In 2020, a wave of protests broke out in Thailand. Calling for political and royal reform, the youth-led movements challenged the status quo with open criticism of the monarchy and popular mobilization against the military-backed government. Among the masses of protesters, saffron robes became a distinct part of the movement as monks and novices, lovingly dubbed the "carrot gang", joined the rallies, raising a defiant slogan “Give Back Our Brows” to critique state and social interference into the code of monastic discipline. In doing so, the carrot gang made a case that political and monastic reform are inseparable, breaking with longstanding expectations that position monastics above the “polluted” realm of politics. This talk attends to the political participation and practices of these monastic youths, exploring the tension between institutional demands for obedience and emerging monastic political consciousness, the ways these young monastics resisted mechanisms of both religious and state control, and the state's response to their transgression of expected political neutrality. I argue that the activism undertaken by monastic youths is not an isolated moment of defiance but an instance of monastic ungovernability, the persistent forms of resistance that challenge state control over the sangha in Thailand. While the sangha has been subordinated under state control through legal and political mechanisms since the early twentieth century, there remains enduring political consciousness and spaces of disobedience within the sangha regarding questions of autonomy, status, and representation. By examining this youth activism as a form of monastic ungovernability, this talk demonstrates how the sangha has always been a contested site of political authority rather than a sphere insulated from political struggle. Such attention reveals a longer history of politically engaged Thai Buddhism that disrupts assumptions framing Buddhism as inherently apolitical and rigidly separating the worldly from the otherworldly.
Biography: Prakirati Satasut is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Thammasat University, where he specializes in anthropology of religion and Thai politics. He received his Ph.D. in Anthropology from the University of Wisconsin-Madison (2019), where his dissertation examined monastic activism and state-sangha relations in post-coup Thailand. His research explores how Buddhism intersects with law, politics, and state power, with particular attention to questions of religious authority, political participation, and legal control of the sangha. As a 2025-2026 Visiting Scholar at the Harvard-Yenching Institute, he is conducting research on Buddhist protectionism in Thailand, tracing its historical development and analyzing its contemporary expressions through debates over monastic autonomy and whose responsibility it is to safeguard Buddhism, as well as through ethnographic fieldwork on monastic political mobilization.