In Thailand, the military’s Reserve Officer Training Corps program (Ruk Sa Din Daen—หลักสูตรรักษาดินแดน [ร.ด.]) is something ordinary people are intimately familiar with. Roughly 15% of Thai high school students participate in the program. It recruits 100,000 new members annually, and its multi-year requirement gives the military access to around 300,000 ROTC students at their disposal in any given year. Former army chief General Apirat Kongsompong acknowledged the program’s importance, underlying that the size of the ROTC is as big as the entire army force.

Five years in the ROTC gives students extra points in military exams if they want to pursue a military career, while three years gives them right to skip conscription. In practice, most ROTC students attend not because they want to be soldiers, or because they like the military, but to avoid a compulsory conscription system infamous for mistreatment of draftees. For that reason ROTC participants typically quit the program halfway, after completing their third year—making the ROTC program notably unsuccessful in its ostensible goal of serving as a channel to recruit reserve officers.

The military nonetheless sees the ROTC as having another crucial function: political indoctrination. The army’s top brass have clearly expressed that the program has political implications for them. An ex-commander of the ROTC, Lt. Gen. Prakarn Padawanija, wrote a thesis arguing that cultivation of ROTC students’ ideology is the key to non-traditional threat deterrence. Former army chief Apirat also agreed with Prakarn: he visited many ROTC training centres nationwide in 2019, to reiterate to the students that they must be “good citizens” who help the military counter non-traditional threats.

Nevertheless, the non-traditional threats that the two primarily meant are the “wrong perceptions” held by people in society—which leads to distrust in the armed forces, the monarchy, and “Thai-style democracy”.

Indeed the military has gradually reduced the proportion of ROTC subjects devoted to military subjects, from 70% to 55% percent. Almost half of the curriculum now consists of political subjects like History of the Thai Nation (ประวัติศาสตร์ชาติไทย), The Thai Monarchy (สถาบันพระมหากษัตริย์ไทย), Good Citizens Democratic Ways (พลเมืองดีวิถีประชาธิปไตย), Information Warfare and Nontraditional Threats (การข่าวเบื้องต้นและภัยคุกคามรูปแบบใหม่), The Military’s Role and Security Issues (บทบาททหารกับความมั่นคง), The 20-Year National Strategy (ยุทธศาสตร์ชาติ 20 ปี), and The Thai National Ideologies (อุดมการณ์ของชาติไทย).

The military has clearly long realised the political potential of the ROTC,  but academic studies have not paid much attention to the program. The impacts of the ROTC on civil–military relations have not been explored in the international scholarly literature, which has generally viewed the program as a channel for avoiding conscription, and as a moneymaker for the military.

My doctoral thesis sought to close this gap. Through close examination of curriculum, policy documents, and interviews conducted from 2022 to 2024 with current and former students, military personnel, as well as civilian educators familiar with the program, I show how the ROTC has become a key channel for military indoctrination—but also how that effort is undermined by students and instructors alike, who engage in forms of everyday resistance that frustrate its political aims. My research reveals how even in the face of the unequal power relations that prevail in a military camp, the establishment meets resistance at the coalface of its efforts to promote counter-democratic norms.

Masculine warriors

ROTC indoctrination lessons can be roughly categorised into two groups. The first group is the lessons which groom students to be ideal soldiers—masculine warriors who are loyal, obedient, and hyper-nationalist.

These lessons are delivered within a general atmosphere of discipline and adversity meant to build masculinity and reflexive obedience to authority. Physical exercise, often ordered as punishment, takes place in the heat, rain and dust, and is compounded by sleep deprivation. Petty compliance is instilled by making students follow trivial orders from their instructors. This includes, among other things, rigorous policing of dress and grooming, even outside of the ROTC facilities. Although ROTC training is often perceived as milder than conscript training, its intensity should not be underestimated: in 2022, the press reported that 23 students were hospitalised after suffering from rhabdomyolysis and acute kidney failure following ROTC punishment.

The disciplinary agenda provides the backdrop for the ideological one. To instil loyalty, countless lessons repeatedly tell students that good soldiers must be loyal to the nation and the monarchy. One vivid lesson is the story of Phraya Phichai (พระยาพิชัย), taught in the second year of History of the Thai Nation. He was an elite warrior serving under King Taksin in the 18^th century. He was a master of martial arts who drove a Burmese army away despite one of his swords being broken. At the end of the story, after King Taksin died, King Rama I asked Phichai to join his rank, but Phichai denied since he did not want to serve any other king. Phichai, instead, asked King Rama I to execute him so that he could join his old master in the next life.

The program also teaches students to be hyper-nationalist. Glorification of Thainess and degradation of the other are employed regularly. The story of Bang Rachan, a small Thai village which withstand Burmese invasion for months, taught in the same subject is a good example. The ROTC textbook portrays the Burmese army as evil thugs who raped and killed Thais for fun, and concludes that the Burmese deserved to be killed in revenge. It reads, “Although they [the Bang Rachan villagers] eventually lost in the battle, they managed to shed some blood of these evil Burmese soldiers to properly exact their revenge.” (แม้จะแพ้ในการศึกแต่ก็ได้เลือดของพม่าเลว ๆ ส่วนมากบางคนมาล้างแค้นอย่างสาสม)

Good citizens of “Thai-style democracy”

The second group of ROTC indoctrination lessons aims to cultivate students to be good citizens in “Thai-style Democracy”—a semi-democratic regime designated by the official term “Democracy with the King as the Head of State” (DKHS—ประชาธิปไตยอันมีพระมหากษัตริย์ทรงเป็นประมุข).

The lessons in the Good Citizens Democratic Ways subject argue that because Thai society is not as politically mature as the western democracies, the most appropriate regime for Thailand is not liberal democracy. The lessons teach students the standard elitist narrative that political participation is not as important as Thailand being run by “good people” who rule for the benefit of the country.

Although finding good leaders might be difficult for other countries, according to the lessons from The Thai Monarchy and The History of the Thai Nation, Thailand has never struggled to find virtuous rulers, since the Thai monarchs are naturally benevolent. Because Thai kings follow Buddhist teachings, they always rule for the benefit of the people, resulting in an inextricable relationship between the nation, the religion, and the king. Even in modern times where monarchical power is claimed to be limited, Thai kings still hold the status of “advisor of the nation” who guide the country through political crises.

Moreover, the lessons from The Military’s Role and Security Issues portray the military as the loyal servant of the monarchy—in other words, the “good people” who are approved by the monarchy to lead the country. The lessons do not only depict the military as the protector of the nation, the religion, and the king, but also the agent of development. The lessons describe that during the Cold War the armed forces played a vital role in modernising the nation, and today they closely work with the monarchy in running royal development projects.

The lessons from The 20-Year National Strategy subject also portray the 2014 junta very positively. They depict the junta as people who were trying to bring Thailand towards a utopia, where “the country is secured, the people are happy”, “the country is peaceful, the people live sustainably”, and “the people live well, eat well, being employed and having various sources of incomes”. In contrast to the military, politicians are portrayed negatively as greedy and self-interested. The textbooks refer to politicians as those who “play with politics (เล่นการเมือง)” and manipulate people for their own benefits and ambitions.

In short, this group of lessons try to convince students that the DKHS formula is perfect. Although the textbooks accept that Thailand still faces many challenges, they maintain that all issues stem from a single cause: corruption. However, corruption does not arise from flaws within DKHS, textbooks say, but the attitude of Thai people who are corrupted by bad politicians and foreign enemies, making them abandon Thainess and Buddhism, embrace greed, and reject the king’s sufficiency economy philosophy.

Therefore, the lessons imply that the best way to solve Thailand’s problems is not political reform, but political education. Furthermore, since DKHS is perfect, protesting and other means of political participation beyond voting in elections and referendums will bring nothing, but disruption of peace and order in society. These means are thus never mentioned as an acceptable participation by the textbooks.

Does the ROTC indoctrination work?

Despite the military’s efforts to indoctrinate ROTC students, their attempts are frequently futile. Interviews I conducted as a part of my doctoral research revealed that the indoctrination outlined above faces resistance from ROTC agents—who I define as comprising both instructors and students. Given the unequal power relations within the program, the resistance is not organised and confrontational, but instead hidden in the form of everyday resistance.

Examining everyday resistance is thus a challenging task. I used unstructured in-depth interviews with 31 participants—including 21 ROTC students from different regions, 6 military personnel, and 4 civilian educational staff who work closely with the ROTC—to uncover everyday resistance in the program.

To build trust with interviewees, I approached potential participants as military outsiders and guaranteed their anonymity. Furthermore, the interviews always started and filled with ice-breaking conversation to maintain the friendly mood. For example, I always revealed to interviewees that I had also attended the ROTC program. The unstructured nature of the interviews allowed me to bring out my experiences in the ROTC to bridge the gap between the researcher and the participants throughout our interviews.

My research discovered that everyday resistance was driven both by self-interest and progressive ideologies. Most students and instructors did not want to get involved with political indoctrination vigorously. For self-interested instructors, indoctrination was an extra burden. For apolitical students, indoctrination lessons were boring. For those who were progressive, the lessons were against their ideology.

The progressive instructors and students wanted military reform. They suffered from problems in the armed forces, such as corruption, cronyism, and unequal power relations. Some of them felt that the military’s political involvement damaged reputation of soldiers and led to persecution of their preferred political parties.

It was not clear how widespread progressive tendencies among ROTC agents are, but it is likely to be significant. Though highly granular voting data from the February 2026 elections are not yet publicly available, such tendencies are suggested by the results from 2023, where the Move Forward Party, which campaigned for a military reform, won many electoral districts in military zones (e.g., Dusit, Chatuchak, and Phayathai).

When these resisting agents are under observation by military representatives, they pretend to accept ROTC indoctrination. At first glance, they may appear to be submissive: the students may attend classes, join in drills, and obey orders, while the instructors might do their job. However, this superficial submission is just a tactic to survive unequal power relations in the program.

Yet when they are not observed they revealed their dissent against the military to each other, forming informal alliances among themselves. Many interviewees report that instructors sometimes gossip about the military, the monarchy, and politics with students. Some talked about their allowances being deducted suspiciously. Some discussed corruption in weapons purchases. Some complained about the junta’s poor performance; some mocked and made fun of the coup makers. Some revealed that they did not want to work in the palace. Some referred to the king using derogatory epithets. Surprisingly, I found that some even encouraged students to join anti-military protests.

On the other hand, many student interviewees disclosed that time spent in ROTC training centres allowed them to interact with low-ranking soldiers, making them see that good soldiers exist, and that they are also exploited by the military. This resulted in shared empathy between soldiers and ROTC students.

Such empathy arose from the unique dynamics of civil–military identities found between ROTC students and instructors. To put it simply, the ROTC program allows the youth to experience soldiers’ hardship, while it allows soldiers to interact with civilian students and reconnect with their citizenship. Ironically, the ROTC program thus gave birth to an unlikely anti-military alliance within an equally unlikely site.

Everyday resistance in the ROTC

The indifference of self-interested agents and the dissent of progressive agents led to a development of a powerful rule of thumb in the ROTC: “check attendance, inspect hair, eat snack, and go home” (เช็คชื่อ ตรวจผม กินขนม กลับบ้าน). This has become a well-known unofficial slogan of the program. It suggested that there are only two important activities in the ROTC: to check attendance and to inspect grooming. Aside from that, students just eat snack and then go home. Classes, drills, and training do not matter. This pattern resulted in the sabotage of ROTC indoctrination through everyday resistance. ROTC agents produced half-baked work, and then together they disguised the low-quality work via window-dressing tactics (ผักชีโรยหน้า).

For example, the military encouraged instructors to use an “active learning” approach in classes—but instructors often interpreted the approach as self-learning. Reportedly, some instructors merely gave learning materials to students and exited the classrooms, leaving students to loaf freely until the end of classes, where instructors came back to ask a few questions and dismissed them.

Another example took place in a boot camp, where an instructor brought students out of the camp for running exercise. Yet after they exited the camp, the instructor made a deal with students that he would allow students to stroll around, but once he brought them back to the camp they must run in unison and chant loudly. Eventually, the students agreed, and the “exercise” was perfectly staged.

Also sabotaged was an ROTC Volunteer activity, an initiative to encourage ROTC students to socialise with civilians. This involves doing community service, running events glorifying the monarchy, and politically “educating” people. The activity was popular among students, because it was an excuse to escape harsh training and boring lessons. Occasionally, after the photos had been taken, instructors might let the volunteers work with privates without supervision, allowing them to relax and play with friends.

Similarly, some students also volunteer to join ROTC Cyber, an initiatives that establishes special units to disseminate positive images of the military online. Their volunteering was, again, motivated by practical benefits, such as skipping drills, and getting access to computers and air-conditioning. Thus, some content produced by ROTC Cyber was in poor quality, lacking the intended virality and clickbait elements. Most importantly, the ROTC Cyber was mostly active during the ROTC semester. This made the content getting produced only for two months, September and October, during the year.

To avoid getting punished, ROTC agents frequently find ways to window-dress their half-baked work. For instance, instructors normally allow students to loaf around and pay no attention in classes, but when the military sent inspectors or photographers to the classes, instructors would make sure that everyone would “behave”. Moreover, students widely cheated in online exams, and instructors often turned a blind eye to it. Reportedly, some instructors even help students cheat, to guarantee that nobody will fail the exams.

Contesting control of the ROTC

Despite the doubtful effectiveness of its political agenda, different factions in the army still seek to control the ROTC commander’s seat to leverage the program’s indoctrination function. The tenure of Lt. Gen. Weerachai Intusophon (2015–2017) in leading the program is a good example. Weerachai belonged to the Eastern Tigers faction, which took control of the country from 2014 to 2023. When the junta wanted a new pro-military constitution to be approved in the 2016 referendum, Weerachai initiated the ROTC Volunteer activity mentioned above.

Between October and December 2015, the volunteers covered 650 districts and reached more than half a million people. One of the volunteers’ activities involved handing out pro-constitution leaflets in Bangkok’s busiest areas. The ROTC Volunteer activity, along with factors such as the persecution of constitutional critics and public concern that rejecting the new constitution would further delay the return of civilian governments, contributed to the passing of the referendum in August 2016. Soon afterwards, the Eastern Tigers-dominated junta rewarded Weerachai by promoting him to the position of assistant army commander.

After Weerachai, the ROTC’s indoctrination function has only grown. In 2019, under the leadership of Lt. Gen. Prakarn, the ROTC New Gen campaign was introduced to the program. It is a series of changes which aim to support the indoctrination: some changes focus on making the program more appealing to the youth, such as easing haircut rules and promoting “active elearning” approaches. Another change was the initiation of the ROTC Cyber activity.

The ROTC and Thailand’s civil–military struggle

The ROTC program is a clear reflection of civil–military struggle in contemporary Thai politics. On the one hand, the military wants to use the program to indoctrinate students to secure civil–military–monarchical hegemony. On the other hand, society—which is represented by ROTC agents—has mostly resisted the military’s hegemony.

To be precise, the military expects ROTC agents to embrace the armed forces’ roles in both external defence (i.e., as masculine warriors) and political affairs (i.e., as protectors and builders of DKHS). However, ROTC agents accept only the former role, while denying the latter.

Although instructors do not usually take political indoctrination vigorously, many of them still very much care about training students to be masculine warriors. Instructors keep teaching students to love and be ready to sacrifice for the nation. They also continue to use punishment and petty compliance as a main training tool to make students strong and obedient.

Likewise, although many students do not like their instructors’ training approach, they accept that training students to be masculine warriors is understandable. They may try to loaf and escape harsh training, but they never deny the discourse that masculine warriors are ideal soldiers.

By contrast, political lessons which justify the military’s role in politics were strongly resisted by ROTC agents. The interviewees disclosed that they found the lessons questionable, useless, and fake. This might be because the lessons conflict with their experiences and ideologies. Political indoctrination thus became a burden, a bore, and a problem to them.

The acceptance of masculine warrior discourse and the rejection of political lessons indicate that society is trying to redefine Thailand’s civil–military–monarchy relations. People are demanding a new regime where the military cannot be involved in politics and only plays a role in external defence. Now, it is up to the Thai military: whether it will adapt to the society’s demands or continue their struggle to indoctrinate the population. My examination of the ROTC program suggests the latter strategy will leave them disappointed.

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The author’s upcoming book “The Thai Military’s Student Training Programme: Indoctrination, Resistance, and Civil-military Struggle” will soon be published via Routledge’s Rethinking Southeast Asia series. This post is part of a series of essays highlighting the work of emerging scholars of Southeast Asia published with the support of the Australian National University College of Asia and the Pacific.