The southern Thai insurgency : of colonial cancers and (Mis)diagnosis.

Abstract

The conflict in southern Thailand has been in existence since the 18th century. However, nervous jitter has increased in theinternational community post-911 over the possibility of extremists hijacking the cause in what is essentially a localised conflict because of how expansive the problem could be for the Southeast Asian region, which has a substantial Muslim population that could be ripe for the plucking for the international jihad movement. A large part of the problem lies in colonial attitudes towards identity in south Thailand, which is explained by David Kilcullen's The Accidental Guerrilla, which observes that in reality, religious radicals or jihadists form only a small elusive minority in any society, but the local guerrillas they exploit fight because they perceive external presence and globalised cultures as a corrosive to local identity. While many believe that religion composed a large part of what forms the southern Thai identity, this paper maintains that the local identity of southern Thais is firstly Melayu, of which Islam forms a component of, but does not engulf the entire being of the southern Thai. The dissertation applies Kilcullen's theory in The Accidental Guerilla in the local southern Thai context. Rather than argue an al- Qaeda (or its networks') infection of the southern Thai conflict, this thesis will manipulate and adapt the Kilcullen model, identifying colonial Siam and thereafter the Thai state as the virus causing the infection, but that the effect of the colonial virus bears greater resemblance to one causing a cancer. In fact, the cancer analogy has been used on a number of occasions describing the metastasis of global terrorism.