The Five Ms of the Red Ants: Toolkit

Introduction: a theory that refuses to wait for the elephant to fall

Many political cultures carry a quiet assumption that change must come from above. The country will be saved by a great leader, a new party, a reformist general, a charismatic outsider, or a hero who appears at the right moment and leads the people to victory. The assumption feels hopeful. In practice it keeps enormous numbers of people in a posture of waiting. And whenever the hero is defeated, jailed, co-opted, or simply exhausted, the hope collapses with them.

The Red Ants Doctrine starts from the opposite question. If no one is coming to rescue us, how do ordinary people build themselves into a force capable of shaping their own future? The question moves the starting point of political theory from the top of the pyramid to its base. It begins with people.

Each red ant is small. It owns no great wealth, commands no army, and holds no office. Seen alone, it seems to mean nothing to a large system. Yet it is precisely such people, in their millions, who keep every system running. They work, pay taxes, produce, and consume. They staff the ministries, teach in the schools, serve in the army and the police, run businesses, farm the land, and practise the professions. Beyond all this, they carry beliefs, values, and a sense of what is legitimate from one generation to the next.

Power, in this view, is not a possession that one ruler holds alone. It is a social relationship that exists because many people make it work. The idea is not unique to this doctrine. Gene Sharp (1973) showed systematically that the power of any ruler depends on sources held by the ruled: their acceptance, skills, knowledge, material resources, and obedience. Hannah Arendt (1970) went further, defining power as the human ability to “act in concert,” something that never belongs to an individual and lasts only as long as the group holds together.

A regime survives, therefore, not only because it has instruments of coercion, but because people believe, obey, accept, grow accustomed, cooperate, or feel they have no alternative. Václav Havel (1985) captured this in his famous portrait of a greengrocer who places a party slogan in his shop window. He does not believe a word of it. He does it so that life will go on without trouble. Yet millions of such small acts are exactly what hold the whole system up. Conversely, when knowledge, legitimacy, trust, and the capacity to cooperate begin to drain away from an old order, its power changes too, even while its outer shell still looks as solid as ever.

This is why the Red Ants Doctrine gives priority to building citizens rather than building followers. It is also where this article begins, before turning to a question the original doctrine left only partly answered.

The Thai setting, briefly

Readers outside Thailand may find it useful to know why a theory like this emerged there. Thailand ended absolute monarchy in 1932, when a small group of civilian and military reformers calling themselves the People’s Party (Khana Ratsadon) staged a largely bloodless revolution. The promise of that moment has been contested ever since. The country has experienced more than a dozen successful military coups, most recently in 2006 and 2014, and has been governed under some twenty constitutions. Scholars have described the informal system that sits above electoral politics as a network monarchy (McCargo, 2005): an arrangement of palace-aligned elites, senior military officers, the judiciary, and bureaucrats that shapes outcomes regardless of how citizens vote. Thai critics also speak of a deep state and of khaki capital, the economic interests of the armed forces.

In 2020 and 2021, a youth-led protest movement brought tens of thousands onto the streets with demands that had long been considered unspeakable, including reform of the monarchy. The energy was extraordinary. Hundreds of protesters, many of them students, later faced criminal charges, including under the country’s lèse-majesté law. In 2023, the reformist Move Forward Party won the most seats in the general election but was prevented from forming a government by a military-appointed Senate that held a vote in choosing the prime minister. In 2024 the Constitutional Court dissolved the party; its members regrouped as the People’s Party, a name that deliberately echoes 1932.

These events pose, with unusual sharpness, the questions this article tries to answer. What happens when a society produces genuine awakening, mass mobilisation, and even electoral victory, and still cannot change who holds power? The Thai case is specific, but the questions are not. Versions of them are being asked from Caracas to Tbilisi, from Khartoum to Hong Kong. The Five Ms are offered with that wider audience in mind.