Organizer: The LSE Saw Swee Hock Southeast Asia Centre

Type/Location: Hybrid/London

Description:

The Border Patrol Police of Thailand (BPP) was formed as paramilitary intelligence police to assist the American anticommunist counterinsurgency in the early 1950s. In the early 1960s, the force transformed into a rural development agency sponsored by the U.S. government and the Thai monarchy and extended its area of operation from the border areas to the entirety of Thailand. It finally inscribed its name as the major perpetrator of the October 6 Massacre in Bangkok in 1976. In the process of multiple transformations, the BPP has become a symbolic missionary of royalist nationalism that safeguards the border of Thainess. The BPP’s transformations and evolving missions vividly show how the Thai ruling elite indigenized the American Cold War crusade in Southeast Asia to build a royalist Thai nation in the second half of the twentieth century.

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