Mapping National Anxieties: Thailand's Southern Conflict.

• Author: Smith, Anthony
• Position: 'Modern Muslim Identities: Negotiating Religion and Ethnicity in Malaysia' by Gerhard Hoffstaedter - Book review

MAPPING NATIONAL ANXIETIES: Thailand's Southern Conflict

Author: Duncan McCargo

Published by: Nordic Institute of Asian Studies, Copenhagen, 2012, 213pp, 50 [pounds sterling] (hb), 16.99 [pounds sterling] (pb).

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

MODERN MUSLIM IDENTITIES: Negotiating Religion and Ethicity in Malaysia

Author: Gerhard Hoffstaedter

Published by: Nordic Institute of Asian Studies, Copenhagen, 2011, 304pp, 50 [pounds sterling] (hb), 18.99 [pounds sterling] (pb).

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

The Nordic Institute of Asian Studies has published two volumes that deal with identity politics in the Malay-speaking world: namely the relationship between the Thai authorities and ethnic Malays in the 'Patani' region (the three Muslim majority provinces of Narathiwat, Pattani and Yala in southern Thailand); and how Malays in modern Malaysia navigate the religious identity question.

Southern Thailand, as McCargo explains, appeared to reach the zenith of its crisis in 2004. That year there was a series of violent incidents when largely unarmed youths confronted security posts and a massacre occurred in the Kru-Ze Mosque in April, and 78 demonstrators died (mostly from suffocation in security vehicles) at Tak Bai in October. But McCargo notes signs of violence in the region from the early 2000s--essentially the re-emergence of separatist pressures from several decades earlier--which the Thai authorities had chosen to dismiss as being based on criminality rather than politically-motivated. Since 2004 more than 4600 deaths have resulted from this conflict.

McCargo locates the southern Thailand conflict in the context of an assertion of Patani Malay desire for cultural and political autonomy, even if these demands are diffuse and the identity of perpetrators of violence more often than not opaque, rather than the rise of extremist Islam (as some earlier commentators have suggested). McCargo notes that any discussion of autonomy in Thailand is a major challenge to that country's narrative of a homogenous country under the benevolent rule of a monarchy that saved Thailand from colonisation, and is immediately conflated in the Thai language with separatism (rendered in Thai as 'tearing apart the land'; also the title of McCargo's 2008 book published by Cornell University, which is a highly recommended companion text to the one under review).

Mapping National Anxieties challenges a number of popular impressions of Thailand. McCargo overturns the idea that Thailand is...