Hegemony, Historical Bloc and Politics of the Yellow and the Red:
Thailand Political Crisis in Gramscian Perspective
For the last several years, Thailand is in spotlight from the international as a result of the existing political conflicts between two social forces, the Yellow and the Red shirt movement. The starting point of the battle between the Yellow and the Red began in September 2005 which initiative movement by the People’s Alliance for Democracy (PAD) against the Thaksin and Thai Rak Thai government. Nevertheless, another forces, which at the first stage, come from the Thaksin’s lovers has formed the Against PAD movement – which later after the September coup in 2006, they changed their name to be the United front of Democracy Against Dictatorship (UDD) – to battle against the PAD movement. The struggle between these two social blocs has a great deal increasing complexities of the movement and transcending the pro – anti Thaksin dilemma in 2005 - 2009 towards overthrowing the Monarchy and the subaltern red shirt questions on social and political inequality in 2010.
This research attempts to study integrated historical foundations of two social forces – the yellow and the red shirt movement in Thailand- who had been playing crucial roles in the current political crisis in Thailand. The research has set a central research question which is; how to gain a comprehensive understanding on the movement of the yellow and the red shirt forces in the current Thai political crisis between 2005 and 2010? The research argues that the political crisis in Thailand is a structural crisis, therefore, to comprehensively understand the current political turmoil of Thailand has to consider three major historical foundations of bo...
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