Social Science Research Council

The South of Thailand bore witness to violent clashes between government forces and young Muslim insurgents. It is not the first time that tensions have flared between the country’s indigenous ethnic Thai, Buddhist population and the Malay, Yawi speaking Muslim minority, and it will surely not be the last. A violent separatist movement tore through the region in the 1960s and 1970s. The situation settled by the 1990s, calmed by economic development and political changes that let local Muslims, who had for long lived within an independent Malay kingdom before being annexed by Thailand in 1902, elect their leaders and send them to the national legislature in Bangkok. Some officials have attributed the violence to the possible resurgence of the said separatist war movement It would also seem that the violence is a manifestation of long held grievances triggered by the disenfranchisement of the Muslim population surrounded by a predominantly Buddhist culture. As these issues resurface today in the form of violence, they beg for innovative strategies which will put an end to what could potentially become a vicious cycle experienced by generations to come.

The Global Security and Cooperation Program has received a grant from the United States Institute for Peace to explore the issue of recurrent violence in Thailand and to carry out various activities to foster the peaceful and long-lasting resolution of the conflict. Building up on the experience of Peace Audits as implemented in South Asia, this project proposes a novel and innovative approach to both understanding and ameliorating the conflict. Based on the experience of a neighboring region where conflicts between the state and marginal communities are endemic, the technique of peace audit will initiate a novel process that combines reflection, analysis, and conciliation in order to promote better relations between the Malay Muslim communities in the south of Thailand and the Thai government and majority population.

Activities to be carried out under this project will include a series of meetings in Thailand, where peace constituencies (including students and youth leaders, community leaders, monks and clerics, academics, leaders of women’s movements, human rights campaigners and development workers) and representatives from the government will meet and discuss how to adapt the peace audit approach to the particular conditions relevant to this conflict. The primary function of the meetings will be to learn about and translate the assumptions and findings of the peace audit process as it was implemented in South Asia to the conditions in Thailand. Activities will also include the design of a jointly determined framework for action, and the training of peace audit practitioners, who will proceed to train other members of the affected communities in the theory and practice of this process. Support for ongoing and future activities will then be drawn from local resources, to ensure ‘buy-in’ from local constituencies and to establish local control over the direction and outcome of the process. Scholars from Bangkok and local universities will be closely involved in the process as monitors and sources of expert advice.