Bangkok’s Chula Uni relocates launch of book critical of military off-campus

Chulalongkorn University has cancelled a plan to use its campus to hold a seminar and book launch for a book – authored by one of its own scholars – on the role of the military in Thailand.
Puangthong Pawakapan, an academic at the Political Science Faculty, announced in a Facebook post on Monday that the seminar on security and the power of the armed forces planned at the university on Friday will be moved to the Jim Thompson Museum.
“I was informed by the faculty dean last week that university executives will not allow any venue at Chula to launch the book entitled ‘Infiltrating Society: The Thai Military’s Internal Security Affairs’ with no clear explanation,” she wrote.
The event is still supported by the International Relations Department despite the change of venue, she said, while calling the decision a threat to academic freedom.
The book introduction set for Friday is for the Thai edition of her award-winning book of the same title. The English version was published by the prestigious Yusof Ishak Institute in Singapore in 2021. The Thai book is printed by Same Sky Books.
The publication derives from a two-year research project that garnered awards from the university in 2023 and from Foreign Affairs magazine in 2022.
The faculty congratulated her on the university award on May 24 on its Facebook page.
The change of venue takes place less than two weeks after the Internal Security Operations Command on Sept 14 lambasted her prior to the launch, accusing Ms Puangthong of “having no qualifications and expertise on security affairs”.
Isoc urged for the book and all forums related to it to be banned to avoid stirring “public misunderstanding and damage to the image of the armed forces”. It threatened legal action against the author and called for the university to look into her ethics. 
In a Facebook post two days later, Ms Puangthong argued that her research and publication had been scrutinised by experts on Thai politics, the military and security from several international institutions. She also called for Isoc to send representatives to the forum to exchange views in public instead of calling for a ban and trying to use the law to silence both her and discussion of the issue.
Speakers in the forum on Friday include Thanathorn Juangroongruangkit, who co-founded the disbanded Future Forward Party, and Prajk Kongkirati of the Political Science Faculty at Thammasat University. They are publicly known as strong critics of military coups and political interference by the armed forces.