Tyrell Haberkorn

“The Carceral Kingdom” offers a new, book-length history of Thailand centered on the lives and perspectives of political prisoners. The foundational premise is that rather than those who hold power, the polity—and what is politically possible within it—is shaped by those excluded from it. Organized chronologically from the 1946 regicide to the present, the book examines how the imagination of equality and democracy remains even as monarchy and authoritarianism are strengthened. The book traces how the struggle for democracy and state repression to preserve the monarchy form a dialectic that creates what is named the carceral kingdom, in which imprisonment for lèse majesté always looms and shapes political imagination in Thailand. Examining the violence of prosecution and imprisonment in tandem with how those imprisoned make freedom unexpectedly, the project offers a new chronology, actors, and sites of transformation based on sources marginalized in both public life and scholarship.