Title: The fragility of power: the unstable politics of Thailand.

Speaker: Dr. Claudio Sopranzetti
Postdoctoral Fellow at Oxford University, CSEAS Visiting Research Scholar

Date: Thursday, February 23, 2017, 16:00-
Venue: Large-sized Meeting Room (No. 333) 3rd Floor, Inamori Foundation Building, Kyoto University

Abstract:
This talk explores the unstable politics of Thailand in the last decade.
It does so in three acts.
In Act 1, I go back to my previous work on motorcycle taxi drivers and show how, during the 2010 protest, they revealed cracks in the state apparatus and its inability to control its own territory and subjects.
In Act 2, I zoom out from the drivers and explore how, in the following year, these cracks expanded into larger fault lines in state’s royalist hegemony.
Finally, in Act 3, I explore the army’s intervention since 2014 as an attempt to fill in the fault lines that had emerged in 2010 by retaking control over the drivers’ mobility, persecuting any challenge to royalist hegemony, and dispelling new mobilization through repression.
While dominant theories of power have given disproportionate attention either to the stability of hegemony or to everyday resistance, in this talk I focus on the the failures of power and the work needed for its maintenance in contemporary Thailand.

Claudio Sopranzetti is a Postdoctoral Fellow at Oxford University. His work explores emerging logics of capital, everyday life and collective action in and beyond Thailand. He is currently concluding a book titled “Owners of the Map: Mobility and Politics Among Motorcycle Taxi Drivers in Bangkok” for University of California Press.