Showing 1 - 10 of 18
Government stability tests performance
Oped, Thitinan Pongsudhirak, Published on 03/04/2026
» Prime Minister Anutin Charnvirakul has gone from strength to strength, leveraging a stopgap minority government late last year into solid majority rule after the Feb 8 election.
Thai politics back at the brink (again)
Oped, Thitinan Pongsudhirak, Published on 04/07/2025
» The Constitutional Court's suspension of Paetongtarn Shinawatra from the premiership is déjà vu, exposing a pattern of systematic manipulation and concoction of political outcomes. After so many dissolutions of leading political parties and repeated bans of elected representatives over two decades, it is time to call a spade a spade. Thailand is a faux democracy. Its core foundations constitute an autocratic regime that does not really care about the country's future and the collective will of its people.
The tyranny of anarchy and what to do
Oped, Thitinan Pongsudhirak, Published on 21/03/2025
» It is both exciting and alarming to be a student of international affairs as the world is being turned upside down. In just two months, the second administration of President Donald J Trump has sent shockwaves rippling through the international system as the United States pulls back from its role as leader, underwriter, and guardian of the nearly 80-year-old international order that it instrumentally constructed after WWII. In view of the US's portentous withdrawal, relative anarchy in the international system is back with a vengeance, leaving Asean members and smaller states elsewhere to fend for themselves in a self-help geostrategic environment.
Early implications of Russia's invasion
Oped, Thitinan Pongsudhirak, Published on 04/03/2022
» Just one week after his military invasion of Ukraine, Russian President Vladimir Putin has found some truisms of warfare the hard way. Once war starts, the fog that accompanies it and the friction that it creates lead to unanticipated and unintended outcomes. Russia's war of aggression against Ukraine, borne out of choice rather than necessity, appears to be dragging on, not the short and swift victory Mr Putin and his military planners might have envisaged. While Russia may still triumph on Ukrainian battlefields, it has lost the war just about everywhere else.
Asean's Myanmar crisis out of control
Oped, Thitinan Pongsudhirak, Published on 26/03/2021
» Myanmar's spiralling post-coup violence and bloodshed has become Asean's existential crisis. It is customary to pin hopes on an Asean way of fudging and nudging the main protagonists into some workable, face-saving compromise to save the day but this time the situation is dire and dark. Unless the 10-member regional organisation can make a difference in halting Myanmar's descent into uncontrollable violence and potential civil war, Asean is at risk of undermining and perhaps ending its success story.
Thai education reform is top priority
Oped, Thitinan Pongsudhirak, Published on 09/10/2020
» Of the myriad reforms that have been demanded by the ongoing student-led protests, Thailand's deficient and outdated education system is second to none. Education reform has become a self-contained and separate agenda for change. Thai students across the country, particularly in high schools, have been awakened and angry at the fact that they have been kept in the dark and cloistered in a state-imposed mind bubble for so long. Unless it is answered, this awakening and anger is likely to galvanise more protests and point to broader changes that have been pent up for decades.
Domestic drivers of superpower rivalry
Oped, Thitinan Pongsudhirak, Published on 10/07/2020
» The coronavirus pandemic is fundamentally global but its impact is mainly local because of the international system of state sovereignty, borders and divergent national interests. What is needed to cope with, contain and overcome the pandemic is more international cooperation and coordination. But we are seeing less international efforts to fight the virus together and more self-help where every nation fends for itself. The upshot from this fractured and fragmented international system during Covid-19 is the primacy of domestic determinants of international outcomes. Nowhere is this reality clearer than the competition and confrontation between the United States and China.
Misguided myopia of asking the rich
Oped, Thitinan Pongsudhirak, Published on 24/04/2020
» Prime Minister Prayut Chan-o-cha's initiative to seek more cooperation and assistance from Thailand's 20 wealthiest billionaires is understandable. Thailand needs all the help it can get to handle and manage the social and economic ravages of the coronavirus (Covid-19) crisis. But making an appeal in writing from the top to the country's richest is short-sighted and misguided on many levels. It displays a government at the end of its tether and a leader who is being forced to own up to mismanaging the country for the past six years.
Thailand needs firmer Covid-19 action
Oped, Thitinan Pongsudhirak, Published on 20/03/2020
» While being on the right track, the government's latest response to the new coronavirus (Covid-19) by closing schools and entertainment venues, as well as putting off the Songkran break, is likely to prove too little, too late, once again. As other countries have shown, the sooner firm and hard measures are put in place, the better and likelier efforts to contain and remedy Covid-19 will be successful. An early global lesson from the fast-spreading virus is to be pre-emptive and pro-active, "front-loading" the pain of social adjustments and economic damages rather than playing catch-up and ultimately paying a higher price.
Underpinnings of a Thai mass shooting
News, Thitinan Pongsudhirak, Published on 14/02/2020
» Thailand's worst apolitical mass shooting on a Buddhist holiday last weekend left a trail of deaths and injuries with one lasting question that will be hard to answer. As the country reels from the shocking tragedy and loss, the Thai government needed to respond by pulling the country together in a healing process, coming to terms with the situation and drawing the right conclusions to prevent this sort of mindless killing from ever taking place again. Instead, the authorities from the prime minister to the army commander-in-chief focused too much on themselves and failed to show sufficient empathy with the people and provide a way forward for Thai society.