ABSTRACT
The long-standing tendency of Thailand’s royalist establishment to cite the threat of chaos – or when that is not enough, to engineer the chaos themselves – in order to make the suspension of electoral democracy appear necessary to “maintaining” or “restoring” order calls to mind an analogy between the methods of states and organised crime. This has been the case of Thailand, which has witnessed a series of 13 coups and 20 constitutions since 1932. By investigating the logic of Thailand’s royalist military coups – the governing principles undergirding the series of events regularly entailed by a royally sanctioned coup and their affinity with those involved in the running of a protection racket – this chapter hopes to shed light on the longevity of Thailand’s royalist political order and on the state of crisis into which the arrangement has been thrust by the de-stabilising political conflict that has engulfed the nation since the turn of the century.
