Book Condition: Very Good, text clear and clean, no markings, minimal shelfwear. appaesr unread. Includes bibliographical references and index. Hardly a day goes by without a shootout or a bomb attack in Thailand’s volatile south, where a long-simmering Malay-Muslim insurgency flared anew in January 2004. The problem of the restive south is hardly new, but during the premiership of Prem Tinsulanonda from 1980-88, a kind of "social contract" was brokered in the area, and "the security forces were not too abusive, local Muslim leaders could report to a central agency and in exchange violence was kept to manageable levels," Mr. McCargo argues. Then came the meteoric rise of Mr. Thaksin, who set about changing established security structures in the south. By 2003, the number of extrajudicial disappearances had increased dramatically, provoking a strong and hostile reaction from the local, Malay-Muslim population. The current military-installed government, headed by former army commander General Surayud Chulanont, pledged on taking power to adopt a new, more peaceful approach to the southern insurgency. Even so, the violence is continuing, perhaps because the situation already is beyond redemption, but maybe also because the central authorities have not yet started to effectively implement the softer policy. Whatever the case, this book is a valuable contribution to a better understanding of the problems in the three southern provinces of Pattani, Yala and Narathiwat—which once formed an independent sultanate called Patani. It had, and still has, a separate identity, of which religion is only one of many aspects. Significantly, there is no insurgency in the fourth southern Muslim-majority Thai province, Satun. Before coming under Thai sovereignty via the Anglo-Siamese Treaty of 1909, Satun was part of the Malay sultanate of Kedah, which remained under British rule and now is part of independent Malaysia. Although currently 80% Muslim, Satun never had the same national identity and, therefore, has become more successfully integrated into Thailand. Today, Thai is spoken in Satun, not the Malay dialects prominent in the other three southern provinces. Rethinking Thailand’s Southern Violence analyzes the origin of the conflict between the Thai center and the Malay-Muslim south in its historical as well as contemporary context, dismissing the notion that it is a product of international Islamic terrorism, or part of some global network of Islamic groups, as some other analysts have claimed. Consisting of seven essays by as many different authors, with an introduction and a postscript by the editor, Mr. McCargo, this material was first published in the March 2006 issue of Critical Asian Studies, and have been only slightly updated. Chaiwat Satha-Anand, an associate professor of political science at Bangkok’s Thammasat University, deals with the origins of the insurgency, and the degree of collective amnesia about what really happened when, in the late 1940s, communal violence claimed several hundred lives in the south. The analyses presented by the various authors are brilliant and should help remove many of the misunderstandings surrounding the Malay-Muslim insurgency in Thailand’s deep south.
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