Viengrat Nethipo

Bangkok: Iterum Books, 2026

Reviewed by: Tinnaphop Sinsomboonthong (PhD Candidate, Department of Sociology and Anthropology, National University of Singapore; Assistant Professor of Sociology, Faculty of Sociology and Anthropology, Thammasat University)

Viengrat Nethipo’s State: Formation, Power, and Legitimacy (รัฐ: การก่อรูป อำนาจ และความชอบธรรม in Thai, romanized as Rat: Kan Ko Rup, Amnat, lae Khwam Chop Tham) takes up a question that can be easy to overlook in the heat of political debate. How did the state acquire the powers it exercises today? I kept coming back to this question as I thought about some of the Thai progressive commentary I encounter. The plot is familiar. The state oppresses, the people resist, and the state somehow arrives on the scene with all its powers already in hand. I share the democratic commitments that animate much of this criticism, but I often find myself wanting a little more backstory. What political struggles, economic interests, and social relationships made those powers possible? Through which institutions does the state exercise them, and on what grounds does it claim the right to do so? Viengrat’s book gives me a way to ask these questions historically.

If the Thai state did not acquire its powers overnight, neither did its relationship with the people who live within it take the same form in every period. That brings me to a question that any political sociologist, myself included, would be reluctant to leave alone. As the state changes, how does it reshape people’s relationships with one another, the roles and positions they occupy, and the rules that govern their everyday conduct? Viengrat writes as a political scientist tracing how states were made. I read her account as a political sociologist, curious about the state’s backstory and what it can tell us about how people came to live under its authority.

Viengrat begins with a problem that runs through the book. What counts as a state, and how has that answer changed over time? Chapter 1 considers different definitions of the state, while Chapter 2 examines debates about its relationship with class, power, war, and society. Chapter 3 then turns to the historical record, looking at city-states, empires, and the social and political conditions of the Middle Ages. Chapter 4 follows the transition into the early modern period. By examining changes in how urban spaces were organized alongside the roles of war, sovereignty, religion, and capital, Viengrat shows how both the organization of the state and ideas about it changed.

The later chapters widen the historical scope and bring the relationship between the state and the people into focus. Chapter 5 examines how absolutism laid the foundations for the emergence of the nation-state, while Chapter 6 traces European expansion within and beyond the continent through imperialism and colonialism. In Chapter 7, Viengrat turns to modern citizenship and democratic rule, tracing a shift from identifying the nation with the king to locating it in the people. By the final chapter, the question of how states take shape has become a question of who can claim to belong to them. Viengrat approaches that relationship through histories that unfold in quite different settings.

Viengrat develops much of this historical account through the experiences of France, Great Britain, and Spain. Yet in several chapters, she also brings in examples from Siam/Thailand. For Thai readers, these examples give familiar political institutions and relationships a place in the book’s broader discussion of how states take shape. What interests me about reading these histories side by side is the opportunity to ask where the comparison holds and where it breaks down. Which aspects of state formation in Siam/Thailand become easier to explain alongside the European cases, and which call for an account of their own? That is where I return to the problem I began with. If we want to understand how the Thai state exercises power today, we need to ask how its particular history shaped who could exercise authority, on what grounds, and over whom.

I see the book’s main contribution in the way it teaches readers to ask historical questions about concepts that political debate often takes for granted. For newcomers to political science, history, or political sociology, Viengrat offers a way into debates about how states acquire power, what makes their authority legitimate, and how citizenship changes the relationship between the state and the people. For readers who already use these terms in their work or public commentary, the book gives them reason to pause over a word as familiar as “state” and ask what it actually explains. It is one thing to say that the state has power. It is another to explain how that power was built, who can exercise it, and why people might recognize or contest its legitimacy.

As a political sociologist, I find Viengrat’s historical account a useful starting point for asking how the state takes shape through social relationships and, in turn, reorganizes them. However, the book’s historical approach also raises a question about how we use its comparisons. Because European experiences provide much of the book’s historical narrative, they can begin to look like a general model of political development, with Siam/Thailand appearing to follow a path already laid out elsewhere. At the same time, I see one of the book’s strengths in the opportunity it gives readers to put that apparent fit to the test. European histories offer concepts and explanations that can help us make sense of how the state took shape in Siam/Thailand. Where the comparison reveals discrepancies, the history of Siam/Thailand can help us identify the limits of those explanations and, in some instances, call parts of them into question. For me, this is what makes the comparison worth pursuing. It can sharpen our understanding of state formation in Siam/Thailand and lead us to rethink some of the theories we use to explain it.

Citizenship offers one way to pursue that comparison. In the final chapter, Viengrat turns to the tensions between inclusion and exclusion that arise from the way nation-states define political membership. How does the nation-state seek to ensure the inclusion of its citizens, and how might exclusion nevertheless arise, even unintentionally, through the very arrangements intended to include them? What I find particularly thought-provoking is how these questions bring the discussion back to the social relationships, structures, and order through which state power operates. They invite us to consider whose membership is recognized, how people are (re-)positioned differently within the same political community, and what these differences mean for the promise of equal citizenship. Viengrat’s closing question about whether the nation-state is a structure, an ideology, a set of power relations, or some combination of the three brings me back to the familiar plot I began with, in which the state oppresses and the people resist. When we tell that story in Thai political debate today, how did the state acquire the powers we criticize, and who gets to count as “the people” in whose name it governs?