On September 28, 2014, Thailand's Prime Minister Prayut Chan-o-cha vowed to an army camp based in southern Thailand that the violence in the south would end within a year. Two days later, he recanted.Footnote 18 The prime minister's reversal underscores the Thai government's current struggles with the south as well as the conflict's continued political importance.
The violence in Thailand's three southernmost provinces has proved quite costly to the last five Thai prime ministers. Since 2001, it has destabilized the southernmost region and has undone the political capital of several administrations. It is in this vein that a study of the southern conflict requires a southern Thailand regional and national analysis.
In Mapping National Anxieties, Duncan McCargo does this and more. In this extension of his highly praised monograph Tearing Apart the Land,Footnote 19 McCargo reviews the intricate ways religious actors, journalists, and the notion of citizenship impact the conflict. This is the most detailed analysis of Thailand's southern conflict to date. What sets McCargo's work apart from previous analyses of the southern conflict is his attention to both Islamic and Buddhist influences and their local, regional, and national significance.
The book contains eight chapters and two appendices. The first chapter introduces the book and its subsequent sections. McCargo explains that the chapters do not explore security aspects of the insurgency, but rather, “they examine the interlocking questions of religion, politics, reconciliation, identity, and alternative futures that help explain Thailand's local and national anxieties” (p. 13).
The second chapter, “Buddhist Fears,” focuses on the role of Buddhist actors and is the most detailed and comprehensive chapter in the book. Setting aside the simplistic assumptions of Buddhism as a peaceful religion (p. 17), McCargo outlines critical categories in which Buddhists become embroiled in the conflict. The chapter discusses the fears and frustrations of southern Buddhist monks; the arming of Buddhist militias such as the Or Ror Bor, Chor Ror Bor, and Ruam Thai; and the unraveling of Buddhists’ tolerance toward their Muslim neighbors. McCargo notes that some Buddhists are in fear of ethnic cleansing and that “[h]uge numbers of local Buddhists had bought guns” (p. 38). Although many Buddhists feel ignored by and under threat from an aggressive Muslim majority, McCargo supplies alternative Buddhist voices to show that “not all Buddhists shared the dark, even apocalyptic views of the interviewees cited here” (p. 41). While some scholars consider Buddhism a civil religion in Thailand, McCargo presents key Buddhist elements that have become “particularistic, more national and markedly less civil” (p. 46).
In the third chapter, “Managing Islam,” McCargo continues his examination of religion. Following the lead of Thai historian Auesrivongse, who argues that Thai Buddhist monks “are effectively kharatchakan, government officials” (p. 49), McCargo traces the ways that Malay Muslims resist a government that is both Buddhist and Bangkok-centric. This resistance has crippled governmental attempts to garner grassroots support to combat the ensuing conflict. One of the more prominent examples of the Bangkok-centric methods is the state-instantiated role of the Chularajamontri, who is labeled the spiritual leader of Thai Muslims. There are roughly five million Muslims in Thailand, with the vast majority residing in the south.Footnote 20 While the national Islamic council selects the imam for the position of Chularajamontri, a seemingly democratic process, nearly every imam chosen has come from central Thailand. Malay Muslims viewed the Chularajamontri with suspicion, and southern Islamic councils like the Pattani Islamic Council (formed in 1999) became widely viewed as a site of resistance against the state (p. 51). It is in the heart of the Islamic political resistance that McCargo focuses the bulk of the chapter. He examines the Pattani Islamic Council's elections in November 2005 and locates deep and problematic intersections between regional and national interests.
Chapters 4, “National Reconciliation,” and 5, “Communicating Conflict,” cover the ways in which the national infrastructure has hindered reconciliation attempts. McCargo provides a detailed overview of the National Reconciliation Committee (NRC), which Prime Minister Thaksin designed as a concession to his critics and which was meant to “understand, access, and develop” the south (p. 69). Although the NRC ultimately failed to win public support and political approval, its formation, exercises, and reception provide important insights into the national political web surrounding the southern conflict.
Ordinarily the national media illuminates societal problems for the general populace, but in the case of the southern conflict it failed to do so. The Thai newspapers had no specific desk tasked with the southern conflict to coordinate the complex web of economic, political, and religious networks. Most provincial news was covered by local stringers, who “were very close to sources of information” (p. 99). The lack of southern representation in Thai news led many southern Thais to believe that the media was acting on behalf of the Thai state (p. 93). This became alarmingly apparent in the wake of two marines being kept hostage in the Narathiwat village of Tanyonglimo. Local Malay Muslims denied Thai journalists access to their village and instead requested that foreign journalists cover the incident (p. 92). McCargo argues that “the root of these problems was a failure to create a culture of critical reflexive journalism” (p. 97) and links this failure to reasons for southern villagers’ suspicions of the Thai media and to the creation of alternative sources like the Issara News Centre.
According to McCargo, the heart of the southern violence is about “contrasting views of identity and citizenship” (p. 113). It is in this way that he approaches chapters 6, “Contested Citizenship,” and 7, “Autonomous Futures.” Throughout the two chapters, McCargo explores the offered solutions to the southern conflict and how they may redress the problem of fitting Malay Muslim identity into Thainess (khwampenthai). The last chapter, “Twin Fires,” reflects upon the more recent conflicts in Bangkok and their parallels to the problem in the deep south.
With the current military rule in Bangkok and the ongoing violence in the south, readers will find Mapping National Anxieties a necessary supplement to recent works on Thai politics such as Andrew McGregor Marshall's A Kingdom in Crisis: Thailand's Struggle for Democracy in the Twenty-First Century (London: Zed Books, 2014) and Pavin Chachavalpongpun's edited volume, Good Coup Gone Bad: Thailand's Political Development Since Thaksin's Downfall (Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 2014).
Overall, this book provides invaluable material to sociologists, anthropologists, political scientists, and religious studies scholars who are interested in contemporary Thailand. McCargo's rich ethnography coupled with trenchant political analysis makes the book indispensable. This value is only furthered in the appendices. The second appendix provides an important source on McCargo's previous publications. The first appendix is an essay by Phrae Sirisakdamkoeng, “Perspectives of Thai Citizens in Virtual Communities on the Violence in the Southernmost Provinces.” Phrae Sirisakdamkoeng finds little tolerance for Muslims among the online Buddhist forums and reaches similar conclusions to McCargo (p. 161). This book reinforces the argument that the exclusivity of Thainess has fostered many of the problems in the history of southern Thailand. Hopefully, ruminations on this systemic problem will contribute to a better future for southern Thailand and its people.
