Insurgency redux: Writings on Thailand's ongoing southern war

Abstract

Comprehending the origins, dynamics and solutions to the ongoing violence in southern Thailand's Muslim majority border provinces has proved to be a challenge, not only to successive Thai governments and security forces but also to scholars and other investigators. Insurgent-instigated attacks, now paralleled by and intertwined with more opportunistic forms of violence, have afflicted the border region for nearly seven years (as of late 2010), with no sign of ultimate abatement, despite a considerable investment of resources by the Thai state. Arguably under-reported by the world media, this conflict has nonetheless attracted its fair share of parachute journalism and superficial reportage by instant-experts, single-issue rights advocates, wide-eyed postgraduate researchers and assorted cranks. Many of them have been ensnared by local ‘fixers’ with their own agendas. Despite some notable exceptions, much academic research effort in the region itself has been hit-and-run. As Duncan McCargo emphasises: ‘this is a messy, awkward, in-your-face conflict’ (p. 188) — as such it demands a comparable ‘in-your-face’ and sustained field-based research effort, which, as he rightly notes, has been sadly lacking.