People Politics in Thai Society Before and After 2000s: Ideology, Relations to the State and Citizenship

Abstract

This article explores the literatures on people politics from 1970s to the present, focusing on the ideology, relations to the state and citizenship. The author discovers that people politics from 1970s grew through the conceptual idea of culture community, transforming into the politics of communitarianism which has different directions, for example; some groups were favored to community and royal nationalism, whereas some others looked for a movement for equal rights and criticized the injustice structure. For people and the state relations, this work argues that there is a tendency which changes from resistance to the state to become cooperating with the state. This process depended upon a chance of such power groups to control the state power. This is a character of the people politics, however former works on politics did not reflect the dynamic formation of people politics in the context of Thai history which are complicated and composed of multiple relations.