Puangthong Pawakapan's Infiltrating Society makes a significant contribution to our understanding of Thailand's ongoing political crisis. Pawakapan, a professor in the Department of International Relations at Chulalongkorn University, has herself made other such contributions in the past. But Infiltrating Society is the most systematic account I have read addressing the varied roles of the Thai military in not only policing but also shaping Thai civil society from the Cold War period to the present. To be sure, the issues Pawakapan addresses have received attention from a variety of authors in the past, as her own extensive bibliography reveals, and during the Cold War it wasn't unusual for critical scholars to note the ways the military was becoming omnipresent in all aspects of social life. But the repetitiveness with which the military has intervened to depose elected governments that are not to its leaders' liking has tended to train most observers...

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