Transcript: Network Monarchy

Duncan Network Monarchy 25 11 Final

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Intro to Nordic Asia Podcast        This is the Nordic Asia podcast.

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Petra Desatova Welcome to the Nordic Asia podcast, a collaboration sharing expertise on Asia across the Nordic region. My name is Petra Desatova and I am a Post-doctoral researcher at the Nordic Institute of Asian Studies at the University of Copenhagen. In this episode, I'm talking to Duncan McCargo, Director of the Nordic Institute of Asian Studies and Professor of Political Science at the University of Copenhagen.

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Petra Desatova Welcome to the podcast, Duncan.

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00:00:34

Duncan McCargo              Thank you, Petra.

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Petra Desatova So Duncan is a regular host of our Nordic Asia podcast series, and it's my great pleasure to be able to switch roles with him for this ones and interview him for our today's episode. Now, Duncan is well known in academic circles for his agenda- setting research on Thai politics and an extensive list of publications, many of which have become seminal works on Thailand. His two latest books include the 2020 co- authored titled 'Future Forward The Rise and Fall of the Political Party', published by NIAS Press, and his 2019 book *Fighting Virtue, Justice and Politics in Thailand', published by Cornell. Today, we're not going to talk about either of Duncan's latest books, but we are going to talk about a very important concept network monarchy that Duncan actually coined in his 2005 article called 'Network Monarchy and Crisis of Legitimacy in Thailand', and he has recently published a new article where he revisits this particular concept called 'Network monarchy as euphoric couplets' and this article came out in September 2021 in Pacific Affairs. So my first question is, Duncan, can you tell us a little bit more about this network monarchy concept? And how did you come up with this particular concept and this way of understanding Thai politics? As we all know, Thai politics is incredibly messy. So where did this idea come from?

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00:01:58

Duncan McCargo              It's a really good question, and I try to lay it out a bit in that recent article, but let me attempt to offer a quick summary here. So if we go back to the early 2000s, I was working for a couple of years with my colleague Ukrist Pathmanand at Chulalongkorn University, and we wrote a book together called 'The Thaksinization of Thailand' which tries to look at at how former prime minister then current Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra, had risen to power and how he exercised control over quite a wide range of aspects of Thailand's state and society. And actually, Ukrist was the one who really took the lead in writing the particular chapters that I'm talking about now. But they're the chapters where we looked at Thaksin's networks in the military, in the police, in various companies and in the bureaucracy to understand how he was able to use not just the formal powers of the prime minister, but what you might call informal authority that he'd accrued by building up all these incredibly strong personal connections over many, many years, connections that straddled the bureaucracy and the private sector, the business sector. So to understand how Thaksin became so powerful and how he became such an incredibly important figure in Thai politics, and we're still talking about today. Although he hasn't been prime minister since 2006, 15 years later, his influence is still incredibly strong a nd that's because it wasn't just about the formal positions that he held. Then a second thing was happening to me at the same time as I was working on that book, which book written I actually finished in 2004, it was published with the 2005 date. In 2004, around the same time when we finished that book and it came out, I moved to spend a year in Cambodia. I had quite a bit of leisure time to reflect on things. Cambodia is also a monarchy, and during that period, King Sihanouk actually decided to abdicate and at that point, there was the coronation of King Sihamoni, his son. And I saw how Sihanouk had managed to organize his own succession, according to his own satisfaction, to pick one of his children that he thought would be the best one to perform the role of king and put him onto the throne before he himself passed away so that things would not be left to the government, obviously, the Hun Sen government and the ruling Cambodian People's Party, to figure out what to do about the monarchy going forward. So that was one very interesting thing that happened to me at the same time, at least three or four different things going on at this time, which all came together. So the third thing that happened was that I had many years earlier got to know Paul Handley, a journalist who was based in Thailand for a long period of time, who was, of course, writing a book which eventually became 'The king never smiles'. A book that was published in 2006 by Yale University Press and was really the definitive critical biography of King Bhumibol Rama the 9th. So I read that book in manuscript form in a rather longer version than the book that Yale eventually published. So I've been thinking a lot about the way Paul had tried to help us understand what the role of Rama Nine was, all the sorts of different areas in which he was working, and it was very clear to me from that book that whilst I thought Paul's account of the king himself was fascinating, I was much more interested in all these figures surrounding the monarch and the monarchy, some of whom didn't actually have any direct connection with the King but were working on his behalf or claimed to be working on his behalf. So that was the third element and still getting to the end of the question here. The fourth thing that happened was that in January 2004, the long simmering insurgency in Thailand's deep south started up, and we then began to see competition between Thaksin forces, elements of the police and the military who were loyal to the prime minister and other forces in the bureaucracy in the military who were more aligned with General Prem, former army commander and president of the Privy Council and more leaning in a royalist direction. So you could see the emergence of two, if you like, competing power networks, which were not obviously competing at that point but the sense of competition between the two of them became larger and larger. So this is when I started to try to understand how can we get an idea about the political role of monarchy that goes beyond just looking at the king? Because most of it is and is not about the king. It's about people who are around or in the general vicinity of the palace.

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00:06:36

Petra Desatova Yet obviously, that's become a very important idea within Thai politics. But is there an easy way for you to illustrate how this network monarchy works in practice? Because a lot of the times with these concepts, they could be quite abstract in a sense and as you illustrated, we could see it's not just about the central players, but also about the people working around them. But is there a way to illustrate how it actually operates?

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00:07:02

Duncan McCargo              Well, I do open the new article, the one that's just come out in Pacific Affairs with what I call a cup of coffee story, which is an actual episode that's taken place a number of times when I used to teach at the University of Leeds. I would go into my class and I was teaching about Southeast Asian politics, and several weeks into the semester, we get to the network monarchy concept, and I would teach the class actually several times in a row because we would do four seminar groups or something. And by the time I got to three o'clock in the afternoon, I was flagging. I would be in need of a cup of coffee and I would cross the road and buy myself one and go back to the seminar room to face the next group of students. So I remember at one point this sort of came to me. We were talking about network monarchy, and I said to the students, What is this in front of me? The answer to which was a cup of coffee. Where did the coffee come from? And they would, they all knew the place on the other side of the road "oh so you got it at the cafe on the other side of the road", which of course I did. And then I would say, what does that tell us about our power relations?

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00:08:11

Petra Desatova OK.

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Duncan McCargo              And then it would really depend on how bright the students were and how tuned in they were, whether they'd been thinking critically about some issues related to the course or not. Did this a few times and in a good week, I would get an answer pretty quickly.

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00:08:28

Petra Desatova That's great.

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Duncan McCargo              Yes. But quite often I had to explain it.

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00:08:32

Petra Desatova So do explain, please.

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Duncan McCargo              Right. So at this point, remember, bear in mind, I've said we're several weeks into the class and I had been teaching the same group of students in the same room for those weeks. And it's obvious that each week I needed this coffee and I went and got it for myself. So what that told us about the power relations was that the students didn't feel any responsibility for my coffee. I didn't have any real authority over them in the sense that I was there to teach them, but they were not subordinated to me in terms of trying to do things to please me. Interestingly, when I went to teach in China, I taught for three years in a row at a University in Shanghai. After the first class, when I needed to have the cup of coffee every day, the coffee would appear before me because the Chinese students quickly realized that the teacher would like to have coffee, and therefore they made the coffee available for me. So what was happening in the Chinese case, but not in the Leeds case, was that the students were anticipating the needs of the professor and sort of making it unnecessary for the professor actually to go and find his own coffee. So what on earth does this got to do with the King of Thailand or the politics of Southeast Asian countries? The point here is that if you understand power in this kind of way, people always say, Well, why didn't the king order people to do something about this? Why didn't the king stop the military from shooting people? Or why didn't blah blah blah? All of these questions about agency overlook a sort of central notion that to me, underpins network monarchy, certainly during the ninth reign, which is that if you're a king, you shouldn't really need to tell people what to do because they should already know very well what it is that is going to please you. Therefore, without having any communication from the king and without the courtiers or the subordinates, needing to go and ask the king whether it's OK for them to do something, they can go ahead and take the action, which should be pleasing to the ruler and will be rewarded accordingly. So once you've got that kind of conception of power, then this whole question about structure and agency that we're very familiar with from lots of books about politics becomes much, much more murky. How do you exert agency? Well, you can exert a lot of agency just by sitting there and accepting what is brought to you. You don't have to give people instructions to do things on the whole question about why aren't instructions being given becomes much more complicated than it might at first seem. Now, it's not impossible that in Thailand or other people in senior positions of authority all over the world, i n some cases, don't give direct instructions and sometimes there are direct instructions. But direct instructions are not a necessary prerequisite for something to happen. Many things happen simply because those around the center of power, whether it be a monarch or somebody else in other contexts, anticipate what it is that the ruler, the regime, the dominant party, the leading figure in the organization or the society would like and then go ahead and do it on their behalf with or without consulting them. And I think it's this kind of idea that helps us to elucidate a lot of things that have happened in Thailand in recent decades.

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00:11:59

Petra Desatova Certainly. I mean, it's absolutely fascinating and I love the example of the coffee because I think it really shows how messy then things can end up being because if you are just acting based on what you believe the wishes and know of certain figure, then we are in for all sorts of problems as well as what we could see actually in Thailand happening. But since your article actually came out that introduced this concept of network monarchy, there have been a lot of concepts that either tried to somehow elaborate on your network monarchy concept or really disprove the validity of this concept. I mean, has been written? So been 'autonomous political networks' working towards the monarchy, there was the famous 'deep state', which probably was one of the most serious rival concepts presented in the past few years. Then we had 'parallel state', 'monarchisized military', so there had been loads of them. So have any of these concepts actually made you rethink your ideas about the network monarchy and then where do you stand in relation to some of these concepts and particularly the deep state?

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00:13:07

Duncan McCargo              Obviously there's a lot that could be covered and in the article I discuss more of the concepts. I mean, the first thing I want to say is the point I'm making in the article is that once you come out with a phrase like this which one of my distinguished predecessors' director of NIAS Robert Cribb famously called a euphoric couplet. You know, you come up with these ideally two word phrases in Southeast Asian studies, obviously, imagined communities stands out as an example of this sort of couplet. Once you come up with this coinage of two words, you immediately lose control of it because if it's a success, then other people start using it in a sense, abusing it or giving it meanings that you had never really associated with it. So that's one of the interesting things. And of course, on one level, it's it's flattery. It's very complementary to the original concept that other people wanted to go off and use it in different ways, to take issue with it and create their own coinages which are in some way variance of, or responses to or critiques of the original. And as I say in the article, I'm not trying to defend some kind of network monarchy fundamentalism like ' network monarchy is absolutely this and it can't be that'. At the same time, I think when some of the people who've used the idea trying to turn it into different things, they're obviously going in directions that I myself would not want to go. Like network monarchy isn't some sort of ideological framework. I've taught elsewhere about virtuous rule. Virtuous rule is something you might associate with network monarchy, but it's not network monarchy itself. You can have network monarchy without invoking ideas of goodness of the kind that are very pervasive in a lot of Thai political discourse, for example, that is shifting to something a little bit different. I regard the various different usages in somewhat different lights. You know, is it working towards the monarchy? Is this an idea that Serhat Uenaldi who was another of my students, a master student at Leeds put forward in the book based on his PhD thesis? I think that's a very interesting idea. It's based on Ian Kershaw's discussion of the nature of Hitler's power in Nazi Germany. That you had people who were working towards that power but weren't necessarily in any way themselves, directly associated with the regime and certainly were in a very lowly position. So what's interesting about Serhat's idea is, you know, there's a lot that was never spelt out in the original network monarchy article, which is only about 15 pages long. So many people had questions about it, which were never answered and were never really going to be answered by what was really a piece designed to stimulate thought and debate. But one thing that I probably didn't make clear in the network monarchy article is that it's not just about the Privy Council and just about some generals and judges and a very small number of senior people. The network monarchy can go right down to much more lower levels in society, and it can be all over the country, and it can be people who've never set eyes on any member of the royal family or anyone in the palace. So in that sense, I think that I would agree with Serhat whether I would use that particular terminology or not. Mm-Hmm. A lot of monarchized military or whatever we want to call it. One thing you have to be aware of with the 2005 article is that it was still in that wonderful honeymoon period where there hadn't been a military coup for a long time. There was a coup in '91, and then the next coup is in 2006. So when I published the Network Monarchy article, which came out at the end of 2005, there hadn't been a military coup for almost 15 years. So in retrospect, if we look back now, especially in light of the 2014 coup, we see very, very close and intimate connections between the military and the monarchy, which had loomed much, much larger in recent years. The period that I was focusing on in the original network monarchy article was really the heyday of the political reform process. It was the 1997 constitution and all those associated new institutionalist bodies, the Constitutional Court at the Counter Corruption Commission, the Human Rights Commission, the Election Commission, which you’re yourself so interested in Petra and so forth. And it was about a period when lawyers, doctors, university lecturers, NGO activists, journalists and editors, civil society broadly defined, lot of those groups had enjoyed very prominent roles. So the monarchy had in many ways during that period formed a strong bond with civilian actors who were trying to institutionalize in some way, whether it's exactly democratic rule would be a debate, but were moving Thailand in a more liberal direction in which representative political institutions will be made more robust and solid. So that was the focus of the original network monarchy article, that particular period. And in retrospect, we see over the subsequent sixteen years the way in which the military has loomed much larger as the most important, the right hand of the military in trying to shape the direction of Thailand's politics and society. So I think it is important to acknowledge that if we think about May 1992 until September 2006, that 14 year or so period was a period of civilianisation and then from 2006 to now really has been pretty much continuous period of militarisation with a bit of a hiccup in the middle. So we have to understand that we're a monarchy in those terms as well. That is a useful corrective but I still would hesitate to assume that the monarchy and the military are really one and the same, because I do think there's quite a bit of clear blue water between them and perhaps more clear blue water than some other commentators would tend to emphasize.

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00:19:02

Petra Desatova So how about the deep state? You know, from what we were talking, and this is really probably what most listeners might be interested in, but your concept of network monarchy is ambiguous and fuzzy, right? So it's about a network of people that is not necessarily clearly defined. We don't know fully, you know, how many members that network has. There's a lot of ambiguity and uncertainty over who is and who isn't part of that network until somebody starts acting and we can clearly see that person, don't know where the boundaries are and so and so forth. But the idea of deep state is a lot more concrete and in many ways, a lot more institutionalized. So why network monarchy and not a deep state?

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00:19:41

Duncan McCargo              Right, yes, I mean, obviously, Eugénie Mérieau's article has had a lot of influence, and we've all enjoyed reading it and thinking about it considering this idea. For me, it's an either or you've kind of got to choose, are you going with the network monarchy argument or the deep state argument or perhaps coming up with a different one altogether? I don't think we can have our cake and eat it, and we can say, well, the network monarchy is a deep state. I think that network monarchy isn't deep state and the deep state isn't network monarchy. So why is that? Why do we have to make a choice between these two concepts? The network monarchy really is describing a political system and a mode of governance, but it's a mode of governance where agency is quite murky and ambiguous. It's a mode of governance where the influence of particular institutions waxes and wanes. It's a mode of governance where the monarchy is always present, but not necessarily taking the lead or the prime actor at any particular juncture. And in the deep state article, it really explicitly says the 'Constitutional Court has taken over the role that used to be performed by the King' which begs a couple of questions like: Did the King ever make those kinds of overt interventions on his own behalf? Or were they carried out more commonly on his behalf by members of the network such as Prem and so on? But the second thing is, can you really see the Constitutional Court as having taken over what the monarchy used to do, presumably on the strength of the exhortations contained in those two royal speeches of April 2006, that judges should help to solve Thailand's political problems and take that as a kind of a direct injunction to the Constitutional Court to perform the roles previously performed by the monarchy. To me, that's a really big leap, partly because I don't think the Constitutional Court, although it's a very important act to act on its own behalf or independently. And in my book 'Fighting for Virtue', I have a whole chapter on the Constitutional Court to show how hesitant, how confused, uncertain and nervous the Constitutional Court often were during the late years of the ninth reign about taking dramatic political action because they were often mixed messages coming from the palace. For example, during the Yingluck government, there were a number of junctures when the palace seemed actually to be quite sympathetic to the Yingluck government and was not signaling in any way that the court ought to be bringing that government down. So to assume that there is a deep state which is working consistently because really, what the deep state's argument suggests is that there's a consistently Anti-Thaksin Anti-Red pro-military stance, which is adopted systematically by a set of actors who were very closely aligned and are in a kind of active, quasi conspiratorial collusion with one another. It may be that many of those actors have become more coordinated over time, especially in the tenth reign. But you know, the network monarchy article really is dealing with the ninth reign, and the deep state's argument is also dating from the very final years of the ninth reign before the new King comes on the throne. So if we're talking about what was happening, then I feel like there was a great deal more ambiguity than is captured by the deep state idea. It's, you know, it does alarm me that people like former President Donald Trump in the United States talking about the deep state. It is an idea that appeals to conspiracy theorists and people. Who would like to believe that, you know, the odds are stacked against them because of dark and mysterious and murky movements, and whilst there's a lot that's ambiguous and murky in Thai politics, I've never seen it as being so consistently organized as the deep state argument would suggest. Equally, in the 10th reign, I don't think there is a deep state. There's a very clear chain of command so that people are pretty well understanding where the orders are and what the orders are all about. So in a different way, the deep state doesn't so convincingly apply post the end of 2016.

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00:23:32

Petra Desatova Well, let me touch upon this last part of what you were talking, and we're gonna move away from the discussions of whether it's network, monarchy or deep state. I am aware that you have been asked about these things number of times, the sort of this test of times for your concept of network monarchy under the new reign, because one of the central premises that your network monarchy concept has been really built on was this highly ambiguous and often plausibly deniable, and I'm kind of quoting from your own paper here, mode of governance, right? So it was the royal power that was still very ambiguous, and you were never really sure who was really calling the shots, as you actually explained. But now we are in a completely different situation in Thailand because I think now it is lot clearer where the power is coming from and who is the one calling the shots. So how do you look and reconcile this with your original concept and argument about the network monarchy? Can we still really talk about this the under the current reign?

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00:24:27

Duncan McCargo              Clearly, it's a concept that came out of a particular period of time, and it's a concept that if you want to continue using it under different circumstances, you need to adapt it. So in essence, my argument is same network, different monarch. Still, you know, we just have yet another very important Constitutional Court decision about the actions of some of the anti-government and indeed anti-monarchy protesters and we see judges and other actors in the society playing a role. So the actors in the network are still there. But we've also seen much more commonly avert political intervention at the palace, we typically saw during the ninth reign. And the most outstanding would be the dissolution of the Thai Raksa Chart party in the middle of the 2019 election, which followed on from their allegedly inappropriate nomination of Ex Princess, for want of a better term, Ubalratana to be their prime ministerial candidate. So there we saw the palace was quite willing to issue a statement on a highly contentious political issue of the day, which had the direct consequence of leading to the dissolution of a political party and in some respects, then shifted the outcome of the 2019 election. And we also saw on the very eve of the election, another royal statement urging voters to support 'good people', which was widely interpreted as an expression of support for certain political parties, particularly the Palang Pracharath Party associated with the military junta that had seized power in 2014 and which continues to be the lead party in the subsequent government. So those were interventions of a direct nature into the realm of electoral politics, of a kind that we didn't experience in the same sort of way during the ninth reign. So that indicates a shift. So yes, I don't think any more the cup of coffee analogy works so well. I think cups of coffee can be ordered and many other things can be ordered. And I think one of the quotes that I have in the article where King Bhumbibol said that he never got what he wanted. That's not really the case anymore. We have a king on the throne who does get what he wants. He makes it fairly clear that he would like certain things done following on from that they very often happen in pretty rapid order, as we've seen with, you know, transferring the authority over troops or transferring Crown property bureau assets and things like that. So he doesn't hesitate at times to say what it is that he wants to be done and then that proceeds to happen, and that is a different modality. But nevertheless, as you saw with that Constitutional Court decision and many other issues that have come up in the political sphere over the past three to four years, there are many times when proxies, the military, the current government, the judiciary and key players in the various independent agencies are acting on behalf of the monarchy in ways that are not dramatically different from the ways they acted during the previous reign.

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00:27:19

Petra Desatova As we had running out of time, I will just get in one more question, and it might require a very quick response from you on that point, but I'm kind of thinking, how sustainable is this mode of operation for Thai politics going forward? Because previously it was very clear that obviously people were acting on behalf or in the name of the king and were able to draw some benefits because the king himself was highly popular. Now this kind of chain of cost and benefit seems to be slightly broken, maybe under the current reign or not as straight forward as it used to be because the current king doesn't have such a strong position in terms of popular respect. Maybe, let's say, five years from now, do you think we still might be talking about network monarchy, or networked forms of governance in Thailand? Or do you think that this will potentially maybe evolve into something different?

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00:28:17

Duncan McCargo              Yeah. I mean, it's really hard to predict the future in Thailand because so, so many things can happen and things that have happened just over the past year or so. We might not have anticipated just a year and a half ago that students were going to go out onto the streets and call for reform of monarchy, for example. And we might not have anticipated that a situation where the king was actually resident outside Thailand for much of the year could abruptly come to an end. So many matters relating to the monarchy and its role within Thailand state and society are being renegotiated as we speak, and that's what makes it incredibly hard to predict. But what's clear is there has been an increasing move of greater power and authority and control in the direction of the palace and a greater willingness to exert authority, power and control in a more overt way. That has been the direction of travel. But it's also striking from the huge number of protests that took place last year and that have continued this year. That hasn't been a smooth process, which has received the kind of broad public acceptance that many of the actions during the ninth reign received. This is now a much more contentious struggle, so exercise of power, whether it's direct monarchical power or network monarchical power, is subject to an unprecedented level of pushback and challenge. I think that's one of the things that makes things extremely unpredictable. The great advantage of the old network monarchy was that it was all a bit of a fudge. It was sort of hard to work out who was doing what. And when you maintain that level of ambiguity, it's much more difficult for people to articulate criticism of it and offer resistance to it. So one of the problems of making it more about the monarchy less about the network is the monarchy then becomes more exposed to criticism and to resistance. So there are both advantages and disadvantages for the palace as a political actor in going down that road.

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00:30:11

Petra Desatova Well, it sounds like we are in for a ride when it comes to Thai politics in the next few years. Thank you very much, Duncan, for joining our podcast, this time as actual guest rather than the host. So it's been a great pleasure for me to talk to you about your concept of network monarchy and really discussing a little bit more in response to your latest article. So thanks again. And I hope that we'll get a chance to do this again at some point.

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00:30:38

Duncan McCargo              Thank you so much, Petra. It's a great pleasure to be a guest on the Nordic Asia podcast.

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00:30:42

Petra Desatova Thank you for joining the Nordic Asia podcast, showcasing Nordic collaboration in studying Asia. My name is Petra Postdoctoral researcher at the Nordic Institute of Asian Studies at the University of Copenhagen, and I have been talking today to Duncan McCargo, Director of the Nordic Institute of Asian Studies and Professor of Political Science at the University of Copenhagen. Thank you very much for listening.

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00:31:06

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