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Vincent Tan

When Brunei’s Sultan Hassanal Bolkiah recently stripped his daughter-in-law of a royal title, the move drew attention for its unusually public glimpse into discipline inside one of the world’s few remaining absolute monarchies.
But it also offered a small example of what analysts who study Southeast Asia’s royal families describe as a wider challenge for the region’s monarchies: how to preserve authority through tradition and adaptation as public expectations change.
An official announcement dated August 7 said Pengiran Raabi’atul ‘Adawiyyah’s conduct had tarnished the monarchy’s reputation and shown disrespect towards the sultan, Queen Saleha and the royal family, but did not offer details.
A contrasting example came on May 25, when Cambodian Senate president Hun Sen, acting as head of state during King Norodom Sihamoni’s medical absence in China, signed a royal decree pardoning former opposition leader Kem Sokha.
One case involved hierarchy and discipline inside an absolute monarchy; the other showed the working of constitutional authority in a monarchy with limited governing power.
Across the region, the models differ sharply. Brunei’s sultan rules as both head of state and government, Malaysia’s king is elected every five years from among nine hereditary rulers, Cambodia’s crown remains largely symbolic and Thailand’s monarchy occupies a prominent but highly sensitive place in national life.
Yet analysts told This Week in Asia that all four faced a common test: whether they could keep adapting as politics, institutions and public expectations evolved.
Pavin Chachavalpongpun, a professor at Kyoto University’s Centre for Southeast Asian Studies, said monarchies endured partly by presenting themselves as inseparable from the nation and as “primary custodians of order, continuity and moral authority”.

Religion, history and state-sanctioned accounts of nation-building also allowed crowns to exercise influence beyond their formal constitutional roles, said Pavin, a prominent critic of Thailand’s royalist establishment who has lived in self-exile in Japan since Thailand’s 2014 military coup.
In moments of political crisis, he said, some political actors might look to royal institutions as sources of external legitimacy or arbitration.
But such reliance was “a double-edged sword”, Pavin said, because it could deepen institutional dependency and reinforce the idea that elected civilian leadership was secondary to royal guardianship.
Public discussion of the Thai monarchy remains constrained by Section 112 of the Penal Code, commonly known as the lese majeste law, which carries prison terms of three to 15 years for defaming, insulting or threatening the king, queen, heir apparent or regent. Pavin himself was charged under the law in 2014.
In Pavin’s view, Thailand’s royal institution had moved away from the informal “network monarchy” associated with previous eras towards a more formalised structure of authority.
The youth-led protests of 2020 and 2021, he said, showed that royal authority was not uncontested and that some younger Thais wanted more open discussion of the institution’s place in the country’s political system.
Malaysia offers a contrast in design, with royal power dispersed among nine houses whose rulers are heads of Islam in their respective states.

“The monarchy itself is tied very closely to identity and the position of Islam within the nation-state,” said Ahmad Fauzi Abdul Hamid, a political scientist at Universiti Sains Malaysia.
The kingship rotates among the houses, preventing permanent authority from accumulating in one royal line, while the Conference of Rulers helps resolve differences within the system. Ahmad Fauzi credited the arrangement with helping Malaysia navigate successive governments and a hung parliament between 2020 and 2022.
Malaysia’s larger, multi-ethnic population and competitive elections have also required its rulers to accommodate constitutional government and wider public expectations, Ahmad Fauzi said. Members of state royal families maintain direct public contact and have also entered the civil service.
Brunei presents the opposite model. Hassanal Bolkiah has fused the state with Sunni Islam and Melayu Islam Beraja (MIB), or Malay Islamic monarchy, while retaining sweeping authority. Oil wealth is central to the system’s legitimacy, Ahmad Fauzi said: “Most of the wealth goes to the royal and elite families, but the public still benefits.”
Frank Fanselow, a sociologist at the Singapore University of Social Sciences who spent years in Brunei, has called this arrangement a “rentier bargain”, where energy revenues fund education, healthcare, subsidies and public-sector employment, while citizens reciprocate with loyalty.
Fanselow said that Brunei’s durability rested on a welfare-based social bargain, MIB ideology, royal ritual and the sultan’s cultivated image as a paternal “caring monarch”, while the ruler also projected accessibility through visits to mosques, schools, offices and markets.

Longer-term pressures, however, include reliance on hydrocarbons, youth employment, economic diversification and succession after a reign that has become closely identified with the state, Fanselow added.
Ahmad Fauzi said the sultan was aware that the welfare system could not depend on oil indefinitely. “That is why you have initiatives to diversify the economy away from just petroleum,” he said.
“Few Bruneians can remember their country without him at the helm. In some ways, he is bigger than the monarchy itself, and his absence would leave a huge vacuum not only in the institutions but also in the collective consciousness of his subjects,” Fanselow added.
If Brunei shows monarchy fused with executive power, religion and welfare, Cambodia presents a much more constrained model.
The monarchy was restored in 1993 after the Khmer Rouge era and years of civil conflict, with the king expected to “reign but not govern”.
That limited constitutional role was visible in May, when King Norodom Sihamoni was in China for medical treatment and Hun Sen, as acting head of state, signed a royal decree pardoning former opposition leader Kem Sokha.
Kem Sokha had been under house arrest after receiving a 27-year sentence for treason.
Cambodia has no automatic hereditary succession, although Sihamoni is unmarried and has no children. When the throne becomes vacant, a nine-member Royal Council of the Throne elects a new king from eligible members of the royal family.
The episode illustrated the monarchy’s primarily constitutional and symbolic role in contemporary Cambodia. While the king remains an important national figure, the institution operates alongside political offices and governing structures led by the Cambodian People’s Party.

For Ou Virak, founder and president of Future Forum, an independent Phnom Penh-based think tank, that political imbalance has not erased the monarchy’s legitimacy.
“The very notion of Cambodia as a nation, as a kingdom, comes from long ago,” Virak said, pointing to the ancient Khmer empire and its god-kings, as well as the legacy of the late King Norodom Sihanouk, who is closely associated with Cambodian independence.
“We are always going to look at the role of the monarchy as a source of Cambodian identity,” he said.
The decline of royalist parties after the political turbulence of the 1990s also enabled the palace to be presented more readily as above party politics, Virak said. But he described its relationship with the ruling establishment as an “uneasy marriage”, with Buddhism and the monarchy remaining as cultural anchors whose endorsement could lend legitimacy to a centralised political system, even though “the ruling class holds most of the cards”.
After the Cambodia National Rescue Party’s dissolution in 2017, the monarchy increasingly became another source of legitimacy for the country’s rulers alongside economic growth and rising living standards, Virak said.
Oh Ei Sun, a senior fellow at the Singapore Institute of International Affairs, said Sihanouk’s legacy had made the monarchy a symbol of continuity for a population shaped by the Khmer Rouge era.
Sihamoni’s distance from day-to-day politics had also helped preserve the institution. “Realistically, it is very symbolic nowadays. The real power is with Hun Sen and Hun Manet,” he said. “It is this sort of flexibility and, in a sense, harmlessness which renders the monarchy quite durable in Cambodia.”
Taken together, the four monarchies suggest that endurance depends not only on tradition but also on how far each crown can bend with political, economic and social change without weakening the authority it seeks to preserve.
“A monarchy which is able and willing to adapt to changes according to the times, according to modern developments, will fare better,” Ahmad Fauzi said.


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How Southeast Asia’s monarchies stay relevant in a volatile region

World’s longest-reigning living monarch, Brunei’s Sultan Hassanal Bolkiah, returns a salute during his 80th birthday celebrations at Taman Haji Sir Muda Omar ‘Ali Saifuddien in Bandar Seri Begawan, Brunei July 15. Photo: Reuters

Thai officials leave after taking the oath of allegiance to become civil servants to mark King Vajiralongkorn’s 74th birthday outside the Grand Palace in Bangkok on July 28. Photo: EPA

Malaysian sultans pose for photographs before the election of the country’s next king at the National Palace in Kuala Lumpur in 2023. Photo: EPA-EFE

Brunei Sultan Hassanal Bolkiah and his son Prince Abdul Mateen arrive during the welcome ceremony of the Asean summit in Cebu in May. Photo: EPA

Scouts carry balloons during the 20th anniversary of Cambodian King Norodom Sihamoni’s coronation in front of the Royal Palace in Phnom Penh in 2024. Photo: AFP

The Malaysian king, Sultan Ibrahim Sultan Iskandar (centre), attends his coronation at the National Palace in Kuala Lumpur in 2024. Photo: Reuters

Then Thai prime minister Prayuth Chan-Ocha (middle left) prostrates himself in front of newly appointed Thai King Vajiralongkorn in 2016. Photo: AFP

Cambodia’s King Norodom Sihamoni arrives for the first meeting of the Senate in Phnom Penh in 2024. Photo: AFP

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Malaysia’s king Sultan Ibrahim Sultan Iskandar (centre) takes part in a wreath-laying ceremony at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier by the Kremlin Wall in Moscow on August 6, 2025. Photo: EPA

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The kings in Thailand, Cambodia, Malaysia and Brunei have to be attuned to societal or economic changes to survive, analysts say


The kings in Thailand, Cambodia, Malaysia and Brunei have to be attuned to societal or economic changes to survive, analysts say.


How Southeast Asia’s monarchies stay relevant in a volatile region

.css-1c6uqr6{color:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-size:inherit;font-family:inherit;line-height:inherit;overflow-wrap:break-word;}The kings in Thailand, Cambodia, Malaysia and Brunei have to be attuned to societal or economic changes to survive, analysts say

The kings in Thailand, Cambodia, Malaysia and Brunei have to be attuned to societal or economic changes to survive, analysts say