THAILAND'S PROTEST MOVEMENT (2020–2021): AN OPERATIONAL ANATOMY OF A LEADERLESS MOBILIZATION CONFRONTING A HYBRID MILITARY-MONARCHICAL REGIME

The Thai regime that emerged from the 2014 coup rests on an institutional architecture designed to prevent democratic alternation in power. The 2017 Constitution, drafted under the junta, combines an elected House of Representatives with a 250-member Senate, approximately 200 of whose members are appointed by the military, with the two chambers jointly electing the prime minister. This arrangement enabled General Prayut Chan-o-cha, who led the 2014 coup, to remain in power after the 2019 election, fuelling among younger generations a sense of structural democratic deadlock.

The spark came from the dissolution, in February 2020, of the Future Forward Party (FFP), a reformist party that had won strong support among young voters in the 2019 election, and the ten-year political ban imposed on its leader Thanathorn Juangroongruangkit. This ruling by the Constitutional Court, based on an unlawful loan of 191.2 million baht found to be in breach of political-party financing laws, triggered spontaneous protests on university campuses, abruptly halted by the COVID-19 pandemic in the spring of 2020.

The movement resumed on a much larger scale that summer, catalysed by the government's political violence embodied by the forced disappearance, in June 2020, of exiled activist Wanchalerm Satsaksit, and by mounting economic and social anger intensified by the public-health crisis, which exposed generational inequalities and the contrast between the austerity imposed on the population and the lifestyle of King Vajiralongkorn, then residing in Germany.

This dual sequence, institutional deadlock followed by visible repression, laid the foundations from 2020 onward for a protest movement that would target not just the government, but the very architecture of the regime.

Although initial demands had begun to emerge earlier in the year, the movement coalesced, from August 2020 onward, around three core demands: the resignation of the Prayut government, the adoption of a new constitution drafted by a representative assembly, and reform of both the monarchy and the lèse-majesté law (Section 112 of the Criminal Code), which provides for prison sentences of up to fifteen years for criticism of the monarch.

On 10 August 2020, at Thammasat University, ten specific demands concerning the royal institution were made public: transparency over the King's wealth, an end to direct royal control over certain military units, and the taxation of Crown assets, breaking what had until then been regarded as an absolute taboo.

This gradual radicalization of the movement's demands had an ambivalent effect: it gave the movement its historic distinctiveness and immense symbolic power, but it also hardened the confrontation by making negotiations with the establishment virtually impossible.

By breaking this taboo, the protesters changed the nature of the conflict: it was no longer simply a matter of challenging a government, but the very architecture of power, monarchy included. This shift made de-escalation more difficult for both sides.

The movement's effectiveness rested first on its ability to lower substantially the cost of participating in collective action. In an authoritarian setting, where joining a structured organization can quickly expose individuals to surveillance, activists favoured flexible and readily reproducible forms of engagement: flash mobs, hashtags, themed gatherings, and shared cultural references allowed people to take part without joining a hierarchical organization. This low barrier to entry facilitated rapid, large-scale mobilization, particularly among university and secondary-school students. Research by ARTICLE 19 and ISEAS show that social media allowed rallies to be organized at very short notice, meeting points to be changed in response to security constraints, and protests to be coordinated simultaneously across universities, secondary schools, and provincial areas.

This lightweight organizational architecture was accompanied by remarkable tactical adaptability. When demonstrations were banned, public-transport stations closed, organizers arrested, or attempts made to block Free Youth's digital channels, the movement systematically adjusted its methods. Rallies could be relocated, broken into smaller gatherings, or rescheduled within hours, while new digital tools took over whenever a network became harder to access. This flexibility was especially evident in October 2020, when the tightened state of emergency failed to prevent flash mobs from taking place almost daily across Bangkok.

The movement's symbolic dimension was another key source of its effectiveness. Its many references to popular culture, from the three-finger salute drawn from Hunger Games to costumes inspired by Harry Potter and the extensive use of social-media visual codes, served several strategic purposes: reducing fear by making engagement feel less daunting, making messages immediately intelligible to a generation immersed in digital culture, facilitating international circulation, and increasing virality online.

This dynamic was strengthened by the gradual expansion of the protest coalition. Initially centred on the Free Youth group, the movement came to encompass complementary actors: Free People extended mobilization beyond the student community, secondary-school studentsbecame full-fledged participants, LGBTQ+ networks and artistic and cultural collectives introduced new forms of action, while K-pop fan communities placed their expertise in crowdfunding and content amplification at the movement's disposal. Organizations such as iLaw and Thai Lawyers for Human Rights provided essential legal expertise.

Repression itself sometimes produced the opposite of the effect intended by the authorities. The police violence of 16 October 2020 illustrates this boomerang effect: the use of water cannons against unarmed protesters prompted widespread public outrage and strengthened solidarity networks. Reuters reported that K-pop fan communities turned their anger into fundraising campaigns, purchases of protective equipment, and financial support for legal assistance to prosecuted protesters. Amnesty International and ARTICLE 19 concluded that several police interventions involved excessive or unlawful use of force. Although repression increased the risks faced by protesters, it also helped, at several points, to broaden the social support the movement enjoyed.

Despite a largely closed institutional environment, the protests succeeded in exploiting certain openings in the political system. The campaign launched by iLaw for constitutional reform, backed by more than 100,000 signatures, compelled Parliament to place the issue on its agenda. More broadly, the protests triggered an unprecedented national debate over the legitimacy of the 2017 Constitution and the functioning of Thai institutions.

By the end of 2021, several objectives could be regarded as partially achieved. The movement first succeeded in stripping the monarchy debate of some of its sacrosanct status, by bringing detailed reform proposals on a previously taboo subject into the public sphere, even though criticism of the monarchy has since 2023 repeatedly served as grounds for dissolving progressive parties, as with the dissolution of the Move Forward Party on 7 August 2024. It also succeeded in **building mass opposition to the government during the summer and autumn of 2020,**while bringing forth a new generation of activists whose networks, organizational practices, digital skills, and litigation capacity largely survived the decline of street protests.

This interim assessment illustrates the paradox already identified: real tactical effectiveness, which alone is not enough to make a power holding a coercive monopoly yield, as the State's response shows.

In response to the mobilization, the state deployed a range of measures characteristic of a hybrid regime, preserving formal democratic institutions while using legal, judicial, and coercive instruments to neutralize the opposition. These measures included extensive use of the public-health emergency decree to ban gatherings, arbitrary arrests and repeated pretrial detention of the same activists, military information-warfare units tasked with discrediting organizers, online censorship, the mobilization of pro-government royalist groups, and, above all, a growing use of Section 112 on lèse-majesté from late 2020 onward, after Prime Minister Prayut announced that "all laws" would henceforth be enforced against protesters.

This repression also saw a physical escalation, with water cannons, tear gas, and rubber bullets used near Parliament in November 2020, followed by the death of a protester in October 2021, struck by live ammunition.

Legally, the Constitutional Court's decision of 10 November 2021 marked a turning point, ruling that demands for monarchical reform amounted to an attempt to overthrow the regime, in a ruling widely described as a "judicial coup."