Dictatorship on Trial: Coups and the Future of Justice in Thailand

In 2014, after a decade of political turmoil, the National Council for Peace and Order (NCPO) carried out Thailand's 13th coup since the country's transformation from absolute to constitutional monarchy in 1932.Though the NCPO promised to restore the rule of law, justice-long tenuous in Thailand-disappeared entirely.The legal system was used to criminalize the thoughts and actions of democratic dissidents, facilitate extrajudicial violence, and guarantee impunity for the coup and crimes by state officials.Combining legal and historical scholarship and long-term courtroom observation, Dictatorship on Trial traces the legal, social, and political impacts of authoritarianism, and foregrounds court decisions as both a history of repression and a site in which to imagine future justice. Organized chronologically across the five years of the NCPO regime, each chapter takes up a different political case and enumerates the ways in which political activists were made vulnerable rather than prot