Over the next few months we will be continuing our analysis of mainland Southeast Asia’s current wave of political turbulence. Alongside the more familiar Thai showdown and looming October election, there are coming events in Burma, Cambodia and Laos that we will be following closely. There has even been recent chatter about resuming Burma’s controversial military-sponsored Constitutional Convention.
This is just one more nudge to remind us that, for all its chaos and unpredictability, the situation in Thailand is still usually far tamer and more transparent than politics elsewhere in the neighbourhood.
This snapshot of students counting votes at a provincial polling station in northern Thailand was taken on 6 February 2005. This was the historic landslide vote where Thaksin dominated his rivals and their efforts to defeat him at the ballot box. For obvious reasons, New Mandala has no similiar file photos of Lao or Burmese national elections with which to tempt our readers.
For coming attractions…keep watching this space….
2 responses so far ↓
1 New Mandala » Diplomatic intent // Sep 27, 2006 at 3:22 am
[...] Right now, we are, however, hearing much banter about Thaksin’s supposedly “corrupt domination of the rural vote”. The realities on the ground often defy such convenient generalisation. [...]
2 New Mandala » Where to for Thai Studies? // Oct 15, 2006 at 2:29 am
[...] Back on 20 August 2006, I posted a short note that flagged what I then saw as some of the potentially important events that were looming over the horizon for scholarly interpretations of Southeast Asia. The dramatic events of September 19, but a month later, were certainly beyond my vision of the political stalemate. Back then, almost nobody openly speculated on the possibility of another Thai coup. [...]
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