Unraveling the Thai Capital

This chapter focuses on the Red Shirts protest that took over Bangkok from March to May 2010. In particular, it explores how motorcycle taxi drivers transformed their mobility and invisibility as urban connectors into political tactics, posing a significant challenge to state forces and ridiculing the pretense of state control over the city and its flows. The drivers—to use the words of Oboto, the man who led the largest group of organized motortaxis in the protest—embodied their role as “owners of the map,” holders of an unmatched knowledge of the urban terrain and gatekeepers of its channels. During three months of protest, the drivers emerged as unrelenting and uncontrollable political actors: invaluable allies and dreaded enemies, able to chart the terrain of the protest better than anybody else and move through it, rendering it readable to their allies and opaque to their enemies. Moving through back roads and parking lots, collecting and circulating information and directives, appearing and disappearing in the urban landscape—skills they developed in years of moving through Bangkok’s impenetrable traffic—the drivers managed to raise a formidable challenge to apparently unbeatable state forces.