015. On the same day last week, someone launched multiple bombings against security forces in the south, and Thai authorities shot dead an insurgent in a different firefight. In addition, the insurgents, who are believed to operate in diffuse cells without any clear sole leader, released a statement in early January encouraging fighters—and their supporters—to continue to battle the Thai state. As usual in the southernmost provinces, determining the exact causes of why violence ebbs and flows is difficult, given the opaque leadership structure of the insurgency and, often, the lack of reliable information about its operations. As Sunai Phasuk of Human Rights Watch told Al Jazeera, the insurgents may have launched this recent wave of attacks partly as retribution for the “recent assassination,” in early January, of an man alleged by the Thai government to be an insurgency leader, who was killed by gunmen in the south while he was riding his motorcycle. The man killed, Doloh Sarai, also was a Muslim cleric. But beyond the possible immediate retribution, the insurgency drags on, and may be accelerating, in part due to a lack of clear policy toward the south by the military. While the civilian government that ran Thailand between 2011 and 2014, before the 2014 military coup, attempted to make progress in negotiations with the insurgents—and seemed ready to possibly offer a higher degree of autonomy to the southernmost provinces—since the coup any movement on the situation in the south has stalled. The junta government still holds some talks with some representatives of the insurgency, although key leaders from the core faction of the insurgency have refused the junta’s pressure to join the talks. Insurgents may be realizing that the military is digging in for good—and will likely be in charge even after elections—and ramping up their attacks in response, hoping to convince the armed forces that doing nothing about the south will have consequences for the Royal Thai Army and the country generally. Overall, the combination of an election that could fail to move Thailand back toward pluralist democracy, the possibility of an angry reaction by many Thais if the election leaves the political calculus unchanged, and the revival of violence in the south make for a potentially grim 2019 for the kingdom.

In addition to regression on the issue of press freedom, Southeast Asia witnessed backsliding on rights and freedoms in many other areas in 2018, with Malaysia as a notable exception to this trend. Cambodia, the Philippines, Thailand, Myanmar, and even Indonesia exemplified a continued democratic regression. Cambodia became a clearly one-party state after a sham election in July, although at the end of the year Hun Sen and the CPP, under pressure from foreign governments, slightly relaxed their pressure on the opposition and civil society. However, this relaxation was probably just a means of convincing major foreign donors not to impose tougher sanctions against Cambodia, and not really a shift in how Hun Sen treats the opposition or civil society. Meanwhile, the Thai junta did everything it could to prevent real political opposition from coalescing. It banned political parties from organizing for most of the time before the February 2019 elections, putting most parties at a disadvantage before the election. The ban was only lifted in December. In the Philippines, President Rodrigo Duterte cracked down hard on press freedoms, as I noted in a previous blog, including trying to shut down the Rappler, one of the country’s best-known independent outlets. But he also appears to be trying to intimidate other journalism outlets, and has floated plans of launching more extrajudicial killing squads, in addition to those already tasked with wiping out drug suspects – these new squads would purportedly attack anyone linked to a communist insurgent group. Duterte also continued to weaken the independence of the judiciary and the power of the political opposition. In Laos, where the country’s new leadership has promised to take tough measures to root out graft, there are signs of progress on fighting corruption, including the firing of two provincial governors alleged to have been involved in corruption. But overall, the anti-corruption campaign has made modest inroads at best, and promises by the new leadership to bolster transparency and accountability have had no real effect on what remains a highly authoritarian and opaque government. And in Myanmar, the National League for Democracy/Aung San Suu Kyi government has proven a massive disappointment, overseeing stalled democratic reforms, regression on press freedoms, and a scorched earth policy toward the Rohingya in western Myanmar. However, 2019 might not be so grim for rights and freedoms in Southeast Asia. Although Thailand’s junta has tried to stage-manage elections called for February to ensure that the outcome is favorable to the military – and possibly even one resulting in a former general as prime minister – it cannot completely control the actual election. There is considerable reason to believe that, although the election will not be totally fair – the military is trying to slant the playing field against the long-ruling Puea Thai party – the actual Election Day will be free, marking some progress after nearly five years of military rule. In addition, an election brings some degree of uncertainty, and there is a chance that the vote will result in a parliament that has real authority and popular legitimacy and puts the country back on the path to democratic rule. There are other potentially hopeful signs in 2019 for rights and freedoms in the region. An election in Indonesia could showcase continued democratic consolidation there, even despite Jokowi’s increasingly authoritarian actions in the past year, and his selection of a cleric as running mate who has, in the past, made harsh statements about a range of minority groups in Indonesia. Malaysia’s government, which has made a strong start on democratic reforms, needs to move quickly to reform the country’s institutions, and set the stage, via legislation, for making lasting inroads against graft. In 2019, the Malaysian government has a chance to push through serious reforms designed to battle corruption, improve government transparency, and protect civil society, showcasing real democratic progress.

2018 was a brutal year, in many ways, for civil society activists, rights advocates, and democratic politicians throughout Southeast Asia. Cambodia’s government transformed from an autocratic regime where there was still some (minimal) space for opposition parties into a fully one-party regime. Thailand’s junta continued to repress the population, attempting to control the run-up to elections in February 2019 that the junta hopes will result in a victory for pro-military parties and their allies. The Myanmar government continued to stonewall a real investigation into the alleged crimes against humanity in Rakhine State, despite significant international pressure to allow an investigation. Meanwhile, in the Philippines, President Rodrigo Duterte appears to have moved on from using extrajudicial killings in his war on drugs to preparing to utilize extrajudicial killings in other ways. Last month, Duterte raised the idea of creating a new death squad to fight against communist rebels in the Philippines, for instance. And even in Indonesia, one of the freest states in the region, the Jokowi government has given off worrying signs of increasingly authoritarian tendencies. Jokowi has politicized top law enforcement posts, overseen criminal investigations of opponents, and shown other worrying signs, according to an analysis of his growing authoritarianism published in New Mandala by Tom Power, a PhD candidate at Australian National University. (Malaysia is a rare bright spot for rights and democracy in Southeast Asia this year—in fact one of the few global bright spots for democracy in 2018.) Perhaps nowhere has the increasing crackdown on rights and freedoms in Southeast Asia been more visible than in the area of press freedom. Of the journalists featured on Time magazine’s series of covers of people of the year, three are from Southeast Asia. Two of those featured are Wa Lone and Kyaw Soe Oo, journalists for Reuters who have been jailed in Myanmar, essentially for investigative reporting into aspects of a massacre against the Rohingya. (They are officially charged with breaking the Official Secrets Act.) The two men have already been in jail for a year—despite their trial being decried as a sham by rights organizations and prominent rights advocates—and they face in total seven-year prison sentences. Suu Kyi has defended their jailing, and the two reporters’ time in prison is emblematic of Myanmar’s worsening climate for independent journalism, even under Suu Kyi’s government. As the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) has noted, three other Myanmar journalists were arrested in October, and overall the Official Secrets Act, defamation charges, and physical threats are chilling the climate for reporting in the country. The climate for press freedom is poor in Cambodia, Laos, Thailand, and Vietnam as well. For example, in Cambodia, one of the leading print outlets, the Cambodia Daily, closed in 2017, reportedly under pressure from the Hun Sen government. Another leading independent outlet, the Phnom Penh Post, was sold to a new owner in 2018, amid worries that the new management would curb critical and investigative reporting. Many Phnom Penh Post staff members quit. Meanwhile, in Vietnam the government continued to aggressively shut down independent bloggers and writers, and Thailand’s junta has continued to harshly repress reporters and editors, such as reportedly pushing for the sacking of the top editor of the Bangkok Post, a leading Thailand newspaper, for his critical coverage of the military regime. Maria Ressa, the head of Rappler, one of the Philippines’ toughest and most groundbreaking news sites, is probably the best-known case of press freedom under attack in Southeast Asia. Before becoming the CEO of Rappler, Ressa had amassed a broad range of experience, including working for two decades for CNN, for whom she covered everything from the rise of Islamist terror networks in Southeast Asia to the post-Marcos era in the Philippines. She has received a wide range of awards for her work, including an Emmy nomination and an Overseas Press Club award. Like many authoritarian-leaning populists, Duterte aggressively demonizes the media, and Rappler in particular seems to infuriate him, with its hard-hitting, deep-digging style. The Duterte administration seems determined to put Rappler out of business. In early 2018, the Philippine SEC announced that it was revoking Rappler’s license. The media organization fought, and continued operating, but it was then accused of libel by the Philippine national bureau of investigation, and then was hit with tax evasion charges by the Philippine tax agency. Ressa herself also was charged with tax evasion, only a few days after she got a press freedom award from CPJ. She and the media outlet deny the charges, and noted how quickly the Philippine government had moved to file charges, seemingly without considering all motions and evidence. The case is now proceeding—but the climate for press freedom in the Philippines, which long combined tough investigative reporting with one of the most dangerous environments for journalists in the world, looks like it will only get grimmer in 2019.

While populism is sweeping through Europe and parts of the Americas it is also making gains in Southeast Asia. The region’s autocrat-leaning populists—those who have already ruled and those who are attempting to win power—use similar strategies: positioning themselves as outsiders who can solve problems where elites have failed, offering brutal approaches to crime, targeting vulnerable groups within societies, and ultimately undermining democracy. Two of the region’s six biggest economies—the Philippines and Thailand—already have had autocratic-leaning populist leaders, and a third, Indonesia, could be run by a populist after presidential elections next year. The emergence of autocratic-leaning populism could further erode democracy and stability in a region that had, until the past decade, been growing freer. For more on how populism is expanding in Southeast Asia, and how Southeast Asian populism differs from its better-known peers in Europe and North America, see my new CFR Explainer.

The region’s fast-growing but fragile democracies have been susceptible to strongmen and autocratic-leaning populists in recent years, propelled by concerns over inequality, crime, and dysfunctional governments.

On a visit to Japan earlier in October, Thai Prime Minister and junta leader Prayuth Chan-ocha reportedly confirmed that Thailand would indeed hold elections early next year, between February and May 2019. According to a readout of a meeting between Prayuth and Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, Prayuth reportedly said that elections could be held as early as February—he had previously vowed to allow elections in February. The junta has now ruled for over four years, since seizing power in a coup in May 2014. But now, having laid the groundwork to diminish the power of elected politicians even after the vote, the military has stepped up plans to further dominate the kingdom even after the election, by running a pro-military party in the election, wooing other political parties in the race for the lower house of parliament, and even possibly by having former junta members run for top jobs. For more on how the election might play out, see my new World Politics Review article, from which this snippet is drawn.

By Hunter Marston Over the last year, concerns about Southeast Asia’s increasingly powerful autocrats have dominated headlines and commentary about the region. Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte, though democratically elected, has imprisoned his critics, including even senators. Myanmar’s military has expelled hundreds of thousands of minority Rohingya Muslims through targeted violence, while the Thai junta has clung to power despite promises of elections to come. Meanwhile, Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen this year won an unfree and unfair election in which the main opposition party was banned. Yet behind these headlines of creeping authoritarianism, Southeast Asian states often exhibit weak, centralized state power in many respects. Indeed, illegal economies in Southeast Asia, including narcotics, prostitution, and human trafficking, among other industries, thrive in the borderlands and frontier towns of Southeast Asia. Rather than imposing law and order, states are often either complicit in these crimes networks or lack the power to stop them. In his new book Hello, Shadowlands: Inside the Meth Fiefdoms, Rebel Hideouts and Bomb-Scarred Party Towns of Southeast Asia, Patrick Winn, Asia correspondent with Public Radio International and a veteran Southeast Asia journalist, analyzes the flourishing crime world on the periphery of state power in Southeast Asia (i.e., the “shadowlands”) and examines the “rational, complex actors” who engage in the sex and drug industries, among other illicit activities. Winn argues that these illegal economies flourish, in some place in Southeast Asia, due to the absence of powerful state institutions—but also that, where necessary, criminal networks cooperate with state authorities and security forces. Further facilitating these powerful networks, according to Winn, is the rising influence of Chinese authoritarianism and the declining power of the United States, the combination of which he sees as “a blessing for organized crime.” China’s enormous middle class, he argues, guarantees a steady stream of consumers with a rising demand for illicit exports, while the Chinese government’s preference for noninterference in neighbors’ internal affairs and disinterest in human rights dictate that Beijing will not restrict illegal trade flows. China’s expanding influence occurs as U.S. power recedes, and Southeast Asia is exhibiting a tilt toward authoritarian governance, although he notes that the United States’ approach to many of these illegal economies in Southeast Asia has often been ineffective in the past too. From the start, Winn offers vivid characters and a human dimension, making the book a compelling read. Winn’s first chapter, for instance, situates the reader in a den of methamphetamine addicts in northern Myanmar’s Kachin State, illustrating their addiction while also examining the broader reasons why the methamphetamine trade has flourished in northern and northeastern Myanmar. He moves on to focus on the lawlessness of Myanmar’s frontier towns, which facilitate a wide range of illegal trade. Winn illustrates how the flow of drugs and weapons persists outside the authority of Myanmar’s central authority, in areas controlled by ethnic Kachin militia for instance. Where the central government is present, it is unable or uninterested to enforce antidrug policies, while army officers who control key checkpoints often benefit from the drug trade by accepting bribes, and the military face allegations of a larger role in the drug trade. Winn next shifts his focus to the Philippines. Rather than just explore the drug war under President Rodrigo Duterte, Winn opts for a different angle. He tells the story of albularyo, herbal practitioners who take great risks to offer both actual drugs—albeit ones that are illegal in the Philippines and are brought in clandestinely, due to the government’s inability to police these shipments—that produce medical abortions, as well as folk remedies that supposedly induce abortions. Abortion is illegal in the Philippines, and the Catholic Church wields significant moral and political power in the country. The Duterte administration, which has pushed for broader access to birth control, has often clashed with the church, although Duterte has not pushed to legalize abortion. Facing desperate circumstances, albularyo remain popular among women with no legal access to abortion. Winn’s portrait of Karen, a woman barely making ends meet who seeks an herbal practitioner to prevent her fourth pregnancy, touches on both drug wars: the first on the modern meth trade; the other against the traditional healers who offer illicit medical abortions, many of which can be incredibly damaging to the health of the mother and child. During times where her income ran low, Karen started selling meth to make enough money to feed her children. When she heard of Duterte’s proposed amnesty for drug users and sellers who turned themselves in to authorities, she submitted her information to the government. But rather than a blanket pardon, those who took Duterte at his word learned that they were now on a list of targets for police and vigilantes enforcing the president’s drug war. Karen has narrowly dodged visitors to her home and is living on the run for fear of her life, unable to see her children. After examining how the North Korean regime uses restaurants across Southeast Asia to bring in hard currency for the totalitarian state, Winn’s tour of the growing “shadowlands” of Southeast Asia takes him to southern Thailand. In the deep south, near the Malaysian border, there is a significant sex industry—despite an ongoing separatist insurgency that often has directly targeted commercial sex workers, as well as soldiers, teachers, and anyone the insurgents see as somehow linked to or complicit in the Thai state. The insurgency, which dates back more than fifteen years in its current iteration, has killed more than 6,500 people in its current period. Insurgents often target bars and other sites in the southern border towns where sex workers operate. While prostitution is technically illegal in Thailand, many police are aware of and tolerate sex work taking place within certain bars because they are able to extract bribes. Police corruption and the heavy security presence of Thai armed forces in the south further inflame local resentment. In his afterword, Winn offers several policy recommendations designed to combat the growing illegal economy in various Southeast Asian states. These include: increase police officers’ salaries; decriminalize sex work; legalize narcotics (including meth); and create powerful anticorruption commissions to hold authorities to account and strengthen rule of law. Such commissions have demonstrated some notable results in Indonesia, for instance, whose corruption eradication commission has led to the arrest of high-profile politicians. Winn astutely points to inherent contradictions in US foreign policy that potentially facilitate illegal economies in Southeast Asia: spending billions on a global war on drugs while slashing overseas development assistance, for instance. Winn’s argument that Southeast Asian crime syndicates make rational choices and operate by certain codes of conduct holds up under scrutiny. But his broader geopolitical conclusions—that China’s rise is as preordained as the United States’ decline—come off as less supported by evidence. Winn is on firmer footing in his quest to understand the people he interviews in the shadowlands. His intimate portrait of the everyday criminals who skirt the law and live in the shadows adds an important human dimension to a still widely misunderstood domain of the global economy and Southeast Asia’s rapidly changing societies. Hunter Marston (@hmarston4) is a Washington, DC–based Southeast Asia analyst and coauthor of a chapter in the forthcoming volume Asia’s Quest for Balance: China's Rise and Balancing in the Indo-Pacific (Rowman & Littlefield, 2018).

After taking power in a coup in 2014, Thailand’s military junta made multiple promises of how they would change the kingdom. They vowed to clean up corruption, which supposedly had spiked under the Yingluck and Thaksin Shinawatra governments, to reduce political tensions in a country that had seen nearly two decades of partisan fighting and literal street fighting, and to transform the Thai economy, which had been floundering due to political turmoil as well as deep problems in Thailand’s education system, infrastructure, and how state funding is allotted to various regions of the country. Yet over the past four years, Thailand’s military has badly undermined the idea that, after the coup, it would somehow be a neutral and wise economic manager, and would not mix business and politics. Instead, even in Thailand’s highly restricted current media environment, local press outlets have discovered that top army brass seem to be unusually wealthy—a problem highlighted by the fact that junta number two Prawit Wongsuwan was caught, in public, wearing vastly expensive luxury watches. Meanwhile, the junta has been accused of stacking certain Thai companies with junta cronies, of boosting defense budgets since the coup, and of making little progress on economic reform. But the fact that the Thai military is intricately involved in the kingdom’s economy should not come as a surprise to anyone following Thai politics. In reality, as the contributors to the important new volume Khaki Capital show, armed forces throughout Southeast Asia, including in Thailand, have been deeply involved in countries’ economies for decades, extracting massive amounts of funds from state budgets for the militaries and for individual military leaders, and using their political and military power to profit in a range of ways. For more of my review of Khaki Capital, see the new issue of the Kyoto Review of Southeast Asia.

More than four years after Thailand’s military seized power in a coup, the nineteenth coup or coup attempt in the kingdom since the end of the absolute monarchy in 1932, the country still seems far from a return to civilian rule. Since the coup, junta leader Prayuth Chan-ocha has repeatedly promised that elections will be held, only to put them off once again. Most recently, the junta allowed political parties to register earlier this year, and also suggested that new elections would be held by February 2019 at the latest. However, in recent weeks the military has waffled on this date as well, and is now saying that elections could be held next May—or possibly later. Yet even as Thailand’s junta prepares to push off elections again, Prime Minister Prayuth Chan-ocha has increasingly been welcomed in many leading democracies. Indeed, from Europe to Australia to the United States, countries have largely dropped efforts at pressuring Thailand’s government, even while Thailand’s political crisis stretches on indefinitely. For more on how the junta has renormalized relations with leading democracies, see my new World Politics Review article.

In early May, Malaysia was stunned by the victory, in national elections, of the opposition coalition, led by Mahathir Mohamad and essentially (from jail), longtime opposition leader Anwar Ibrahim. Although some journalists had, in the run-up to the election, noted that the opposition’s support appeared to be cresting, in the wake of years of massive corruption allegations against former Prime Minister Najib tun Razak and his allies, the win still came largely as a shock. Najib had governed increasingly autocratically, including by detaining many prominent opponents, and his coalition—which had ruled Malaysia since independence—also benefitted from control of state media, massive gerrymandering, and the ability to hand out large amounts of cash in the run-up to election day, a strategy it had used repeatedly in the past to ensure victory. Yet despite these obstacles, the Malaysia opposition won—and Najib and his coalition (eventually) conceded, marking the country’s first democratic transfer of power. Yet democrats throughout the rest of Southeast Asia, where many elections are due this year and next, should not take too much heart from Malaysia’s example. For more on why they should not, see my new piece in the Globalist.

Over the past decade, Southeast Asia’s democratic decline has accelerated, and in the past two years the recession has picked up notable speed. With the exception of Malaysia, which shocked the region with the defeat of the governing coalition in May, Southeast Asia’s hybrid states are backsliding, while its most authoritarian states are becoming more autocratic. Even Indonesia and Timor-Leste, the region’s most solid democracies, have become shakier in the past two years. In an extended interview with The Diplomat, I assess the state of democracy in Southeast Asia today, the regional and international causes for Southeast Asia’s democratic backsliding, and whether there are causes for hope for the future. See the interview here.