South East Asia Research, 20, 3, pp 361–379 doi: 10.5367/sear.2012.0112 Burning red desires: Isan migrants and the politics of desire in contemporary Thailand Claudio Sopranzetti Abstract: The Red Shirt movement, which reached its peak during May 2010, has been met with puzzlement and ambiguity by media and scholars in and beyond Thailand. Often presented as a one-man-driven movement or a ‘peas- ant revolt’, the movement has remained opaque to many observers. This article analyses the ongoing conflict through the eyes of Isan (North Eastern Thai) migrants in Bangkok, especially motorcycle taxi drivers, as motivated by ‘politics of desire’. In particular, the article explores how desires for consumption are voiced by a new emerging regional middle class with a diffuse feeling of being stuck between an agricultural past and a self-employed present, due to struc- tural limitations on social and personal development. The author examines the historical emergences and failures of these desires in a complex web of conflicting and overlapping claims to representation, capitalism and class mobility. Positioning desires at the core of the analysis and exploring their configuration and suppression in Thailand through discourses of capitalist access, self-sufficiency and social justice allows severed links to be recovered and apparent contradictions to be reconfigured. This seems necessary to un- derstand the otherwise disconnected and incomprehensible economic, discursive and spatial dimensions of the Thai political conflict. Keywords: political movement; capitalist desire; Sufficiency Economy; Red Shirts; Thaksin Shinawatra Author details: Claudio Sopranzetti is a PhD candidate in the Department of Anthro- pology at Harvard University, Peabody Museum, 11 Divinity Avenue, Cambridge, MA 02138, USA. E-mail: sopranz@fas.harvard.edu. On 19 May 2010, deploying tanks and war weapons, the Royal Thai Army dis- persed thousands of Red Shirt protesters who had taken over the commercial centre of Bangkok. In the previous two months, these protesters had effectively trans- formed a space of elite conspicuous consumption into a national political arena. By 20 May when the violence stopped, at least 92 people had been killed; more than 2,000 injured filled Bangkok’s hospitals; and 7-Eleven shops, bank branches, the Stock Exchange of Thailand and Central World, the biggest shopping mall in Thailand, were set on fire, filling the air with a pungent smell of burned plastic and stagnant water. The Ratchaprasong intersection, theatre of the violence, was empty and the motorcycle taxi drivers who peppered the protest had already left the area, taking advantage of their mobility and their profound knowledge of the city’s short cuts and back doors to disappear before the military clenched its fist around the protesters. At that point, I had been conducting fieldwork on mobility and mobilization among motorcycle taxi drivers in Bangkok for approximately 10 months. My re-