Fighting for Virtue

My latest book Fighting for Virtue: Justice and Politics in Thailand (Cornell 2019) has been out for a few months now, but for a time the Covid-19 pandemic made it rather difficult to obtain copies. Finally, however, the book is becoming easier to track down. Writing up the manuscript of Fighting for Virtue took quite a while after my spell of core fieldwork in 2012. It deals with the post-2006 'judicialization' of Thai politics after two royal speeches, and draws on extensive ethnographic research and dozens of interviews. I spent many hundreds of hours closely following a range of political court cases in Bangkok.

I was delighted when Cornell wanted to use one of my photos on the cover, but they did such an amazing job that I barely recognised it in the end:

At 251 pages of text and notes, Fighting for Virtue is a substantial tome - but there are now three ways to find out more without investing in a copy:

First, you can watch a recording of the hour-long virtual launch of the book co-hosted by the Nordic Institute of Asian Studies in Copenhagen and the New York Southeast Asia Network on YouTube. The launch features discussion from Tyrell Haberkorn (Wisconsin) and Frank Munger (New York Law School) moderated by Petra Desatova (Nordic Institute of Asian Studies), as well a few words from the author.

Second, you can watch a 12 minute interview with me talking about the book with Ariana King from the Weatherhead East Asian Institute at Columbia University. Fighting for Virtue appears in the series 'Studies of the Weatherhead East Asian Institute', and received  financial support from the University Seminars programme at Columbia, where I presented some of the key findings.

Third, you can read a very apposite and succinct review of Fighting for Virtue in the Bangkok Post, by leading Thailand scholar Chris Baker.

If your appetite has then been whetted, you can order the book from Cornell University Press at 30 per cent off with the discount code 09FLYER, or from Combined Academic Press in Europe and Asia using the code CS09FLYER. See this flyer for more details.