The regime's aim is to impose an authoritarian form of order on the country's makeshift and improvisatory everyday life and its freewheeling public sphere …

Since the May 2014 coup, the junta has leaned on the law to impose the worst repression in Thailand since the 1970s. Opposition activists are fighting back in the courts.

An old debate that pits democratic values against Asian traditions of strongman rule and preferences for economic progress over political reform still resonates in the region.

Thailand runs the risk that future protest, a right and a mainstay of liberal democracy, will escalate quickly into violence and eventually be constricted as a matter of course.

Although midterm economic prospects for Southeast Asia appear reasonably good, the region's political and security dynamics pose considerable risks to a full recovery from the crisis of 1997.

The optimism surrounding the possibility of a democratic thaw in 2002 “was a mirage, a blip distracting attention from a more depressing long-term trend. … Burma's Asian neighbors, including democracies India and Thailand, increasingly are giving the junta free rein to dominate politics and abuse the citizenry.

Ultimately, if reformist elements … do not restrain [Prime Minister Thaksin], Thailand could develop into a larger version of Singapore: a state with a veneer of democratic politics covering a one-party system.

Given East Asia's positive economic attributes, it is easy to conclude that the region's long-term economic future will be bright. … Unfortunately, the capacity and political will to implement the right choices may be lacking.

American officials have turned their attention toward Southeast Asian policymaking— something largely ignored since the end of the Vietnam War—and have declared Southeast Asia the ‘second front’ in the global campaign against terror. … [But] backing Southeast Asia's often brutal and compromised militaries, which themselves contain elements linked to Islamist radicals, will only boost human rights abuses, breeding popular resentment and setting the stage for more terror.

Almost all the East Asian economies have recaptured the economic momentum disrupted by the 1997 financial crisis in the region. Although that momentum was slowed with the global economic downturn in 2001, the process of financial and corporate rebuilding and restructuring in response to the crisis has not.