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Insurgency redux: Writings on Thailand's ongoing southern war

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Tearing apart the land: Islam and legitimacy in southern Thailand. By McCargoDuncan. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2008. Pp. 189. Map, Plates, Notes, Bibliography, Index.

Confronting ghosts: Thailand's shapeless southern insurgency. By LiowJoseph Chinyong and PathanDon. Lowy Institute Paper 30, Double Bay, NSW: Lowy Institute for International Policy, 2010. Pp. 114. Notes, Bibliography.

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 January 2011

Extract

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.

Type
Review Article
Copyright
Copyright © The National University of Singapore 2011

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