Organizer: SEACoast
Description:
In April 2020, I founded a private Facebook group called the Royalist Marketplace as a venue for frank dialogues on the monarchy. The birth of Royalist Marketplace accelerated the erosion of the long-held taboo on discussing the monarchy and immediately received a hostile response from the government. To date, it has more than 2.35 million members making it the largest Facebook page in Thailand. The group openly discussed sensitive topics, including the political intervention of the monarchy, the intimate ties between the monarchy and the military, the ultra-rich Crown Property Bureau, the anachronistic lèse-majesté law and the brutality against monarchy critics.
In Thailand, online activism has become an indispensable part of street activism, unfurling the influence of social media on behalf of political protests, which have started in 2020. In many ways, the Royalist Marketplace assists in altering the discourse on the monarchy. Once inviolable, the institution today is openly criticised despite the lèse-majestélaw. The genie has been let out of the bottle and what has been said cannot be unsaid. Criticising the monarchy today is an irreversible process.
Discussions of the monarchy have long been considered off-limits in Thailand, with the royal family fiercely protected by the lèse-majesté law that forbids insulting comments toward them and carries a possible prison sentence of up to 15 years. Since the enthronement of Bhumibol’s successor, King Vajiralongkorn, the taboo on the monarchy has been broken and the younger generation is eager to confront the ‘elephant in the room.’The problem of the monarchy, for the first time in history, has become a public agenda.
Speaker:
Pavin Chachavalpongpun, founder of Royalist Marketplace, is Associate Professor at the Center for Southeast Asian Studies, Kyoto University. He is the chief editor of the Kyoto Review of Southeast Asia in which all articles are translated from English into Japanese, Thai, Bahasa Indonesia, Filipino, Burmese and Vietnamese. Earning his PhD from the School of Oriental and African Studies, he is the author of many books including A Plastic Nation: The Curse of Thainess in Thai-Burmese Relation.
For questions, email seacoast@ucsc.edu.
Click here for more information.
