Ken Mathis Lohatepanont

General Wit Thephasadin Na Ayudhya has been through his fair share of Thai political party drama lately. At the start of this year, he was the chief strategist for the Palang Pracharath Party (PPRP). He then did a short stint as the head of the Thai Economics Party, the PPRP breakaway party formed by Captain […]

I wanted to write about my own experience applying for Ph.D. programs in political science, in case it is of interest to anyone else looking to pursue a similar path. I don’t claim, of course, to have any special insight into the admissions process for political science Ph.D. programs. However, now that I have just […]

What goes up must come down: such is the law of political gravity. For a while the Governor of Bangkok, Chadchart Sittipunt, looked like he was an all-conquering colossus who bestrode the political landscape with rockstar popularity and an electoral mandate difficult to rival. Scarcely five months after he was elected in a landslide, however, […]

Thailand’s Constitutional Court, the country’s highest judicial body, temporarily suspended Prime Minister Prayuth Chan-ocha from his duties on Aug. 24. After launching a military coup in 2014, Prayuth presided over the kingdom of 70 million people. But the constitution he helped engineer after the coup limits prime ministers to eight years in power — a limit he may have […]

In the early days of the pandemic, it was common for people to talk about the day “when Covid-19 is over,” and people were daydreaming of a return to something that resembled 2019 picturing a world where people no longer had to follow any public health measures or wearing mandatory masks and hoping that the […]

In probably the biggest political news in Thailand in a long time, 2014 coup leader and incumbent Prime Minister Prayut Chan-o-cha was suspended by the Constitutional Court to undertake duties as Premier until the court delivers a ruling on his 8-year tenure. Although the final decision is set to come sometimes in September or possibly […]

“A man’s worth,” the Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius once said, “is no greater than his ambitions.” If this is true both for people and parties, then the Bhumjai Thai party’s value is high indeed. Deputy Prime Minister Anutin Charnvirakul, Bhumjai Thai’s leader, recently made clear his grand ambitions for the party at a rally in […]

On 1 June 2022, Chadchart Sittipunt officially assumed office as Governor of Bangkok. In doing so, he became the first figure identified with Thailand’s opposition camp to enter a prominent executive position since the military coup of May 2014. Click here to read the full piece at East Asia Forum. (Cover image credits.)

On July 8th, Prime Minister Prayut Chan-o-cha released a video on his Facebook page entitled “A Three-Pronged Strategy to Build the Future.” The prime minister, tieless and standing at an angle, looked more relaxed than in his usual speeches. Given that he last posted a video on his page one year ago, this content certainly […]

Today is my last day as a researcher at the Thailand Development Research Institute, and I wanted to write up some of my thoughts to wrap up my time here. The year that I spent at TDRI has also been very impactful in shaping how I approach the problems that face Thailand. In particular, I […]