Religion and Conflict in Southern Thailand: Beyond Rounding Up the Usual Suspects

This article takes clues from Mark Juergensmeyer's comparative study of religious violence and develops Imtiyaz Yusuf's proposal that the southern violence represents a conflict between the competing exclusive ethno-religious worldviews of Thai satsanaa and Malay agama. It moves beyond the routine rounding up and interrogation of the "usual suspects" in two ways: first, by including a range of uncivil elements of Thai Buddhism, and second, by examining often ill-conceived Thai interference in Islamic matters. The article also poses questions about the "usual suspects", beginning with a description of Islamic movements which contribute to an increasingly divided Islamic community less able to prevent and limit Islamic violence. The paper investigates the Islamic credentials of the insurgency and distinguishes between the presence of jihadi rhetoric with a developed jihadi rationale, a recent development in southern Thailand. The article argues for the localization of the global, a process which features local actors and agents that are informed by parochial and highly ethnocized version of Islam that is countering occasionally uncivil Buddhist opponents, as an approach for studying violence in the Thai south.