Publication

This paper argues that the roots of the crisis in southern Thailand lie in the role of religion as it is viewed from the perspective of ethnic identity. The author suggests that the global religious revival of Islam has resulted in three developments in the case of Thailand: a setting of local Thai Islam along the path of puritan reformism, a radicalization of Thai Islam in general and giving religious coloring to the ethnic crisis in southern Thailand without identifying it as a jihadist struggle. The paper concludes that the southern Thai conflict remains a local conflict between the two ethnoreligious identities of Thai Buddhism and Malay Islam in a modern nation‐state setting.