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Article Excerpt
Geographies always contain more than they claim to represent, and there is always a politics involved in this excessive representation. This article examines how such indeterminate geographies structure popular, academic, political, and nationalist understandings of the current wave of political violence in southern Thailand. KEYWORDS: indeterminate geographies, spatial representation, violence, Thailand
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In 1975 Udom Cheuykiiwong published The Time Bomb of Thailand-Malaysia, (1) a small paperback outlining the various causes behind the intense political violence in southern Thailand during the early 1970s. After discussing the historical relations of Thailand and Malaysia to the region, Udom's book describes the makeup of separatist organizations and Communist forces active at the time, as well as efforts by the Malaysian government to "intervene" on the side of Malay-Muslim separatists. Although originally designed to supplement the Thai national curriculum in the fields of "Thai history" and "Southeast Asia," The Time Bomb anticipates the general format of what might be referred to as a genre of "pulp" geopolitical nonfiction that has filled the politics shelves of Thai bookstores since the raid on a government armory and coordinated attacks on public schools by militants in Narathiwat province on January 4, 2004. (2)
In addition to providing a general point from which to compare Thai commentaries on past violence to works written today, it is the front cover of Udom's text that is particularly notable. In the center of the cover lies a map of the conflict. With a prominent rectangle enframing the majority of the space along the Thai-Malaysia border, and a bomb looming over the region, this popular cartography projects a generic threat of violence in southern Thailand. In a very simple way, the geographical representation is indeterminate because this threat is not grounded in a specific site, and its arbitrary rectangle is, as a convenience of layout, simply placed flush with the map's borders.
This use of maps as a cover image is, in fact, commonplace for works published in Thailand focused on intermittent political violence in southern Thailand. On the cover of a similar paperback entitled Southern Thailand: Thai or Malaysian ? published in 1984, a fist clenched around two sticks of dynamite with a lit fuse is set against a nondescript map of the border region. (3) Another example can be found in a 1981 National Sociology Association of Thailand report on the attitudes of Islamic school managers in the southern provinces that featured a cover with the image of crosshairs placed over a map of the region. (4)
With the unprecedented amount of newly published works seeking to explain the present turmoil, this geographical motif has continued to appear in varying detail on the covers of numerous recent books. (5) In each instance, a generic geography is deployed efficiently to convey a regional threat of violence. The spatial representation of violence on each cover is not a precise cartographic description of its location but a broader geography that enables the circulation of certain cultural, political, and historical presumptions.
This article argues that indeterminate geographies such as these structure popular, academic, political, and nationalist understandings of the current wave of political violence in southern Thailand, which since the start of 2004 has claimed more than twenty-five hundred lives. Geographical representations of the unrest come from disparate sources such as media and academic accounts, official comments, maps retrieved from documents of separatist organizations, military strategies, and discourses related to the "war on terror." Examples of the spaces referenced include general maps of the incidence of violent attacks, colored security zones, the boundaries of a state of Patani (6) (the former sultanate and an object of separatist ambitions), nationalist mappings of the "Greater Patani area," the "southern fire," (7) networks of regional "Islamic" terrorism, and the emergence of localities as sites of violence, public protests, and standoffs with state authorities.
Geographical references also establish a demographic context of the region for accounts of violence or provide general empirical locations of violent attacks. In these instances provincial boundaries (and the enumeration of provinces) delimit a region, as in "southern Thailand" or "the southern border provinces." As such, demo-graphically, the vast majority of Thailand's Muslims reside within the five southern border provinces of Songkla, Satun, Patani, Yala, and Narathiwat, in which they make up numerical majorities in the latter four provinces. The majorities within the provinces of Patani, Yala, and Narathiwat are commonly referenced with regard to ethnicity, religion, and language as Malay-Muslims. The provincial location of the current conflict--namely, the provinces of Patani, Yala, Narathiwat, and southeastern parts of Songkla--therefore is one in which Malay-Muslims appear as a majority. This demographic "fact" not only serves as an introductory context for numerous accounts (popular and academic), but has also been deployed politically in justifications of nationalist separatist campaigns, calls for regional autonomy, and claims to communally based unity.
Following the primary argument of this article, however, the continuously cited regional location just described (seemingly straightforward in its "empirical" conjoinment of violence, geography, and demography) is itself an indeterminate geographical representation. Popularized in an abbreviated form as the "three southern border provinces" (sam changwat chaidaen pak tai), this geographical reference totalizes the incidence of violence across the three (not four) provinces. Moreover, a possible emphasis on cultural difference (between Malay Muslims and Thai Buddhists) within this space leads to commonplace depictions of two distinct communities in the region and the assumption of shared sentiments--political, national, or religious--that may emerge as a motivating force responsible for intensifying or directing the violence (even in light of the fact that no single group, movement, or network has emerged as the "cause" of the conflict). Within a bounded space in which local demographics transform a national majority (Thai Buddhists) into a local minority, violence at the edge of the nation-state may appear as a logical outcome premised simply on this representation of cultural/national difference, rather than being grounded in complex political or historical relationships. (8)
Geographies of all kinds mentioned above, therefore, work to provide a spatial representation of the very location of violence. It is only through this reference to location that many of the discourses surrounding political violence in southern Thailand can cohere. The effect of location, in this regard, is to bound the conflict. Yet each discourse does so in a way that cannot fully contain "the spatial excess of Patani's location." (9) In an insightful commentary, Itty Abraham and Sumie Nakaya point to the multiple, potentially competing, narratives involved in the "spatial reckoning of Patani as simultaneously a historic intellectual center, a contemporary political margin, a region where a political minority is in the numerical majority, a borderland of popular movement and illicit traffic, and a homeland for migrant people." (10) The proliferation of these spatial narratives in their account results in a "conceptual ambiguity" in the location of Patani insofar as the space may be invoked or claimed in a wide range of political, religious, or academic discourses. In this manner, geographical representations of violent conflict are often considered necessary to "visualize" such conflict, but they do so in the face of the spatial excess of their own geographical terms and subsequent conceptual ambiguity.
Along similar lines, Chaiwat Satha-Anan has suggested critically that Patani not be understood geographically as the province of Patani, but rather as "political geography," which is popularly treated as a "space in which violence can arise easily." (11) This article demonstrates how indeterminate geographical representations of violence and community in fact provide the content for and in some critical ways structure such a political geography. The indeterminacy of these geographical representations is grounded in this excess and ambiguity described by Abraham and Nakaya. Rather than overwhelming legible geographies of violent conflict, the indeterminacy at work in such representations actually results in a malleability (or "ambiguity") of geographical reference that enables broad claims in which community, nation, or historical grievance, for instance, become conjoined with a spatial context. The two examples I explore in further detail in the second half of this article are the controversy surrounding the proposed expansion of security zones by Thaksin Shinawatra, the former prime minister, in February 2005 and various mappings of separatist claims to statehood and Malay Muslim community.
The arguments I develop follow two theses. First, I suggest that geographical representations proliferate in the context of sustained political violence. Such geographies vary broadly in both their spatial references and their detail, resulting in a wide range of mappings that are at times contradictory or nonidentical in the spaces they represent. Second, I argue that these geographies are necessarily indeterminate with regard to the spaces they reference. Indeterminacy here does not simply mean that these maps are "factually" inaccurate. Rather, as Matthew Sparke argues, these maps are "fundamentally heterogeneous":
Every geography, whether assumed or explicitly elaborated as such, every mapping, ... becomes rereadable not just for what it includes, but also for what it overwrites and covers up in the moment of representing spatially the ... unfinished historical-geographical processes and power relations of its spatial production. (12)
In other words, geographies always contain more than they claim to represent, and there is always a politics involved in this excessive representation. It is the conjunction of a map's internal heterogeneity with the proliferation of varying (nonidentical) spatial representations that results in the general indeterminacy of these geographies. Indeterminacy, therefore, is not a deficiency of such geographical representation; it is, rather, its very political condition. This article does not argue that there is an objective way to map the "threats" or historical "origins" of the current conflict. Geographies of political violence cannot escape this process of proliferation and indeterminacy, even in their most "empirical" or geographically "precise" moments, as their claims are always politically linked to other narratives of the conflict.
More broadly, these geographies reveal a primary indeterminacy at the very foundation of political community itself. Political community, as theorized in Jacques Ranciere's work Disagreement: Politics and Philosophy, is always (in)determinate in that it is founded upon a "gap" that prevents it from totally representing the sum of its parts. (13) In fact, the core function of modern political community, according to Ranciere, is to classify, categorize, and manage, or more broadly to "police," these "parts" of society. Geographies of violent conflict continuously reference and ascribe boundaries and agency to various communities (national, ethnic, religious, or minority). This article argues, particularly in the discussion of red zones and mappings of separatism, that the indeterminacy of these geographies is paradoxically a critical mechanism in the partition of society (in the language of Ranciere) upon which political community is founded.
The two sections that follow will, prior to looking at these examples, first examine recent...
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