Thai Military Power: A Culture of Strategic Accommodation

NIAS Monographs #142

by Gregory Vincent Raymond

Being at the centre of the vital Asia–Pacific region, Thailand is important. But, despite its large population and powerful military forces performing significant roles in state and society, Thailand has little military power. Why is this? Using strategic culture as an analytical framework, this book portrays the Thai state as an accommodative actor. When Western empires dominated in Asia, Thailand ‘bent in the wind’ to preserve its independence by a limited trading of territory and sovereignty. This policy continues today in different forms. A key feature is that military organizational culture reinforces a state ideology of royalist nationalism, in turn reinforcing the national strategic culture. Significant here is internal political acceptance not just of military domination in civil–military relations but also of the Thai military’s limitations in state-on-state combat. The author finds such ‘underbalancing’ – not responding to threat, or responding inadequately – elsewhere in Southeast Asia, too.

304 pages, Paperback

Published February 1, 2018

Reviews

[Jonah Lo · Rating 4 out of 5]

A very competent review of the strategic culture of the Thai military, which goes over the histories it remembers and the stories it tells itself at some length. It uses untranslated internal and external literature and interview data well.

My quibble is that the study's "tests" of its theory are not really proper social-scientific tests at all. Each test instead highlights the presence of 2-5/5 of the theory's component parts, in different case studies with different contexts. Falsifiability is not really prominent. Thus, they are better explanations or illustrations than tests.