Ponkok were described as the “core” “center” and “heart” of the Malay-Mus;im community. The absence of mass Muslim organizations such as the Indonesian NU and Muhammadiyah is striking.

Pondok range from quite modern, inter-net savy “schools” that teach at least 50% secular subjects to very traditional schools that teach only religius subjects and rely heavily on Jawi text.

The pattern of attacks on institutions and persons, Buddhist monks, Thai Gov schools by Muslims, and Pondok, Mosques and Imams by Buddhists is typical of religious violence throughout the world.

Theoretical literature would lead to the hypothesis that separitist insurgency and communal violence are merging. This is a very dangerous sign.

The Thai authorities appear to be contemptuous of Muslim-Malays describing them as simple people not much interested in civilization. They focus development activities on subsistence agriculture, fish and poultry production and speak of “winning hearts and minds”

This combined with efforts to arm and train Thai-Buddhist paramilitaries do not bode well for the future.

I am familiar with trans-national jihadi movements and saw andheard almost nothing to indicate that these figure significantly in the conflict.

Of course, you are quite right in your remarks about the (im)possibility of doing substantial research in the South. Doing research on a situation without being able directly to analyze the major actors leaves you with a black box and doing research on the effects this black box has, or on factors that supposedly contribute to the shape of the box, rather than with opening this box and look what’s inside.

There is a Thai PhD student at the University of Muenster, Germany, also working on the South. But it seems that he could not go down to the field, probably because of security concerns. I don’t know his name. There should be one or two more people doing work there, but I have no concrete information about them.

My greatest worry given the need for more on the ground information & documentation AND a paradigm shift in conceptualization and analysis is that because the violence is so severe and unrelenting we are likely to always be looking at events in the rear view mirror of a rapidly accelerating car. All scholarly work is inevitably retrospective, especially regarding contemporary events. But given the dilemma that access to informants is so much harder now than in the past and access to fieldsites is so much more restricted and fragmented than was possible in the past, it is hard to see how scholars can rethink issues in the South in a broadly informed and comprehensive manner. Which makes whatever work does emerge even more valuable, of course.

Many people are still confused and applied the terms ’state’ and ‘nation’ interchangeably. The meaning of ‘nation’ goes beyond state and there are variations on the way in which it has come to be received by its people.

Anthony D Smith is the one to read for ethno-religious nationalism (and on the entire history of nation/nationalism debate really). John Sidel has a good paper on nationalism in Indonesia last year (it dealt with nationalism as fear/anxiety). John Breuilly is engaging in the role of education/intelligentsia in nationalism (that’s what he told me when I met him a year ago anyway).

There must be a paradigm shift in the study of the South. Time is running out.

# 1: Regarding your interest concerning the factor of “fear”, at the cent AAS conference in Boston, Marc Askew presented a paper antitled “Landscapes of Fear, Horizons of Trust: Dealing With Danger in Thailand’s Insurgent South.” Maybe, we will see this in print at some later point of time. The author of this paper has just started his second round of field data collection in Pattani. Duncan McCargo had also done many months of field work in Pattani, mainly on political aspects, including the Islamic Council elections. He is now writing up his book. A number of PhD students has also taken up the South as an object of study. But research is dangerous. One of them, collecting data in Narathiwat, told me, “I would like to collect some more data in rural areas, but this is life-threatening.”

So, some more publications will certainly see the light, sooner or later.

: Researchers need to go down to the ground. Go to the pondok (ponoh) religious schools. Access would be extremely difficult around this time (I visited some at peace time). The ones you should be studying normally don’t let you in. Study the role of ‘toh kru’ and remember education is a process of ’socialization’.

: I fear that this may be ‘Nationalism’ of most complicated kind. It is ‘re-li-gi-o-us nationalism’. Psychologists (to study cause of ideology/mind), anthropologists (to study ethno-symbolism), and religion comparativists need to get involved. Historians and political sociologists have to move beond an understanding which suggests the ‘nation’ is an imaginary construct (or isn’t real). Islam transcends modernity. It provides a strong base to a concept of nation without geography and doesn’t necessarily require printed materials to spread Nationalist idea (the fact that something like kitab jawi exists and they are still teaching it has some implication to the idea of ethno-religious homeland?)

Best of luck to everyone researching the South.

I started to post a comment here, but it got to big and without a preview window, I decided to post it over at my blog.

http://bangkokpundit.blogspot.com/2007/04/rethinking-thailand-southern-violence.html

As far as I can see, Surayud had expressed his sorrow concerning the lady killed and burned by the insurgents. Please, correct me, but I cannot recall a similar statement regarding the killings of Muslim youth in Pattani and Yala. Have the perpretrators been arrested, and are they under investigation? All I heard were execuses of the kind, “They acted in self-defense.” Is this the emphasis on justice Surayud had announced as the cornerstone of his policy?