ABSTRACT Recent scholarship examining political contestation in Thailand has emphasised concepts
such as “network monarchy,” while pointing to the populism and enduring political influence
of Thaksin Shinawatra. While this descriptive work has helped shed light on the architecture of
governance in Thailand, it has not been embedded in a broader theoretical approach that might
help to train our attention on other powerful actors that play important roles in shaping Thailand’s
political and institutional landscape. In this article, I outline one such approach and advance the
term “autonomous political networks,” to refer to collections of people who share strong value
commitments and political goals and who operate in the space between the country’s dominant
political institutions – often straddling positions in the state and civil society simultaneously. This
theoretical discussion is grounded empirically in a description of one such network whose power is
derived from sources other than electoral legitimacy or long-standing historical tradition. The
article discusses the enormous influence this network has exercised in reshaping Thailand’s political
order, all while remaining largely invisible to the public eye. It suggests the need to use this
approach to elaborate other hidden political networks that play important roles in governance in
Thailand and beyond