When to Strike a Buffalo: The Dystopia of Health Driven Governance in Thailand

• In Event: The Other Side of Hope

Abstract

This paper examines the Thai military junta’s adoption of a WHO notion of health-driven governance since 2006. Making good health outcomes consubstantial with good governance was intended to “cleanse politics” and to revitalize a nation that - according to the military junta - carried the scars of an ethos of reckless consumerism. In the junta’s conceptualization, previous democratic administrations’ supporters lacked “mental immunity” to the call of consumerism, and thus the task of governance fell upon individuals of high moral standing who could “quarantine” economic interests and party politics from moral rule. To this end, in 2007, the military drafted a new constitution that fused the WHO’s idea of health as a socially-determined condition along with royalist claims that illness and suffering result from greed. But such utopic visions of “clean” governance unleashed a dystopic fundamentalism that foreclosed the possibility of politics as a sphere of social contestation.
Here, I question what is at stake in expressing political conflict through the idioms of “mental immunity,” contagion and quarantine. Additionally, I rethink the presumed translatability of WHO approaches to promote well-being and explore the unintended consequences of their global export. Based on fieldwork amongst Thai health experts, I propose that the turn to “mental immunity” and to global experts for political legitimacy should be considered in relation to shifting relations of power between the Thai ancien regime and a public increasingly aware of its political power.

Author

• Daena Aki Funahashi, Aarhus University