Impunity and State Violence in Thailand

This project offers a new history of Thailand, written through the lens of impunity - the failure to hold state actors accountable for violence - and the legal, political, and social structures that produce it. Using archival and ethnographic research it charts forms of impunity across Thailand's democratic and dictatorial regimes since 1932, a period marked by crises, including 17 successful or attempted coups. It offers new historical and theoretical insights on the challenges to democracy posed by state failure to break the links between law and violence, while also shedding light on impunity's effects on state formation and nation-building generally.