การใช้อำนาจของรัฐบาลในสถานการณ์การระบาดของโควิด-19 กับการชุมนุมทางการเมืองในประเทศไทย ช่วง พ.ศ. 2563-2565

Abstract

This thesis aims to study the government's exercise of power in managing the COVID-19 pandemic in two dimensions. The first dimension examines the law enforcement mechanisms used by the government that impacted political demonstrations in Thailand from 2020 to 2022. This is analyzed through the lens of the historical development and the concepts of international human rights principles regarding peaceful assembly, both in normal times and during a state of emergency, as well as through the discourse about sovereign power in the state of exception. The second dimension analyzes the government's exercise of power as characterized by its efforts to establish certain discourses, knowledge, and truths in the society, as well as its attempts to create mechanisms to monitor public assemblies and political movements. The work then explores the resistance by the population against such power. The first dimension’s study finds that international human rights principles has the standpoint of valuing democracy. As such, they give high level of importance and prioritize rights and freedoms related to democratic processes, including freedom of peaceful assembly or freedom of expression, even during pandemic situations. Nevertheless, the government's COVID-19 control laws and measures were also used to suppress political demonstrations and dissenting opinions, which contradicted international human rights principles and values. This kind of exercise of power reveals the government’s attitude towards public assemblies and political movements as threats to its stability, showing the state’s characteristic of being always ready to expand its power and to push out those with dissenting opinions from the sphere of rights and freedom and normalcy, in order to to maintain its power and stability. The subsequent dimension’s study finds that the government utilized its power for the management of the pandemic to create discourses that would suppress and push assemblies and criticisms against the government out of the normal sphere. The contents of the discourses were ones that would establish knowledge and truths about the situation and pandemic management that align with the government's agenda, regardless of being in line with other existing data and contextual relevance. Furthermore, the government's exercise of power also resulted in the establishment of surveillance mechanism against the exercise of freedom of assembly and freedom of expression, which would cause chilling effect among citizens in exercising such freedoms. Nevertheless, due to the widespread political awareness and participation of political expressions on the internet, which resulted in accumulation of social capital and the ability to perform political mobilization, together with certain functioning checks-and-balances mechanism against such exercise of governmental power, the result was that the power could not exert total control on citizens, allowing widespread resistance against such power.