The Contestation of “Good Politics”: Explaining Conflict and Polarisation in Thailand

Abstract

ABSTRACTThis article focuses on contestation over “good politics” in Thailand among yellow and red shirt supporters, and conflict and polarisation, in the last decade. It applies the phenomenology of “everyday politics” to understand the diversity of perceptions, thoughts, beliefs, experiences and emotions of the different sets of protesters, and shows how they define good politics in their own terms. The main argument is that conflicts between the yellow shirts and the red shirts cannot be fully comprehended simply by contrasting two political ideologies and social classes. Thai political conflicts represent the contestation of different meanings of good politics, which themselves reflect the complexities of underlying social conflicts, as well as the disintegration of the legitimacy of Thailand’s political order. Significantly, these different meanings of good politics reflect different emotional and political realities both between and within the yellow and red shirt supporters. These different realities closely link to experiences of cultural learning, social class and conflict issues in specific contexts and positions.