When young protesters took to Thailand’s streets in 2020 with a ten-point program for reforming the monarchy, Pavin Chachavalpongpun, a scholar of politics and international relations at the University of Kyoto’s Center for Southeast Asian Studies, saw a possible opening for political change and democratic reform.

“I thought, 'Oh my God, this is it. The time has come,'” says Chachavalpongpun, who, after the coup of 2014, was forced to flee Thailand and seek refugee status with Japan because of his critical views of the Thai monarchy and military.

What followed, however, was a profound shift by the Thai monarchy toward a more confrontational and legally absolute model of rule, Chachavalpongpun explained at a recent talk titled Five Years after the Youth Protests: The Thai Monarchy Strikes Back. Hosted by the Southeast Asia Program at Stanford University’s Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center (APARC), the event marked his return to APARC after he served as a 2015-16 Lee Kong Chian NUS-Stanford fellow on contemporary Southeast Asia.

Chachavalpongpun describes the monarchy’s response as “overt power codification and defensive hyper-personalization”: a shift toward making royal authority more explicit, more personal, and harder for elected institutions or public critics to challenge.

He identified four interconnected ways this consolidation of power has unfolded:

1. Turning Royal Wealth into Personal Property

This strategy began even before the 2020 youth-led protests, according to Chachavalpongpun. After King Vajiralongkorn’s succession, legal changes in 2017 and 2018 transferred assets formerly held by the Crown Property Bureau into the king’s personal possession.

These changes removed the finance minister from the bureau’s governing structure and placed the assets, including land, cash, equity stakes, and investments, in the king’s name. This move “fundamentally altered the legal character of royal property,” creating a durable barrier against future public or democratic scrutiny, Chachavalpongpun explains.

The result is “a sophisticated legal hardening” of royal wealth: a firewall against public scrutiny and blurring the line between institutional assets and the monarch’s personal property. Now that the assets belong to the king, elected representatives find it extremely difficult to question the monarchy’s wealth.

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2. Using Political Gatekeeping to Nullify Electoral Mandates

Chachavalpongpun argues that, rather than relying on coups, the monarchy and its allied non-elected institutions have learned to work through electoral and judicial mechanisms by leveraging their network of proxy and institutional influence.

A telling example is the institutional process that prevented democracy icon Pita Limjaroenrat from taking office after he led the progressive Move Forward Party to a landmark victory in the 2023 general election and appeared poised to lead Thailand's next government.

Under the military-drafted 2017 Constitution, the 250-member upper house, whose senators are backed by a military-backed system, holds a joint vote to select the prime minister. To become prime minister, a candidate must secure 376 votes across the combined 750-seat parliament, effectively allowing an unelected upper house to dilute the power of the 500 democratically elected lower house. 

“For sure, you would not have 250 from the Senate voting for you,” Chachavalpongpun says. This is why Limjaroenrat failed to secure enough support in parliament. “So the almost prime minister did not get the vote. Even if you won the election, you did not have access to political power.”

Another form of political gatekeeping, according to Chachavalpongpun, is to neutralize the second-largest political party, as reflected in the results of Thailand’s February 2026 elections, in which the progressive People’s Party finished second but refused to join a conservative Bhumjaithai government backed by the royalist establishment and the military. He describes the accommodation between the Bhumjaithai Party and the populist Pheu Thai Party, the third-place finisher, as a kind of co-optation: an alliance that helped bring former Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra back into Thailand while isolating the newer progressive movement.
 

3. Controlling the Monarchy’s Image

A third mechanism is what Chachavalpongpun calls “defensive hyper-personalization” that aims to “restore the monarch’s presence at the national centre, assert control over dynastic succession, and challenge the reformist narrative seeking to shrink the king’s political space.” 

For much of his reign before the 2020 protests, King Vajiralongkorn spent prolonged periods in Germany. This absence offered reformists a potent narrative of an absentee monarch while the country faced economic turmoil and COVID-19. In response to the youth-led protests, the monarchy has made efforts to re-centre the king as the focus of national life. This symbolic control involves maximising physical visibility through a busy schedule of rituals and ceremonies, granting audiences to the private sector, and oversight of royal development projects.

The monarchy has also sought to manage public narratives about the royal family and succession. Chachavalpongpun describes the official succession line as increasingly uncertain and argues that efforts to discuss possible heirs have narrowed as the royalist network has sought to control “what you can speak and what you cannot speak.”

“Stability in a monarchy also brings stability in politics as a whole,” he says, warning that uncertainty about succession could deepen political anxiety.

4. Expanding Legal Coercion

Finally, Chachavalpongpun describes the lèse-majesté law, or Article 112 of the Thai Criminal Code – which punishes defamation or insult to the king, queen, heir-apparent, or regent with prison terms of three to 15 years per offence – as a central instrument for silencing criticism. Once deployed inconsistently and systematically, the law returned to active use at the height of the protests in late 2020 and is now applied systematically and broadly against ordinary citizens and activists. “The lèse-majesté is the automatic weapon to punish any disloyal subject,” argues Chachavalpongpun. This maneuver systematically silenced and institutionalized the criminalization of the political critiques raised during the 2020 protests and has been used as a tool for widespread political suppression. 

As a core gatekeeping apparatus, lèse-majesté is weaponized to disqualify democratic challengers. This strategy is exemplified in the August 2024 Constitutional Court’s decision to dissolve the Move Forward Party on the grounds that its platform to amend Article 112 constituted an attempt to "overthrow the constitutional monarchy," Chachavalpongpun writes in the journal article on which his talk is based. The verdict remains a perpetual threat against the People’s Party and future reformist movements.

“The systematic weaponisation of Article 112 is the clearest expression of the monarchy’s strategy of overt power codification and defensive hyper-personalisation,” writes Chachavalpongpun. “It translates the legal codification of financial power and the re-centring of the king into a concrete mechanism of state violence.” 

The state has also used the Computer Crime Act and, in Chachavalpongpun’s account, coordinated with military information operations and royalist vigilante groups to monitor and pursue critics online.

Thus, since the 2020 youth protests, these four strategies have consolidated monarchical dominance over wealth, government, symbolism, and coercion, Chachavalpongpun concludes. They mark a break from the older “network monarchy” and a pivot to a more confrontational model in which royal power is increasingly personal, codified, and protected from democratic challenge.

Malaysia is a primary destination for displaced people in Southeast Asia, yet its absence from international refugee protection frameworks leaves refugees navigating profound insecurity and uncertainty in their daily lives. For nearly two decades, anthropologist Gerhard Hoffstaedter has studied how refugees in the country navigate lives shaped by legal exclusion, economic insecurity, and social discrimination. His new book, Lives in Limbo: Refugee Place-Making and Survival in Malaysia, explores how Chin and Rohingya refugees create meaningful lives despite these constraints. Published by APARC, the book is now out and distributed by Stanford University Press. 

Hoffstaedter, an associate professor of anthropology at the University of Queensland, was a Lee Kong Chian NUS-Stanford Fellow on Southeast Asia at APARC in 2024. We spoke with him about his book, the changing landscape of refugee studies, and the lessons long-term ethnographic research offers for understanding displacement. Watch the interview on our YouTube channel.

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Beyond Victimhood

Hoffstaedter began his research during his doctoral studies in Malaysia, where he encountered Chin and Rohingya refugees while studying Malay Muslim identity. He initially understood their experiences primarily through their lack of legal status. Over the course of his fieldwork, however, he came to recognize the many ways refugees build livelihoods, sustain cultural traditions, and establish communities despite structural barriers.

“I came to see how they themselves make place, make a home for themselves, even in very difficult situations and in, you know, sometimes horrendous situations,” he explains.

This is a key insight from Lives in Limbo. Rather than portraying refugees exclusively as victims or exceptional figures who overcome extraordinary adversity, Hoffstaedter focuses on the everyday practices through which people create meaning and pursue better lives. “I think the majority inhabit that middle part. And that's what I wanted to write about,” he says.

Hoffstaedter while building rapport through shared activities, such as a fishing trip with Chin refugee community members.

His research documents how work, religious gatherings, cultural celebrations, farming, and sports help refugees cultivate belonging in a country where they lack formal recognition. One example is a Rohingya Football Club Hoffstaedter was involved with. Competing against local teams gave Rohingya players opportunities to demonstrate their skills and gain recognition beyond their own communities.

As Hoffstaedter explains, “So they can't be citizens here. They don't have a legal standing, but they can for a moment be soccer stars and kind of, you know, win the game ten-nil, and celebrate and be really good at something, and be recognized by other people for that skill that they have.”

These experiences illustrate how seemingly ordinary activities can become meaningful ways to assert identity and belonging in precarious environments where legal avenues for recognition are unavailable.
 

Understanding the Polycrisis of Refugee Life

The book employs the notion of “polycrisis” to examine how legal exclusion, economic insecurity, health risks, and discrimination compound one another. The COVID-19 pandemic amplified these overlapping pressures in Malaysia, where Rohingya refugees were increasingly scapegoated and subjected to restrictions on movement.

For Hoffstaedter, such developments show how broader political and social crises can intensify the vulnerability of already marginalized communities.

“[W]e could see the coming together of multiple crises that were accelerating and making life much, much harder for certain populations because of that compounding of multiple crises acting on particular populations.”

Hoffstaedter also examines Malaysia’s inconsistent approach to refugee protection. Although the country has periodically provided sanctuary and work authorization to displaced populations, it lacks a comprehensive legal framework recognizing refugees. Comparing Chin and Rohingya experiences, he shows how religion, cultural affinity, international advocacy, and geopolitical interests can influence who receives protection. The differences in treatment reveal how refugee protection depends on arbitrary political priorities rather than consistent rights.
 

What Anthropology Can Contribute to Refugee Policy

In discussing the book, Hoffstaedter argues that understanding displacement requires looking beyond border crossings and dramatic humanitarian emergencies to examine how migration policies shape everyday life. Long-term ethnographic research can reveal the historical and political forces behind these policies, as well as the realities that broad categories such as “refugee” and “economic migrant” often obscure.

“The things that anthropology can bring to the table are things that policy and politics often ignore. And it's that depth of time, and it's that engagement with people on the ground over a long period of time to see the history and the importance of that history and how some of these things are arbitrary and very recent and are driven by their own logics that are not logical at all, but they have an internal logic.”

His research highlights an ongoing contradiction in Malaysia and elsewhere: the economy depends on migrant labor, yet undocumented workers remain excluded from the protections associated with legal status. Hoffstaedter calls for a broader reconsideration of how governments approach migration and the people whose labor sustains their economies.

The time he spent as a fellow at APARC provided him with opportunities to engage with policymakers and consider how ethnographic research can inform practical responses to displacement. As he explains, “It really brought home to so many ex-politicians or State Department officials how to translate all that knowledge that we amass over long periods of fieldwork. How do we make that digestible?”

By focusing on Chin and Rohingya refugees’ everyday experiences, Lives in Limbo reconsiders existing narratives of displacement and offers readers a more nuanced understanding of how people create community and pursue belonging amid precarity. Hoffstaedter invites readers and policymakers alike to look beyond legal categories and humanitarian crises to recognize the people building meaningful lives within them.

Learn more about the book and purchase it from Stanford University Press. 

In countries far along in the demographic transition, rapidly aging populations are colliding with a severe shortage of health care and elder care workers. Japan may be the most pertinent case study of this and other impacts of demographic disruption. The country’s fertility rate is decreasing faster than projected, and as of 2025, 30% of its population was aged 65 or older. These trends have contributed to a persistent gap between surging demand for elder care and a shrinking care workforce.

To cope with this crisis, the Japanese government has implemented several programs to promote the use of robots in nursing home care. These care robots (or “kaigo robots”) assist care workers and support residents with daily needs. But how does their adoption affect workflows, staff retention, and overall staffing of long-term care facilities? Few studies have empirically examined these questions.

Shedding light on the debate surrounding new automation technologies and their impact on workers, a recent study, published on August 6 in the inaugural issue of the journal Health Affairs Review, finds that care robots help address challenges posed by population aging and care-labor shortages without necessarily displacing workers or lowering care quality.

The study, titled Robots and Labor in the Service Sector: Evidence from Nursing Homes, is part of a collaborative effort driven by the Asia Health Policy Program (AHPP) at the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center. The study’s co-authors are Stanford health economist Karen Eggleston, the director of AHPP; Toshiaki Iizuka of the University of Tokyo’s Graduate School of Economics, a former AHPP visiting scholar; Yong Suk Lee of the University of Notre Dame’s Keough School of Global Affairs, formerly the SK Center Fellow at Stanford’s Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies; and Ellie Xi, a rising junior at Stanford studying biomedical computation on the pre-med track and a former research assistant to Dr. Eggleston.

“One of the aspects of the paper that I found most interesting is its attempt to move beyond simply documenting where robots are being adopted and instead ask what their adoption may actually do to the long-term care workforce, especially given the sector’s high turnover rates and physically demanding working conditions,” says Xi.

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Lessons from Early Diffusion of Robotics in the Long-Term Care Sector

The researchers grouped the robots prevalent in Japanese nursing homes into three main categories:

• Transfer aids: Wearable and non-wearable devices that assist staff with lifting frail residents from beds to wheelchairs, significantly reducing back strain, a leading cause of caregiver burnout.
• Mobility robots: Assistive systems that help residents move, use the restroom, or bathe more independently.
• Monitoring and communication systems: Sensors that alert staff when a resident has slipped out of bed or fallen, as well as social robots designed to offer companionship and cognitive stimulation.

To examine early diffusion of these robots, the researchers used 2017 survey data on long-term care work across approximately 860 Japanese nursing homes. A second source of data is their compilation of prefecture-level care robot subsidy availability, using regional variation in robot subsidies as an instrumental variable. Think of this as a natural experiment driven by a “geographic nudge.” Starting in 2015, Japan’s central government began providing prefectural governments with funds to subsidize the cost of adopting care robots. Because different prefectures introduced these subsidies at different times and with varying levels of generosity, nursing homes in some regions had a much easier path to acquiring and deploying robots than those in neighboring areas.

By comparing staffing trends between nursing homes that received this external, subsidy-driven "nudge" to adopt robots and those that did not, the researchers could confidently isolate the technology’s causal effects on the caregiving workforce.

The results indicate that nursing homes that adopted robots saw a significant decrease in staffing retention problems. Robot adoption was also associated with a 28% increase in care workers and a 39% increase in nurses, resulting in approximately 26% higher total employment at the facility level. Importantly, this employment growth occurred entirely among non-regular employees – that is, staff members on flexible, often part-time, contracts. The findings also suggest that robot adoption may improve continuity and quality of care while mitigating careworker shortages.

“Using nationally representative data from Japan and an instrumental-variable strategy, the study provides evidence suggesting that robots can complement rather than simply replace care workers, including by alleviating retention difficulties in a sector facing persistent labor shortages and potentially supporting quality of care,” explains Xi. “The paper’s central finding is that robot adoption is associated with reduced retention difficulties and increased employment of care workers and nurses under flexible contracts.”

A Human-Robot Collaborative Future for Elder Care

Caregiving is a physically demanding and high-stress occupation. The study’s findings indicate that, by introducing robots to ease staff burdens and monitor residents, nursing homes were able to promote more flexible work, either by increasing the tasks performed by non-regular employees or potentially encouraging part-time work. This type of work structure is encouraged by the Japan Nursing Association as a means for reducing stress, preventing burnout, and promoting a healthier work-life balance.

“Given recent debates about AI use in healthcare and the future of work, I found it especially interesting that this research highlights the potential for technology to augment caregivers, particularly by supporting physically demanding or indirect tasks, while preserving the human aspects of care that are more difficult to reproduce,” says Xi.

The study's findings are relevant for policymakers seeking evidence on the social value of collaborative robots and their impacts on staffing and care delivery, particularly as aging societies facing demographic pressures similar to Japan consider how to meet growing demand for long-term care.

A Mentorship Story

The study is part of Eggleston’s Innovation for Healthy Aging research track, which investigates how East Asian economies adopt and adapt to emerging technologies, design incentives, and adjust their workforces to support older adults. It builds on an earlier research project focused on the impact of robots on nursing home care in Japan.

For Xi, co-authoring the paper represents an academic milestone. "As someone deeply interested in geriatrics, I first began working with Dr. Karen Eggleston as a research assistant during the summer after my freshman year," Xi recalls. "Last spring, we decided to continue working together through a directed reading."

During that directed reading, Xi was invited to help revise and update a project that had previously circulated as an Asia Health Policy Program working paper. She worked to update the research, framing the original findings within the rapidly shifting landscape of care robotics and artificial intelligence in long-term care.

"I worked on situating the original findings within more recent research and developments in care robotics and considering what Japan’s experience can tell us about the role of these technologies in aging societies today," Xi says. "It was an incredible opportunity to work closely with Dr. Eggleston, Professor Toshiaki Iizuka, and Professor Yong Suk Lee. I was especially grateful to see firsthand how a collaborative project evolves and to contribute to that process as the paper moved from a working paper toward publication.”