Branding Authoritarian Nations: Political Legitimation and Strategic National Myths in Military-Ruled Thailand (Book launch)

• IDD 60^th Anniversary Special book launches

Why do authoritarian nations brand themselves? And how do they understand and use this practice? In her new book, Dr Petra Alderman offers a novel approach to the study of nation branding as a strategy for political legitimation in authoritarian regimes using the example of military-ruled Thailand. This talk discusses how Thailand’s military junta, the National Council for Peace and Order (2014-2019), sought to shape the social attitudes and behaviours of Thai citizens through nation branding during the almost 5 years of direct military rule. 

Speaker biography

Dr Petra Alderman is a Post-Doctoral Research Fellow in Leadership for Inclusive and Democratic Politics at the University of Birmingham, and a Research Fellow of the Birmingham’s Centre for Elections, Democracy, Accountability & Representation (CEDAR). Her main areas of research expertise are nation branding, authoritarian politics, elections and electoral management, and the politics of Thailand. Her work has appeared in several academic journals, including Politics, Geopolitics, and Journal of Current Southeast Asian Affairs.

Discussants biography

Dr Janjira Sombatpoonsiri is a Research Fellow at the German Institute for Global and Area Studies (GIGA) and an Assistant Professor at Thailand’s Chulalongkorn University where she heads the research project on influence operations and conflict narratives in Southeast Asia. She has extensively researched civil society and digital politics in autocracies. Her academic articles appear in several academic journals, including the Journal of Contemporary Asia, Journal of Peace Research, and recently International Journal of Communication. She is currently a member of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace’s Digital Democracy Network and a regional manager for the Digital Society Project. 

Dr Kristin Anabel Eggeling is Assistant Professor at the Department of Political Science at the University of Copenhagen, Denmark and Visiting Researcher at the Danish Institute for International Studies (DIIS). Kristin teaches and writes about diplomacy, digitalization, global tech policy and qualitative and ethnographic methods in Political Science and International Relations. She is the author of ‘Nation-Branding in Practice: The Politics of Promoting Sports, Cities and Universities in Kazakhstan and Qatar’ (Routledge 2020) and has published articles in leading IR and social science journals including Review of International Studies, European Journal of International Relations, Global Studies Quarterly, Millennium, Big Data & Society, Geopolitics and Qualitative Research. In 2023, Kristin was awarded the Anthony Deos Early Career Award for the emerging scholar in the field of Diplomatic Studies by the International Studies Association (ISA).

This is on Zoom

• Meeting ID: 831 8989 7809
• Passcode: 144215