Conclusion

Abstract

This concluding chapter studies the politics of the current military junta from the vantage point of the southern Thai counterinsurgency. Imperial practices of policing, it argues, are now applied on a national scale. The continuities of the imperial formation are key to understanding how the current military regime operates. For one, the military centrally relies on counterinsurgency techniques. In this reading, the counterinsurgency campaign in the South has helped to revive important practices and institutions of policing that seemed to have vanished after the Cold War, and, as in other imperial laboratories — European colonies that served as sites for experimenting with modern practices of government — it has helped to develop innovations that the junta now deploys to govern the country. What is more, the current military regime puts into play the axes of difference that undergird the Thai imperial formation, thus fortifying its structure to stabilize military rule.