Description
Book SynopsisUneasy Military Encounters presents a historically and theoretically grounded political ethnography of the Thai military''s counterinsurgency practices in the southern borderland, home to the greater part of the Malay-Muslim minority. Ruth Streicher argues that counterinsurgency practices mark the southern population as the racialized, religious, and gendered other of the Thai, which contributes to producing Thailand as an imperial formation: a state formation based on essentialized difference between the Thai and their others.
Through a genealogical approach, Uneasy Military Encounters addresses broad conceptual questions of imperial politics in a non-Western context: How can we understand imperial policing in a country that was never colonized? How is Islam constructed in a state that is officially secular and promotes Buddhist tolerance? What are the (historical) dynamics of imperial patriarchy in a context internationally known for its gender pluralism? The
Trade Review
Streicher's [Uneasy Military Encounters] provides a significant contribution to our knowledge of the military's counterinsurgency operations in southern Thailand.
* Journal of Contemporary Asia *
Table of ContentsIntroduction: Policing the Imperial Formation
1. Policing History: A Military Handbook on the Southern Provinces
2. Checkpoints: Racialized Practices of Suspicion
3. The New Path to Peace: Disciplining Religious Subjects
4. Guarding the Daughter: Patriarchal Compromise and Military Sisterhood
Conclusion: Happiness and Military Rule
