For decades, the Thai military has played a vital role in politics, and has also tried to convince Thai civilian society to accept their political involvement through various forms of political education. One of the most important—yet overlooked—channels of political education is the “Reserve Officer Training Corp Programme” (ROTC programme—หลักสูตร รักษาดินแดน [ร.ด.]), which recruits 300,000 civilian high school students annually. These civilian students spend 3-5 years with the military, receiving both military training and political education, and being encouraged by the military to disseminate what they are taught to other civilians. The ROTC programme reflects the military’s attempt to shape Thai youth’s ideologies and to employ the youth to influence the wider public.

The thesis examines whether the ROTC programme succeeds in getting Thai civilians to accept the military’s political involvement or not. The thesis has three primary questions: (a) how has the Thai military indoctrinated ROTC students to accept the military’s involvement in politics? (b) how has such indoctrination been resisted by those involved in the ROTC programme? and (c) how effective has such indoctrination been? The main research method employed by the thesis was unstructured in-depth interviews with ROTC students, ROTC advisers, and military personnel.

The thesis found that the programme teaches ROTC students to accept the military’s role in both warfare and politics. For the military’s role in warfare, the programme encourages students to have a masculine-warrior character. This includes physical and mental strength, as well as being disciplined, obedient, patriotic, and loyal to the monarchy. Regarding the military’s political role, the programme teaches students that it is natural for the military to be involved in internal security, public policy, leadership selection, and determination of political order.

However, the thesis also found that ROTC indoctrination has faced widespread resistance from those involved in the programme: ROTC students, ROTC instructors, and ROTC advisers. These resisters cannot openly resist ROTC indoctrination, but when they are beyond the observation of the military, they seek to form an informal alliance with other resisters by sharing their dissent towards the military and the ROTC programme. These resisters also employ everyday resistance and the arts of resistance to make their life more bearable and sabotage ROTC indoctrination. Such resistance is frequently in the forms of half-baked work, window dressing, escape strategies, gossiping, slandering, joking, nicknaming, and mocking.

Because of resistance in the programme, the thesis concluded that the effectiveness of ROTC indoctrination has been quite limited. Even though the ROTC lessons about the military’s role in warfare has been fairly accepted by those in the programme; the lessons which justify the armed forces’ political involvement encounter widespread resistance. Among them, lessons which legitimise the military’s role in public policy, leadership selection, and determination of political order even face counter-hegemonic resistance. This indicates the lack of success in using the ROTC programme to shape the students’ ideologies.

The ineffectiveness of ROTC indoctrination reflects the ongoing struggle to redefine the civil-military relations in Thailand. While the military has attempted to maintain their hegemony through indoctrination, society has resisted and fought back by proposing alternative civil-military relations models.