I am far from an expert on the situation in southern Thailand. All the more reason for me to read Duncan McCargo’s edited volume on Rethinking Thailand’s Southern Violence. This is an exceptionally useful account of the recent violence in the South and a provocative analysis of its causes and origins. As the cover indicates, Thaksin’s heavy handed management attracts a good deal of attention and some of the statistical evidence about the upsurge in violence under Thaksin’s watch is compelling. I would be very interested to hear the views of others who have read the book. New Mandala has been rather light on in its coverage of Thailand’s southern tragedy, and it would be nice to start to redress the imbalance.
12 responses so far ↓
1 david w // Apr 17, 2007 at 5:10 am
In general I found it quite informative and productive to think with. I found McCargo’s introduction and conclusion measured but informative in framing issues. Not being a political scientist, I appreciated but wasn’t overwhelmed by McCargo and Ukrist’s chapters on the national / regional political dimensions of the violence. I must confess I found Satha-Anand’s essay a bit dissapointing in the limited reach and contextualization of his claims; guess I was just hoping for more voices of how different people viewed the monument rather than the more formalist analysis presented. Tan-Mullins’ piece was so brief and suggestive it couldn’t help but dissapoint any reader who wants to know more about how fear, gossip and confusion work in the context of the southern violence. I enjoyed the two essays by Jitpiromsi & Sobhonvasu and Suggunasil the most, probably because they provided challenging and new substantive material and analytic perspectives, yet were restrained in their claims.
After finishing the volume, I was struck about how little academic work exists on the structure and dynamics of local social and religious authority in the deep South. What does the general field of authoritative social and religious actors look like, what dynamics shape how these actors interact with each other and other more official voices of authority (like bureaucrats, politicians, the military and the palace), and even more importantly how exactly has this total local landscape of legitimacy been transformed under the pressure of the insurgency? I was also struck how despite at least two decades of global scholarship on political Islam and Islamism, there is next to no scholarship about how these cultural movement (and transnational Islamic devotional movements more generally) have played out, if at all, in Thai society and / or the South. Strange.
Would be interested in knowing about any work others know of that helps elucidate these issues. Also, for those who aren’t aware of it, there is a useful blog with weekly reflections on the news from the South (and a pdf file of English language reporting, plus numerous general links) at: pattanijg.typepad.com
2 Sawarin // Apr 17, 2007 at 8:07 am
If I were academics working on the South, I would devote all my attention studying ‘religious nationalism’.
3 patiwat // Apr 17, 2007 at 8:09 am
Was the upsurge in violence under Sonthi’s soft handed management approach not compelling as well?
4 nganadeeleg // Apr 17, 2007 at 10:09 am
Thaksin may have inflamed the situation, but it’s gone way beyond that now.
Patiwat: The soft handed approach was never going to be a quick fix, and in any case it appears to not have been followed up on the ground as evidenced by the latest killings of muslim youths in Pattani & Yala.
If those incidents are not properly investigated and appropriate punishment delivered, then Surayud/Sonthi/Saprang (Prem?) are no better then Thaksin.
Bangkok Pundit’s site is the place to follow the southern insurgency: http://bangkokpundit.blogspot.com/
5 Srithanonchai // Apr 17, 2007 at 6:56 pm
The situation in the South started to get worse at the end of 2001/beginning of 2002. Quite some recruitment and training must have preceded that initial upsurge, certainly also preceding Thaksin becoming prime minister. However, he had certainly made matters worse by his approach.
As far as I can see, Surayud had expressed his sorrow concerning the lady killed and burned by the insurgents. Please, correct me, but I cannot recall a similar statement regarding the killings of Muslim youth in Pattani and Yala. Have the perpretrators been arrested, and are they under investigation? All I heard were execuses of the kind, “They acted in self-defense.” Is this the emphasis on justice Surayud had announced as the cornerstone of his policy?
6 Bangkok Pundit // Apr 18, 2007 at 5:58 am
Nganadeeleg: Thanks for your nice comments.
I started to post a comment here, but it got to big and without a preview window, I decided to post it over at my blog.
http://bangkokpundit.blogspot.com/2007/04/rethinking-thailand-southern-violence.html
7 Sawarin // Apr 18, 2007 at 8:26 am
Finally, a number of people are heading towards the right direction. I’d like to add a few things briefly.
: Researchers need to go down to the ground. Go to the pondok (ponoh) religious schools. Access would be extremely difficult around this time (I visited some at peace time). The ones you should be studying normally don’t let you in. Study the role of ‘toh kru’ and remember education is a process of ’socialization’.
: I fear that this may be ‘Nationalism’ of most complicated kind. It is ‘re-li-gi-o-us nationalism’. Psychologists (to study cause of ideology/mind), anthropologists (to study ethno-symbolism), and religion comparativists need to get involved. Historians and political sociologists have to move beond an understanding which suggests the ‘nation’ is an imaginary construct (or isn’t real). Islam transcends modernity. It provides a strong base to a concept of nation without geography and doesn’t necessarily require printed materials to spread Nationalist idea (the fact that something like kitab jawi exists and they are still teaching it has some implication to the idea of ethno-religious homeland?)
Best of luck to everyone researching the South.
8 Srithanonchai // Apr 18, 2007 at 6:51 pm
# 7: A “concept of nation without geography” is also merely a concept, i.e. an imagination. That does not mean that it has not very real behavioral consequences, on the opposite. In Marokko, the state is worried, because the concept of nation propagated by Islamist forces is not the country of Marocco, but rather the Muslim-Arab Nation. In the case of Southern Thailand, however, the geographical focus seems to be rather clear, although some religous references might certainly go beyond the three provinces. It is important to note, as you do, that the previous ethnic nationalism seem to have been replaced by groups that are mlilitantly Islamistic.
# 1: Regarding your interest concerning the factor of “fear”, at the cent AAS conference in Boston, Marc Askew presented a paper antitled “Landscapes of Fear, Horizons of Trust: Dealing With Danger in Thailand’s Insurgent South.” Maybe, we will see this in print at some later point of time. The author of this paper has just started his second round of field data collection in Pattani. Duncan McCargo had also done many months of field work in Pattani, mainly on political aspects, including the Islamic Council elections. He is now writing up his book. A number of PhD students has also taken up the South as an object of study. But research is dangerous. One of them, collecting data in Narathiwat, told me, “I would like to collect some more data in rural areas, but this is life-threatening.”
So, some more publications will certainly see the light, sooner or later.
9 Sawarin // Apr 18, 2007 at 7:47 pm
My commentary in 7 is for the researchers BP cited in his link.
Many people are still confused and applied the terms ’state’ and ‘nation’ interchangeably. The meaning of ‘nation’ goes beyond state and there are variations on the way in which it has come to be received by its people.
Anthony D Smith is the one to read for ethno-religious nationalism (and on the entire history of nation/nationalism debate really). John Sidel has a good paper on nationalism in Indonesia last year (it dealt with nationalism as fear/anxiety). John Breuilly is engaging in the role of education/intelligentsia in nationalism (that’s what he told me when I met him a year ago anyway).
There must be a paradigm shift in the study of the South. Time is running out.
10 david w // Apr 19, 2007 at 5:06 am
Srithanonchai: Thanks for the suggestions of works to be on the lookout for. I have a copy of Duncan’s recent AAS paper, which was informative as it was filled with on the ground recent empirical details I haven’t previously heard about. Can you provide the names of the PhD students so locating their future work will be easier?
My greatest worry given the need for more on the ground information & documentation AND a paradigm shift in conceptualization and analysis is that because the violence is so severe and unrelenting we are likely to always be looking at events in the rear view mirror of a rapidly accelerating car. All scholarly work is inevitably retrospective, especially regarding contemporary events. But given the dilemma that access to informants is so much harder now than in the past and access to fieldsites is so much more restricted and fragmented than was possible in the past, it is hard to see how scholars can rethink issues in the South in a broadly informed and comprehensive manner. Which makes whatever work does emerge even more valuable, of course.
11 Srithanonchai // Apr 19, 2007 at 3:33 pm
DW: One of these PhD students is Sascha Helbardt from the University of Passau, Germany. A few weeks ago, he finished his first four months of initial field orientation. Now, he is back in Germany to try to get funding for a longer stay. The quote above is from him.
Of course, you are quite right in your remarks about the (im)possibility of doing substantial research in the South. Doing research on a situation without being able directly to analyze the major actors leaves you with a black box and doing research on the effects this black box has, or on factors that supposedly contribute to the shape of the box, rather than with opening this box and look what’s inside.
There is a Thai PhD student at the University of Muenster, Germany, also working on the South. But it seems that he could not go down to the field, probably because of security concerns. I don’t know his name. There should be one or two more people doing work there, but I have no concrete information about them.
12 New Mandala » Sticking to the southern script // May 14, 2007 at 3:58 pm
[...] where cultural differences were more profound. In my question I referred to the argument put by McCargo that key dimensions of the southern conflict could be understand in terms of the conflict between [...]
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