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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.
Keywords: South Thailand, Southeast Asian Islam, ethno-religious conflicts, Islamic activism, Jihad.
The present conflict in Thailand's far south continues to attract much attention from academics and analysts. While applauding approaches framing aspects of this conflict in the wider context of Thai society that is facing a range of crises, many remain concerned with establishing local connections to global jihadi movements.1 Such an approach resembles the rounding up of the "usual suspects" ordered by inspector Louis Renault in the closing scene of the 1942 classic movie Casablanca. Anthony Johns likens this to studies of Southeast Asian Islam where the interrogation of the usual suspects has become a routine exercise. While there may be ways to make people talk, there are many more questions to ask and interrogators are capable of putting into suspects' mouths what they want them to say. In short, there is the need to "discover ways and means of moving beyond what has become habitual, of finding new questions to ask and more suspects to round up".2
This article sets out to achieve a number of goals in the discussion on the role of religion in Thailand's southern conflict since 2004. Before asking...