The Coffee Parliament — a newsletter about Thai politics. 🇹🇭 ☕
A venerable tradition of societies everywhere is to gather around in a café and talk about the politics of the day — for keeping up to date, for debate, and for intellectual fulfillment. So beloved is this activity in Thailand that Thais have coined a special word for it: the sapha kafae — “coffee parliaments.”
And so it is in this spirit that The Coffee Parliament is written. Thailand lies at the heart of mainland Southeast Asia: a kingdom constantly plunged into political turmoil as power alternates between the ballot box and the barracks, an upper middle-income country seemingly eternally on the verge of making the leap to developed country status, a bamboo shifting in the wind navigating the great powers. This newsletter is intended to help you make sense of Thailand, from Bangkok and beyond.
Subscribers to The Coffee Parliament include diplomats, officers at international organizations, journalists at leading news agencies, consultants, investment bankers, academics, and anyone with an interest in Thailand. In short: if you care about what’s happening in Thailand, this is the newsletter for you!
About Ken Lohatepanont
My name is Mathis Lohatepanont, and I go by Ken. Originally from Bangkok, Thailand, I am currently a Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of Political Science at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. My research interests lie primarily in political party organization and branding, along with the politics of institution-building and capacity creation. I was previously a researcher in Innovation Policy at the Thailand Development Research Institute. I hold a B.A. in Political Science from UC Berkeley.
As an analyst of Thai politics, I am a regular contributor to both academic and journalistic outlets on politics. My writing has been published in the East Asia Forum, Fulcrum, the Washington Post, the Bangkok Post, and Thai Enquirer. I have been quoted in the New York Times, Bloomberg, The Guardian, the Financial Times, and Foreign Policy, among other outlets. (An irony: I actually don’t drink coffee!) You can follow me on X and Bluesky at @kenlmathis.
Click here to learn more about me.
Subscribe to The Coffee Parliament
The Coffee Parliament is currently fully free to read. If you’d like future posts to land directly in your email inbox, please subscribe! You’ll receive 1-2 new articles a week.
The types of articles you can expect to receive include analysis of current affairs in Thailand, recaps of election results, deep dives into policies, updates on regional affairs, and (reflecting my own research interests!) periodical overviews of the latest happenings with Thai political parties. You’ll also get some more scholarly musings from the perspective of a political scientist. And from time to time, I’ll write about Thai history, culture, and (very occasionally) off-topic areas of interest. Please join us!
(And if you want to understand what’s going on in Thai politics quickly, check this out).
