(ProQuest: ... denotes non-US-ASCII text omitted.)IntroductionIn September 2006, a military coup d'etat toppled Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra's five-and-a-half-year-old government. The Temporary Constitution dated October 1 claimed the following as the reason for the coup:The head of the Council for Democratic Reform under Constitutional Monarchy which seized power successfully on 19 September 2006, informed the king that the reasons for seizing power and abrogating the Constitution of the Kingdom of Thailand were to correct the deterioration in the government of the realm, and inefficiency in managing the government of the realm and mon- itoring the use of state power, which caused widespread corruption and malfeasance, for which those responsible could not be brought to account. This brought about a serious crisis of politics and government, and problems of conflict among the mass of the people who were aroused to such divisive partisanship that the unity and harmony among the people of the nation collapsed into a severe social crisis.1)Likewise, the mass media of Thailand criticized Thaksin's management of the state on the grounds that he had provoked a serious national crisis owing to the concentration of power, prevalence of nepotism, wide-ranging corruption, and destruction of democracy under his watch (Nariphon 2006; Wichai 2006). However, viewing the military coup simply as the result of a conflict between the movement of democratization and Thaksin's dictatorship, and a product of popular protest against a corrupt government does not offer an adequate understanding of why the coup happened as well as an insightful analysis of fundamental problems facing contemporary Thailand under the strong pressures of globalization and economic liberalization (Suehiro 2009).After the 2006 coup, Thailand has suffered continuous political instability due to the conflict between the pro-Thaksin group or red shirts group and the anti-Thaksin group or yellow shirts group. For the past six years from 2007 to 2012, analyses of Thai politics and society have significantly deepened. Those who focused on the sharp conflict between the red shirts group and the yellow shirts group began to turn their attention to more fundamental problems rooted in Thai society, namely, the widening gap in income and assets among the people (not poverty problems), and the basic conflict between the mass people (lower-income class) and the traditional ruling elites (royalists, military, bureaucrats, and capitalists) (Montesano et al. 2012). However, these arguments fail to provide explanation of the real cause of the military coup in 2006. More importantly, they fail to provide a comprehensive explanation of the impact of Thaksin's reforms on Thai politics and society. Given this situation, we still need to explain the real cause of the military coup as well as the total picture of reforms undertaken by Thaksin.My hypothesis in this article is very simple. The real cause of the military coup is the conflict between Thaksin, on the one hand, who forcibly conducted reforms of the state, and royalist-military groups, on the other hand, who believed that his state reforms constituted a serious threat to the monarchy. At the same time, government officials and people have been apprehensive about the outcomes of Thaksin's intensive reforms because these reforms were undertaken too speedily and too radically in the context of Thai social values, which preferred gradual reform towards a democratized country over a big-bang style reform towards an advanced country. This is the most important reason why the majority of the people including the people in rural areas temporarily welcomed or accepted the military coup, at least in its initial stage.2)We should not overlook the fact that Thaksin was Janus-faced in his style of state management: he presented himself as an ambitious populist3) as well as an active state reformist. …