Jihad for Patani: Islam and BRN's Separatist Struggle in Southern Thailand

The violent insurgency in Thailand's predominantly Malay Muslim South has surged dramatically since 2004, claiming more than 7,100 lives and leaving some 13,000 injured. Despite the heavy death toll, the conflict has drawn little international attention and domestic interest has also waned in recent years. The high human cost and risk to regional stability are reminders of the conflict's significance. This study explores the role of Islam in shaping the separatist struggle in southern Thailand. It locates Islam in its local political and historical context rather than viewing it as an expression of transnational terrorism or casting Islam as of secondary importance in what is seen as primarily an ethno-nationalist struggle, as some scholars have done. Both the terrorism and ethno-nationalist literature miss the complexity and significance of religion in southern Thailand. This thesis, consisting of seven chapters, examines the major separatist groups, paying particular attention to Barisan Revolusi Nasional Melayu Patani (Patani Malay National Revolutionary Front) or BRN, currently the most active group with the strongest military capability. Founded in 1960, the BRN is an armed group fighting for the independence of what it believes to be the Malay Muslims' historical homeland known as "Patani". Drawing upon Rogers Brubaker's conceptual framework on religious dimensions of political conflict and violence, this thesis argues that Islam has powerfully influenced the BRN's separatist struggle since the late 1980s in two major aspects as: a constitutive element of its political agenda and a potent socio-cultural resource upon which the BRN has drawn to develop methods and mechanisms to intensify its armed resistance. To consider whether the separatist groups are fighting over religion, we need to examine whether they have a distinctive understanding of religiously oriented right order for the state that they are aspiring to create and attempt to push such agenda for all in the claimed territory. Regardless of whether the separatists have a religious agenda, religion can play an important role in violent conflict by offering a rich cultural and social matrix that produces hypercommitted selves, the construction of extreme otherhood and the mobilisation of rewards, sanctions, justifications, and obligations. In the contemporary separatist struggle, we have witnessed the roles of Islam in motivating Malay Muslim fighters and legitimising armed rebellion, while also providing concepts with which to shape the new moral order in the BRN's ideal nation. Despite the increasing Islamic influence, the BRN's political vision is starkly different from that of transnational Islamist groups. It seeks to gain independence and establish a shariah-based state in a specific territory claimed to be the Patani Malays' homeland. It does not share the vision of global jihadist groups in creating a transnational Islamic state. BRN's Islamic turn began in the late 1980s as it gradually recruited and trained a new generation of fighters under the radar of the Thai security forces. This thesis delves into the preceding decade-long mobilisation, which gave rise to the dramatic upsurge of armed resistance against the Thai state in 2004. It shows how Islam and nationalism were interwoven in the BRN's political ideology, which motivated thousands of Malay Muslims to engage in what they perceived to be an armed jihad against penjajah kafir (unbeliever colonialists). While religion has been employed to legitimise the use of violence, the BRN's engagement with the formal peace dialogue in 2013 shows that religiously driven violent actors are not uncompromising fanatics. When there was a change in political opportunity structure, the BRN leaders showed that they were rational actors who think strategically and can be open to negotiations and compromise