Conclusion

This concluding chapter studies the politics of the current military junta from the vantage point of the southern Thai counterinsurgency. Imperial practices of policing, it argues, are now applied on a national scale. The continuities of the imperial formation are key to understanding how the current military regime operates. For one, the military centrally relies on counterinsurgency techniques. In this reading, the counterinsurgency campaign in the South has helped to revive important practices and institutions of policing that seemed to have vanished after the Cold War, and, as in other imperial laboratories — European colonies that served as sites for experimenting with modern practices of government — it has helped to develop innovations that the junta now deploys to govern the country. What is more, the current military regime puts into play the axes of difference that undergird the Thai imperial formation, thus fortifying its structure to stabilize military rule.

Policing History

This chapter examines a handbook produced for military officers stationed in the South, relating some of its central notions to an imperial construction of history in the modern Thai state formation that simultaneously erases the state's conquest of the Islamic sultanate while marking Patani as its Muslim feminized Other. The epistemological grounds on which the handbook rests are central to the whole military project of building understanding. In this narrative, Patani emerges as an ancient Buddhist land incorporated into Siam by mere administrative reform, Siam's crushing of the legal and political power of the former Islamic sultanate is elided, and the Patani population is characterized as adhering to a private Muslim culture. Based on this narrative, the handbook constructs state officers as paternal protectors of the southern population. The military aligning itself with objectivity is especially noteworthy in a conflict region where claims to knowledge — about history, in particular — are among the stated reasons for violence, and in a country where the government restricts open discussions about Patani's history.

Checkpoints

This chapter discusses how checkpoints were the most obvious signs of the militarization of southern Thailand. In general terms, the installation of road blocks from the beginning of the conflict has marked Patani as a different country within Thailand. More specifically, in day-to-day encounters between soldiers and those crossing, racialized ideas have emerged as a key marker to differentiate peaceful from dangerous subjects. The chapter outlines how the racialization of the southern population has historically extended itself to include certain ideas of dress and language, and it details how these differentiations are drawn in contemporary checkpoint interactions. It also shows the gendering of ideas of the Malay khaek, which entails attributing Orientalized and often sexualized beauty to young local girls.

The New Path to Peace

This chapter explores how the differences seen in young Muslim men is produced in the drug rehabilitation camp Yalannanbaru and discusses how the disciplinary methods deployed by military trainers derive from the Buddhist tradition. It looks at the different exercises of the camp's program to show how the category of religion is enlisted to serve the disciplined incorporation of potentially unruly Malay subjects. The modern concept of religion is not only central to the Yalannanbaru report but also key to understanding how power at the camp operates within the larger structural context of Thailand's imperial formation. Ultimately, the Yalannanbaru training exhibits the military's paternalistic approach; counterinsurgents, many of whom are Buddhist, teach young Muslim men the supposedly correct practice of Islam. While the Yalannanbaru training mobilizes a normative category of Muslim religion, it also implicitly relies on practices and norms central to the Theravada Buddhist tradition.

Introduction

This introductory chapter provides an overview of how counterinsurgency practices contribute to producing Thailand as an imperial formation: a modern state formation with roots in the premodern Buddhist empire of Siam that secures its survival by constructing the southern Muslim population as essentially and hierarchically different. Reinforcing notions of the racialized, religious, and gendered Otherness of Patani, counterinsurgency thus fuels the very conflict it has been designed to resolve. From this perspective, it is possible to understand the marginalization of the southern conflict in official discourse, the denials of obvious connections between the insurgency and the August 2016 bombings, and the culturalization of a deeply political conflict as integral parts of imperial policing practices. The counterinsurgency motto “Understanding, Reaching Out, Development” has guided military operations in the southern region under various governments and juntas, and it encapsulates how counterinsurgency discourse is predicated on and produces the essentialized differences of the southern population. Most conspicuously, the motto positions Thai military as the paternal caretaker of the South and relocates the causes of insurgent violence in the differences of the southern population.

Guarding the Daughter

This chapter traces constructions of gendered and sexualized difference in the Thai imperial formation by examining the more intimate matters of the conflict. These include discourses regarding rape and romantic relationships, the establishment of female paramilitary units to police Patani women, and military support for women's groups in the South. The focus of concern for the Thai military is not ultimately the daughter but the respectability of the family. The seduction of the daughter risks sullying the image of the imperial family and putting into question the father's masculine ability to protect; worse, the sexualized intrusion threatens the body politic because the undesired union might yield unwanted offspring. The “mission of 'guarding our daughter'” consequently aims at policing her sexuality in order to restore both the paternal authority of the Thai state over the southern provinces and the respectful order that regulates the rightful reproduction of the imperial formation.