ASEAS 12(2) | 225

Religious Discourse and Gender Security in Southern Thailand

Amporn Marddent

► Marddent, A. (2019). Religious discourse and gender security in southern Thailand. Austrian Journal of 
South-East Asian Studies, 12(2), 225-247.

This article describes the complexity of applying human security through the notion of 
gender equality in southern Thailand where violent conflict has been prevalent for nearly 
half a century in a Malay-Muslim-dominated society. It explores how the concepts of 
gender and security have been interpreted in Malay-Muslim leaders’ outlooks. To define 
security more broadly, the article surveys the various notions of peacebuilding dealing 
with comprehensive human security and any security threat, thus not limited to state 
of war or physical violence only. In the prolonged armed violence and conflict, like that 
faced in Thailand’s Deep South, women’s security and their role in peacebuilding emerge 
as pertinent concerns. The discontinuities within the narratives of women and security 
highlight a divergence connected to personal-political imaginations of conflict whereby 
subtle variations in violent conflict can be seen as the products of different policy 
prescriptions, local cultural norms, and the project outcomes of women groups suppor-
ted by governmental organizations and national and international donors. Thus, in order 
to reflect upon how contemporary security notions are framed, gendered security per-
ceptions ought to be considered as they signify the exercise of peacebuilding programs in 
the local context. Persistent advocacy of gender equality is about cultural change, which 
eventually becomes a modality for non-violent society.

Keywords: Cultural Change; Deep South of Thailand; Gender Security; Malay-Muslim Women; 
Peacebuilding; 


INTRODUCTION

Members of civil society organizations in Pattani1, Thailand, have been critical 
of the government’s attempts to generate peace as it only translated within the 
goal of defeating the insurgency. In such peacebuilding scenarios, women, who 
are not part of the insurgency, are entirely ignored. Nevertheless, studies under-
score that violence in the region affects women both directly and indirectly. 
They have been killed, injured, traumatized, sexually harassed, and have experi-
enced emotional and economic suffering as the conflict persisted (Abuza, 2011; 
International Crisis Group, 2012; Marddent, 2006). Parallel to the challenge of 
the implementation process and policy on gender equality and women’s empow-
erment by state and international agencies, especially within the framework of 
the Women, Peace and Security (WPS) agenda, this paper shows that there is an 

1 In this study, I use both Patani and Pattani. The former term is chosen to refer to the region, 
while the latter is used as the name of a province in the south of Thailand. 

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attempt to promote a bottom-up peacebuilding perspective in conflict ridden areas 
of South Thailand as women and members of civil society organizations interviewed 
for this paper described the experiences and knowledge they value.

According to the gendered aspects of the WPS agenda (Pratt & Richter-Devroe, 2011), 
civil society organizations, especially women’s groups, are the main strategic actors to 
push for the discussion of women’s experiences in armed conflict. The WPS agenda 
addresses three main themes: (1) Women and girls in war and armed conflict demand 
to be protected from sexual and gender-based violence; (2) Women must have a role in 
the prevention and resolution of conflicts and peacebuilding; (3) Local actors, member 
states, and the United Nations (UN) system need to adopt a gender perspective in peace 
operations, negotiations, and agreements. In the region, women’s movements are tra-
ditional actors or grassroots peace activists, who are critical of military solutions (Deep 
South Watch, 2014; Tissamana, 2017, pp. 102-115) which have been adopted through a 
state-centric security approach. Their involvement in the peacebuilding movement has 
a long history. Several groups of Muslim women in the South have become involved in 
political reform to ensure peacebuilding after the uprising against the military dictator-
ship on 14 October 1973 and the massacre of the student movement on 6 October 1976.

This paper accordingly explores the discourses of violence and the peacebuilding 
perspectives of locals in Thailand’s Deep South in order to understand women’s par-
ticipation in peacebuilding and how they position the violence they experience and 
potential solutions. This paper aims to draw attention to the effort of local peacebuild-
ing amidst the complexity of policy formulations from international gender-sensitive 
peacebuilding and development programs. The subjects in this study are not only con-
fronted with violent conflict, but they are also tackling discriminatory gender norms 
within their own culture. Thus, while international agencies need to pay close atten-
tion to their perspectives on what is causing violence and how it can be addressed, this 
paper highlights the degree to which Malay-Muslim women are also trying to work 
with their own communities to lessen the impact that strict Islamic teaching has on 
their ability to live in a peaceful society.

This ethnographic study employs a qualitative research framework for data collec-
tion and analysis. The method involves extensive fieldwork among women’s groups 
and local communities in the research area  – Pattani, Yala, and Narathiwat Provinces 
– through participant observation. This method facilitated my immersion in how these 
women perceive their culture. Sixty-two informants participated in interviews, conver-
sations, and focus group discussions; this includes 5 women who have been the victims 
of violence, 16 women who tackle sexual and gender-based violence in the Muslim 
community, 11 male and female religious leaders, 8 government staff, 2 professional 
peacebuilders, 2 human rights defenders and analysts, 2 scholars, and 16 male and 
female youth. Before detailing women’s efforts and perspective on human security as 
a means of conflict resolution in the impacted regions, I will first briefly describe the 
conflict in Thailand’s Deep South and then describe the various international agendas 
as peacebuilding discourses that have been implemented in the regions.

A BRIEF HISTORY OF THE CONFLICT AND THE TERMINOLOGY PROBLEM

The southern region of Thailand has had a long history of political contestations. 



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It was once home to the sovereign Kingdom of Patani, which was international-
ly recognized, for instance, in diplomatic and trade missions to China in the 16th 
century (Teeuw & Wyatt, 1970, p. 1). Tributary relationship between Thailand, for-
merly known as Siam, and Patani lasted from the mid-13th century to the late 18th 
century. According to Aphornsuvan (2007, p.16), Patani leaders enjoyed greater 
freedom to rule the kingdom during the time when Siamese rulers were preoccu-
pied with other security issues, such as the wars with Burma in the 15th century and 
Cambodia in the 14th century. During these periods of subordination, whenever 
the Siamese royal government was weakened, Patani’s rulers revolted by refusing 
to send tribute. 

By the mid-17th century, the Siamese Kingdom was in political chaos and later 
defeated by the neighboring Konbaung dynasty of Burma in 1767. In such a del-
icate security situation, General Taksin managed to regroup the followers, built a 
new political center at Thonburi, and was crowned as King of Siam in December 
1767. King Rama I later on marked a period of the nation’s golden era with strong 
central government, during which Siam’s trade advanced and stability was imposed 
through military control. In 1785, King Rama I asserted renewed sovereignty over 
Patani. Siam’s troops attacked Patani and destroyed the sultan’s palace (Keyes, 2009, 
pp. 19-42). The tributary system was ended during the reign of King Rama II, who 
divided Patani into seven Malay principalities, which included Patani, Saiburi, Yala, 
Yaring, Raman, Ra-ngae, and Nong Chick. Of these, only Nong Chick had a Buddhist 
ruler. Since the 1900s, the leaders of Siam united the South into the provinces of 
Pattani, Yala, and Narathiwat – divisions that exist until today.

During the 19th century, with the arrival of the French and British colonial pow-
ers, Bangkok, again, tightened its control over Patani. Throughout the century, the 
political status of the Malay Peninsula sultanates, including Patani, became increas-
ingly squeezed between an expanding British colonial rule and a rapidly modernizing 
Siam (Baker & Phongpaichit, 2009, pp. 69-70). In 1909, through the Anglo-Siamese 
Treaty between Siam and Britain, Patani was annexed to be governed directly under 
Thai hegemony. This resulted in the official incorporation of the southern Patani 
border into the Thai state.

This border arrangement, which still exists as the current borders of the Thai 
modern state, has since then been disputed by the local Malay aristocracy who 
objected to the Thai government’s control of the southern region (Bunnag, 1977). 
Tensions worsened when the Thai central government enacted the National Culture 
Act in 1939, which contained detailed codes of behavior (Aphornsuvan, 2007, p. 35) 
intended to ‘civilize’ Thais by forming a unified national culture for those dwelling 
within the Thai state’s border. With the implementation of the act, the Thai state 
aimed to spread central Thai cultural traits and Theravada Buddhism throughout the 
whole country as a policy of assimilation. Consequently, despite the fact that over 
70% of the population in the Deep South are Malay Muslims, Patani people were 
forced to adopt Buddhist culture which had been introduced by Bangkok’s Buddhist-
centric government (Bajunid, 1992; Scupin, 1998, p. 229). The forced imposition of 
Thai culture on Malay Muslims led to violent separatist insurgencies in which those 
who envision themselves to be part of the Patani people fight for independence from 
Thailand (von Feigenblatt, 2009).



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Following the Second World War, violence in the Patani region increased dramat-
ically. The Islamic scholar and the first president of the Provincial Islamic Council of 
Pattani, Haji Sulong, started the first major independence movement in the 1940s 
and early 1950s (Aphornsuvan, 2004; Lamey, 2013, p. 3). He called on the Patani peo-
ple to engage in civil disobedience and a petition campaign. Haji Sulong authored 
the seven-point demand of Malay Muslims that was presented to a commission of 
inquiry convened by the central government to investigate the circumstances of 
the locals at a time of growing Malay-Muslim nationalism and resistance to central 
government authority in the region.2 His arrest and imprisonment in 1948 led to a 
series of violent eruptions before he was made to disappear by security forces in 1954 
(Aphornsuvan, 2007, pp. 52-53; Ockey, 2011, pp. 112-117). Since the 1950s, the tension 
in the region has been characterized by continuous armed violence, whereby Thai 
security forces’ counter-reaction has alienated the Malay-Muslim community and 
conversely led some local Muslims to engage in militancy (Dorairajoo, 2009).

In January 2004, the violence in Thailand’s Deep South took a new turn when 
Malay-Muslim insurgents raided a military camp in Narathiwat and drew on an 
ethno-regionalist narrative to perpetuate a new wave of violent conflict in the south 
of Thailand (Liow & Pathan, 2010). Their claim to religious justification marks a new 
form of separatist movement in which religious rhetoric increasingly plays a central 
role in violent insurgencies’ political discourse (McCargo, 2009). The entanglement 
between religious solidarity and violence becomes even more complex since the col-
lective memory of the military atrocities, particularly of those that took place at Krue 
Ze Mosque and the following Tak Bai tragedy, against Muslim civilians is well alive 
among the locals. In April 2004, the military raided Pattani’s historic Krue Ze mosque 
to arrest a group of militant Malay Muslims who were suspected to have attacked the 
police station. The raid resulted in the death of 32 men, with one civilian victim who 
happened to be in the mosque. The Tak Bai incident followed when a crowd of 2,000 
protestors gathered at the police station in Tak Bai district, Narathiwat, to seek the 
release of six people arrested on suspicion of having stolen guns from defense volun-
teers. Police and military forces used fire trucks and live ammunition to control the 
situation, in the course of which more than 80 Malay men were killed as a result of ill 
treatment (Harish & Liow, 2007, pp. 161-184). These series of conflicts involving the 
deaths of Muslim civilians have generated long-lasting traumatic memories among 
the Malay Muslims in the region until today.3 

2 The demands were: (1) The government of Siam should have a person of high rank possessing full 
power to govern the four provinces of Patani, Yala, Narathiwat, and Satul, and this person should be a 
Muslim born within one of the provinces and elected by the populace. The person in this position should 
be retained without being replaced; (2) All of the taxes obtained within the four provinces should be spent 
only within the provinces; (3) The government should support education in the Malay medium up to the 
fourth grade in parish schools within the four provinces; (4) 80% of the government officials within the 
four provinces should be Muslims born within the provinces; (5) The government should use the Malay 
language within government offices alongside the Siamese language; (6) The government should allow the 
Islamic Council to establish laws pertaining to the customs and ceremonies of Islam with the agreement 
of the high official; (7) The government should separate the religious court from the civil court in the four 
provinces, with full authority to conduct cases (Syukri, 2005, pp. 89-90).

3 Interview with several women and several youths who are members of families of the victims; Pattani, 
Yala, and Narathiwat, 12-13 September 2018, 10-12 May 2010, and 24-26 December 2004.



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The historical tensions in Thai-Patani relations between the central government 
and the Deep South and the reluctance to recognize the region as a sovereign state 
have created a situation of chronic controversy concerning nation-state issues in 
the region, which Winichakul (1994) calls the “geo-body problem” of the nation. He 
asserts that the Melayu Patani, or the ethnic Malays and the Malay-speaking Muslims, 
struggle over the notion of “Thai-ness” (kwaampenthai) because of the conceptions 
of Thai chauvinism and geo-body that emerged from a homogenous conception of 
national culture based on a unitary nation-state (Winichakul, 1994, pp. 3-5).4 

Such tensions lead to enduring violence since the state relies on military force 
to secure order. This is evident from how the state has organized the machinery 
of occupation between the government and the military in these provinces, where 
the government machinery of the occupying power is divided between the govern-
ment and military through security agencies and military forces. Accordingly, in 
assessing the notion of security in the region, the state is applying military termi-
nologies by classifying the conflict as “unrest” and “insurgency” (Buranajaroenkij, 
2017, p. 19). “Unrest” is a key term that the government uses to point to the risk it 
faces in the region along with the region’s social instability. As it creates a division 
of ‘us-versus-them’, the state’s evocation of the term has been criticized by human 
rights activists in the region. Women activists have been rejecting the term as it can 
only be applied in respect to a paternalistic central control policy, and therefore does 
not address all conflict-affected dimensions, including the comprehensive notion of 
human security, which locals and women have to endure (International Committee 
of the Red Cross, 2008; Paulus & Vashakmadze, 2009).

Women and human rights activists contend that the term “unrest” is a simplifica-
tion of the depicted situation since violence in the region has become more complex 
and affected larger concerns, including women’s well-being, domestic violence, child 
marriage, discrimination against widows, and enduring sexual and gender-based 
violence. Accordingly, beyond the scope of the military’s understanding focused 
on a binary situation of stability and unrest, “unrest” has significant consequences 
for those living within it. For example, armed violence as a product of masculinity 
(Bjarnegård & Melander, 2011) often leads to other forms of violence such as against 
women and children (Ezard, 2014), and thus any security notion should set its con-
cerns on human security (Tripp, 2013) as the product of a non-violent ecology rather 
than simply exercising armed or political security.

A report from the Southern Border Provinces Administration Centre (SBPAC)5 
shows a staggering number of women who were victimized in unarmed conflict 
conditions from 2004 to 2017, with 513 killed and 1,704 injured as a result of shoot-
ings or bombings (Buranajaroenkij, 2019, pp. 67- 80). The National Human Rights 

4 To add to the complexity, the Patani region remains, until today, a poor region with substantially less 
economic development than other parts of Thailand’s South (Bank of Thailand, 2006; World Bank, 2019).

5 SBPAC was established in 1981 to monitor the work of civilian government agencies, implement poli-
cy, train and discipline the officials posted to the region, and coordinate with security forces in Thailand’s 
Deep South. These include the Office of the National Security Council (NSC) and the Internal Security 
Operations Command (ISOC). SBPAC, NSC, and ISOC, which are responsible for devising and implement-
ing policy in the region, are led formally by the Prime Minister. In practice, however, the Prime Minister 
exercises little direct oversight (International Crisis Group, 2012).



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Commission of Thailand (2018) reports that in some rape cases, the victims were even 
forced to marry the perpetrators of sexual assault as mediation process to settle the 
suit. At the same time, since separatists have mainstreamed religious discourse into 
everyday life, religious conservatism has dominated the region, and a recent report 
from the Southern Women Network Overcoming Violence (2018) shows that the sto-
ries and numbers of violent incidents against women have largely gone unreported 
due to stigma and social pressure, although the number of incidents of domestic vio-
lence is annually increasing in the Muslim community.

Because of perceived cultural norms, less particular concern has addressed gen-
der-based violence. Studies on and programs for women in conflict situations in 
this region tend to have a limited focus on the quantitative and visible involvement 
of women in peacebuilding as part of grassroots training and programming by for-
eign actors as well as actors from Thailand’s central region (Asia Foundation, 2012; 
Buranajaroenkij, 2017, 2019; UNDP, 2016; UN Women, 2012, 2018). Programs for civil 
society and communities in this region leave religious and socially sensitive issues to 
the religious leaders’ accountabilities; although in many cases the religious scholars 
are indeed sensitive to gender issues. Therefore, when issues of gender-based vio-
lence are addressed, the state and civil society actors associate them primarily with 
the predominant culture of the Muslim community and religious interpretation, 
which, they contend, marginalized women.

Public outcry for Muslim religious authorities to address such issues has never-
theless met a dead end. Such approaches fail because, on the one hand, they fail to 
account for the complexities of violence that women in this area face as part of the 
ongoing conflict, while on the other hand they offer simplistic solutions to how the 
violence could be addressed by disentangling it from the larger conflict situation and 
connecting it to gender as well as values of a conservative Muslim society. 

SEVERAL OPERATING GLOBAL PEACEBUILDING DISCOURSES

It was not only once or twice during my field research (2004-2007, 2009-2010, and 
2014-2019) in Thailand’s Deep South that the locals expressed their complaints about 
the top-down approach that characterizes policies meant to address the conflict, par-
ticularly the martial law order and the 2005 emergency (International Commission 
of Jurists, 2010). At this time, the locals had recognized the prolonged violent situ-
ation as an armed conflict was the outcome of utsahakam kwam mankong (security 
industry). Because of the top down, security-based machinery of the state, people 
in Patani criticized that the cost of the violent conflict had emerged as a profitable 
benefit for several sectors, especially the Thai belligerents and the aristocracies on 
both sides. Moreover, many local people felt they were living within utsahakam kwam 
mankong, whereby their voices were being marginalized and they were being victim-
ized as ‘others’ in the wake of conflict. The feeling of otherness is prominent among 
Malay Muslims who constitute a non-Buddhist minority as well as among those who 
embrace a non-Thai culture.

“The others” is used among the Malay Muslims to define their own identity in 
relation to others. In this regard, they are referring to the dominant Thai social, cul-
tural, and other kinds of identity constructions. To note, since 2004 there has also 



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Amporn Marddent

been a nostalgic revival of Thai nationalism, which includes propaganda songs and 
cultural performances to show that the state still plays a decisive role in the policy of 
assimilation (Jory, 2007, pp. 129-146). Such a sense of otherness, when entangled with 
such expressions of a sense of belonging and nationalism, could hinder local partic-
ipation in the peacebuilding project. The structural othering could also be seen in 
the dispute of regional naming. While the state addresses the region as ‘Pattani’, the 
insurgency movement uses ‘Pattani’ to describe the narrative of its origins and indi-
viduality, and to show how it is not dependent on a center in Bangkok. According to 
Satha-Anand (1992, pp. 1-38), the term “Pattani” actually best reflects a specific polit-
ical and cultural territory. The state’s deliberate word selection is, however, also not 
without a reason. It shows the historical control of the central government since it 
has been using the term ‘Pattani’ as a unit of administration since 1906 (Chonlaworn, 
2014, pp. 527-546). Such disagreement shows how the state disregards the agency of 
local Malay Patani people in constructing their own identity. Panjor (2015) argues 
that, beyond its administrative function, region naming is a form of state’s centralis-
tic control of local political identity that defies or contains local political aspirations. 
Consequently, the term has political and cultural connotations.

Among local women, the problem of identity is also related to how their 
“women-ness” is defined through various global discourses. There are currently four 
discourses of peacebuilding that accommodate women’s participation in the pro-
cess: the United Nations Security Council Resolution (UNSCR) 1325 and its Women, 
Peace and Security Agenda (WPS), the Convention on the Elimination of all Forms 
of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW), and the United Nations Sustainable 
Development Goals. Among these discourses, the WPS agenda has become today’s 
main source and tool to advanced women’s participation in the peacebuilding pro-
cess in Thailand’s Deep South. The WPS was initiated as part of the UNSCR 1325 
on 31 October 2000 (Chinkin, 1994, pp. 326-341). As a UN-based resolution, WPS 
is a global normative order on security discourse. UNSCR 1325 and WPS impose a 
global political agenda on policy support for gender equality. On the global level, its 
mainstreaming centers on four pillars, namely (1) women’s participation in conflict 
resolution and peace processes; (2) gender mainstreaming in conflict-prevention ini-
tiatives; (3) the protection of women’s rights and bodies in times of peace and war; 
and (4) relief and recovery, especially for survivors of sexual violence. At the national 
level, UNSCR 1325 provides guidelines to governments and non-governmental actors 
that outline their responsibilities in order to comply with the WPS agenda (George, 
2016, pp. 376-377). The UN believes, as supported by a study by Krause, Krause, & 
Bränfors, 2018, that when women participate in peace negotiations, there will be an 
increase in the durability and the quality of peace. 

Research on the WPS has invigorated the agenda extensively, such as issues on 
policy prescription and redefinition of the idea of peace, conflict, gender, and secu-
rity. These studies investigate how the implementation of peace resolutions could 
relate to certain gender norms. For example, Goldstein (2001) discusses how the 
gendering of war has been constructed, emphasizing the degree to which men have 
been socialized with hierarchies, such as in the armies, more extensively than women 
in wartime. Thus, men are trained with hierarchical power through wars, while 
women actively oppose war. Several studies, however, criticize the WPS agenda for 



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Religious Discourse and Gender Security in Southern Thailand

its simplicity. Ní Aoláin (2016, pp. 275-292) highlights the applicability of the WPS 
agenda in an era of a new pattern of war in which security strategies have focused 
specifically on counterterrorism and extremism, where women are only marginal 
actors and their voices of peacebuilding play a role only in marginal spaces. Jauhola’s 
work (2016) contributes to the marginalized subjects of women, peace, and security 
by exploring the ways in which the WPS is predicated on the construct of the ‘good 
woman’. The realities of war and conflict in the Global South also deliver a further 
criticism to the UNSCR 1325 and the WPS agenda. Basu (2016, pp. 362-374) criti-
cizes the implementation of both, contending that UN’s discourses on peacebuilding 
and conflict resolution have been primarily developed based on values of the Global 
North. Thus, she calls for the contributions of the Global South to be brought into 
consideration in both the implementation and non-implementation of the WPS res-
olutions. By doing so, she argues that the UNSCR 1325 needs to invite actors from 
the Global South to also write the implementation guidance document as follow-up 
resolutions and to further broaden the discourse on women, peace, and security.

The Thai government has signed the international agenda, but it does not yet have 
a National Action Plan (NAP) to steward the UNSCR 1325 implementation. Regardless 
of such a limitation, there are already some local efforts to incorporate a WPS agenda 
in the establishment of meetings with grassroots women’s organizations. Through 
various interviews, my interlocutors, who are members of women’s NGOs in the con-
flict areas and civil society leaders, expressed that the steps in the WPS agenda have led 
to pragmatic actions in their efforts to craft the country’s policies on gender and secu-
rity. On the practical level, to deepen the application of the WPS, the Thai government 
has relied on women’s groups comprised of those whose husbands have been killed or 
are missing in the region. At the same time, several international non-governmental 
organizations (INGOs) have joined forces with women’s non-governmental organi-
zations (NGOs) in Thailand to persuade the government to also advocate the older, 
already-existing peace discourses to further support the WPS agenda, such as the 1979 
CEDAW and the 1995 Beijing UN Women’s Conference Platform for Action.6

In Thailand, the WPS agenda was adopted in collaboration between the Thai 
Ministry of Social Development and Human Security and UN Women (Government 
Prioritizes UN Policy, 2015; UN Women Asia and the Pacific, 2016). Since it was 
adopted, some women leaders, including those from UN Women, the National 
Human Rights Commission of Thailand (NHRCT), the SBPAC, the Ministry of 
Foreign Affairs, and the Office of Women’s Affairs and Family Development (OWAFD) 
under the Ministry of Social Development and Human Security, have been pushing 
for the UNSCR 1325 to be implemented in domestic activities. On the other hand, 
the practitioners, international observers, diplomats, and activists that I have inter-
viewed, all view that unlike the UNSRC 1325, the WPS actually offers strategies on 
the prevention of violence and protection issues that are already effective for peace-
builders to apply in the field. Thus, the WPS has been proven to be able to be used 
as the core tool of peace processes while helping the state to better advance inter-
national humanitarian law and Thailand’s Internal Security Act (ISA). For example, 

6 See, True’s (2016) discussion paper on women’s inclusion in the peace process. The Foundation for 
Women has provided training and training manuals to educate women in conflict areas to understand and 
apply CEDAW and UNSCR on WPS to advance gender equality since 2008 (Sakrobanek, 2008).



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government and international actors, especially the ASEAN commission and key 
stakeholders, can restore people’s confidence in peacebuilding by undertaking con-
crete steps, such as annual budgeting programs to support women’s forums that are 
likely to result in increased confidence among key groups to agree upon action points 
and ways in accelerating the implementation of WPS agenda. 

These practical engagements, apart from the absence of a NAP, have turned women 
and their organizations into recognized actors whose agency has an impact on building 
a stronger comprehensive set of peacebuilding implementation steps. For example, the 
Thai government has implemented conflict resolution by establishing security goals 
based on a national political blueprint strategy, in which it has initiated a program 
of monetary compensation and rehabilitation processes as one of the initial steps in 
the peacebuilding process. Beyond financial means, such steps are symbolically piv-
otal since they raise the issue of recognition, whereby the impact the conflict has had 
on women is taken into consideration. To date, most women who are conflict-related 
victims have been compensated by the government (International Crisis Group, 2012).

The local Malay-Muslim women, who were direct victims, have also taken a 
greater role as peacemakers by becoming leaders of local women’s groups. Their 
agency is being recognized by the state and INGOs. For example, they have travelled 
more frequently from their villages to the cities to attend workshops and meetings 
and to participate in dialogue forums. They have taken on leading roles in conflict 
prevention and peacemaking, although, again, Thailand does not have a national 
action plan for the implementation of UNSCR 1325.7

This is where complications emerge. Women leaders in the networks of civil socie-
ties in Thailand’s Deep South understand this global agenda as an imposed, top-down 
agenda through which the state is attempting to implement a certain standard on 
women groups. Some civil society members in Pattani province also believe, however, 
that the ISA, although it has adopted some notions of an international legal framework, 
is often used to empower executive authority and security forces, which undermine 
the rights of citizens. At the same time, the government has actually attempted to 
avoid any internationalization of the conflict in the Deep South of Thailand, which 
explains the absence of a NAP. As the Thai government has classified the conflict as 
unrest in the context of riot and insurgency, it primarily centers the WPS agenda only 
in a larger discourse of national security. The state tends to recognize conflict situa-
tions in the region as internal disturbances and tensions; in this discourse, violence is 
explained as isolated, sporadic acts, and a matter of domestic politics (Lamey, 2013). 
When the state developed a plan to address security, a woman human rights defender, 
Angkhana Neelapaijit, criticized the government and local leaders’ handling of the 
situation in the region without a gender dimension.8 She expressed that the state 
should close the gap between commitment and action in the form of non-violence 
policies. Such policies to security, however, will consequently withdraw any abun-
dant presence of armed forces in the region. Angkhana further noted that the lack of 

7 See also, Peace Women (2018). Additionally, while Thailand’s NAP includes WPS implementation 
frameworks, Thailand has not established actions to be implemented in cooperation with civil society. 
The Thai military government, on the other hand, establishes its own security goals based on the 20-year 
national political blueprint strategy (The National Blueprint Strategy, 2018).

8 Interview, Nakhon Si Thammarat, 8 August 2018, and Pattani, 6 December 2019.



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political will to actually implement a change through a NAP supporting the UNSCR 
1325 remains a key issue to advance the goals of the peace process. 

On the other hand, according to group discussions I attended in October 2018 on 
state agencies’ monitoring of the WPS, UNSCR 1325 is currently not being upheld by the 
central government as it has implemented another new security policy for the region 
that does not accommodate the non-violence values of UNSCR 1325. Women officials 
from both the Office of Women’s Affairs and Family Development (OWAFD) under 
Thailand’s Ministry of Social Development and Human Security and SBPAC represent-
atives admitted the lapse. Such discrepancy between policy and action arises because 
UNSCR 1325 is a legally binding resolution for UN Charter signatory states (Initiative on 
Quiet Diplomacy, 2010, pp. 36-37) and is not an organic product of all involved actors.

Apart from WPS, these women activists also have implemented several other 
related resolutions, which address matters on the individual level or in the private 
sphere (Kirby & Shepherd, 2016, pp. 249-254). In 2015, for example, the international 
community endorsed another normative framework, the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable 
Development, commonly known as the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). This 
global instrument formally recognizes gender equality and the empowerment of 
women and girls as a distinct development goal. The SDGs number 5 and 16 (further, 
SDG 5 and SDG 16)9 in particular aim at achieving gender equality and empowering 
of all women and girls, including a call to end all forms of discrimination and vio-
lence against women and girls in the public and private spheres, to eliminate harmful 
practices, to value domestic work, and to ensure women’s political and economic 
participation as well as sexual and reproductive health respectively (Lee & Pollitzer, 
2016). I attended several small women peacebuilding forums on the overlapping 
forms of gender justice and protection mechanisms for women’s rights (in Pattani, 
Narathiwat, and Bangkok in March, August, and December 2018). The present local 
and international scholars, INGO professionals, Thai, and Malay-Muslim women’s 
rights activists and a national human rights commissioner, who have been working 
on women’s right protection with civil society and women groups in the Deep South 
of Thailand, criticized the government’s policy tool as being incapable of achieving 
the state’s goal of a gender-based justice arrangement. The problem is that, although 
the state has ratified the agreement, the current government has attempted to merely 
uphold their accountability to the SDGs by crafting a 20-year governmental strategic 
plan rather than implementing all mechanisms to enact a gender-inclusive security 
policy, particularly those outlined in UNSCR 1325.

Dealing with two discourses, the UNSCR 1325 and the SDGs, the Thai government, 
through its representative state agencies like the OWAFD and the Sub-Committee 
on Women, Peace and Security, has discussed in various international forums in 
Bangkok, which I attended, to consolidate the efforts of integrating these global gen-
der perspectives through learning from local women’s best-practices. Members of the 
civil society network who work on peacebuilding issues with several organizations 
have, hence, attempted to create another space and provide the resources to push for 
larger engagement of Muslim women’s group.

9 SDG 5 aims at achieving gender equality and empowering all women and girls, while SDG 16 promotes 
peaceful and sustainable societies for sustainable development; access to justice for all; and effective, ac-
countable and inclusive institutions for all (United Nations General Assembly, 2015).



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Amporn Marddent

One of the greatest challenges to craft a NAP and for supporting the consolida-
tion of women’s activism is, however, the synchronicity between elements of the state 
themselves. My interlocutors stated that such a problem persists because the state is 
unwilling to accommodate the resolution into a NAP.10 As previously mentioned, the 
representation of the state in the Deep South has been divided into civilian govern-
ment, on the one hand, and military control, on the other hand. Such unwillingness 
seems to be rooted in a complex set of interrelated issues, particularly in terms of the 
permanent State of Emergency under martial law (e.g., Jitpiromrsi & McCargo, 2008; 
The Asian Human Rights Commission, 2009). 

Thus, while the civilian government actively supports a discourse on the con-
solidation of efforts, the military government does not prioritize citizen protection 
or any from-below initiatives due to the martial law in the Deep South that was 
imposed following the 2014 military coup.11 Moreover, reports from international 
organizations contend that the military government, the National Council for Peace 
and Order (NCPO), is failing to promote human rights in general (Human Rights 
Watch, 2017; International Crisis Group, 2016). This situation shows how different 
understandings of the notion of security could lead to a deadlock. Such a deadlock 
can become a potential blowback to any peacebuilding effort since it prolongs the 
status quo on security (see also, Liow, 2006; von Feigenblatt, 2011). 

Responding to such an incoherent plan, and to strengthen the implementation of 
UNSCR 1325, SDG 5, and SDG 16, women’s groups have demanded that the Thai gov-
ernment deconstruct the notion of security  – as part of a larger notion of non-violent 
society – and go beyond its current focus on state security (Thailand Universal 
Periodic Review, 2017; Universal Periodic Review Info, 2017). The goal is that, by 
incorporating grassroots women’s voices on security, which could be directly applied 
within the community, the Thai government could effectively implement the WPS 
resolution. Such efforts have been fruitful since several national forums commenced 
in 2015 and 2016, organized in Bangkok and Songkhla, respectively. In these initia-
tives, along with scholars and state officers of the Ministry of Social Development and 
Human Security, a large number of women from different networks were invited, 
including the leaders from Islamic communities, such as the Peace Agenda of Women 
(PAOW), a network of 23 women’s organizations. Through these forums, the Thai 
government also aims to endow grassroots women with a basic knowledge of SCR 
1325 (Government Prioritizes UN Policy, 2015). Apart from the bureaucratic complex-
ity, this development on various international discourses on WPS that are currently 
taking place in the Deep South show that there is a national recognition of the added 
value that women can bring to peace implementation in partnership with the UN 
and state agencies, even though women do not understand all the technical matters 
in relation to a dominant strategic plan for SCR 1325.12

10 The Thai government announced the finalization of the National Action Plan (NAP) for Women, 
Peace and Security. However, no timeline or budget has specifically been allocated to the NAP (Peace 
Women, 2018).

11 Thailand’s recent general election results in May 2019 entail that the NCPO continues to maintain 
their power over an elected parliament since the military coup in 2014 (McCargo, 2019, pp. 153-222).

12 Interviews with two scholars from the Prince of Songkla University, Pattani Campus, who attended 
the forum as observers, Pattani, 10 December 2016.



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PEACEBUILDING FROM BELOW: SALAFI DISCOURSE AND WOMEN’S 
CONSOLIDATION

To tackle the bureaucratic complexities and the limitation of the state’s notion of 
security, women’s rights activists, practitioners, and academics aim to broaden the 
security framework for women in the Deep South. They have sought to conceptu-
alize more holistic notions of peacekeeping, particularly notions that members of 
grassroots organizations could acknowledge and practice. A leader of the Southern 
Women Network Overcoming Violence, Rosidah Pusu, has complained to SBPAC 
that the government needs to work on female violence in order to gain larger support 
from the local community. In this call for a broader framework of security that goes 
beyond ending the insurgency, Malay-Muslim women have found themselves actively 
involved in civil society activities as representatives of sensitive and women’s issues. 
Local Muslim women have consolidated the peacebuilding effort through the Council 
of Muslim Women’s Organization Cooperation for Peace (CMCP) – a network of 21 
Muslim women’s organizations which was established in 2011.13 As more local – and 
specifically women – actors have become involved in the peacebuilding process, my 
research indicates that a new notion of security has gained a foothold in the region, 
this is peace which draws on the Islamic traditional framework.

Applying the theological approach of Salafism, CMCP aims to apply a purified 
belief and practices to strengthen a peaceful society in Patani region. It holds a 
multaqa Muslimah (Muslim women congress) as an annual activity. CMCP claims that 
for peacebuilding goals to succeed in the region, a campaign for structural reform is 
necessary to secure women’s presence in the peacebuilding process and to gener-
ate social recognition of women’s roles in the traditional Islamic patriarchal society. 
They do not dismiss religious discourse in this matter. Instead, they attempt to find 
an alternative path to build peace in society by using their professional platform as 
religious intellectuals. Hamidah Adae, the group’s leader and one of my main inter-
locutors, has played a significant role as an advisor for the network of the Southern 
Muslim Women’s Association (SMWA). Hamidah became deeply involved with the 
women’s network after her retirement from the College of Islamic Studies of Prince 
of Songkhla University in 2011. She often delivers speeches and shares her religious 
knowledge of Islamic peace concepts with students and villagers.

Since the group emerged, a more religious model, based on the Islamic culture 
of peace and non-violence, has gained prominence. As a halaqah, an Islamic study 
circle, the group differs from those sponsored by the state or international NGOs. 
CMCP’s members gather in houses or university meeting rooms in which they estab-
lish their own space. Hamidah and other group leaders, such as Maraim ‘kak Yae’ 
Samoh14, act as the consultant of each halaqah. Through group intervention specif-
ically targeted at healing the mental wounds of conflict through the adoption of a 
spiritual approach, they personally coach the members in dealing with their trauma. 
This spiritual approach as a healing method is important since women in conflict 

13 Their local cleric is Dr. Ismail Lutfi Chapakiya, the rector of Fatoni University, who published a book 
to promote peacebuilding from a religious perspective entitled Islam Sassanha Haeng Santiphap (Islam the 
Religion of Peace (2011).

14 Maraim ‘kak Yae’ Samoh is active in the Social Action Party (Phak Kit Sangkhom) since 1976.



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Amporn Marddent

areas revealed that many people have been drawn into the insurgency, neither for the 
liberation of the region nor for religious reasons, but in a quest for personal revenge 
after their family members were arrested, tortured, and stereotyped as murderous 
Malays by security forces.

Accordingly, alongside the political steps towards conflict resolution– such as the 
WPS agenda and UNSCR 1325 – as operable methods to overcome political griev-
ance, the spiritual narrative of peacebuilding should also be recognized as an effective 
approach in the peacebuilding process. It provides a normative justification for peace 
that could change the actors’ worldview. The halaqah group applies the pedagogy 
of persuasion to establish a peaceful space for women, students, and lecturers. This 
approach also aims at the attainment of inner peace. In their halaqah, participants 
assert the importance of reciting the Qur’anic verses regarding inner and outer peace 
(chapter 60, verse 7) and non-violence (chapter 4, verse 29). They also repeatedly 
brought the historical example of ethical and strategic acts of non-violence, such as 
the Treaty of Hudabiyya, which is seen to exemplify concessions on the part of the 
Prophet in order to secure peace.15 Seventeen CMCP members also attribute the act of 
non-violence to the avoidance of confrontation and quest for a peaceful co-existence 
by referencing the time when the Prophet Muhammad sent Muslims to the Christian 
King in Ethiopia to seek asylum from persecution by the Meccans.16

While the ethical subjects and the Prophet’s exemplary decisions are taken as ide-
ological references, members of CMCP also undergo a transitional phase through 
different dimensions by reflecting on their own lives and traumatic narratives. For 
example, they have to learn the notion of peace within the context of sulh, or peace-
ful resolution, in oneself. They refer to sulh in Ibn Qayyim’s interpretation, in which 
the term appears as the key concept of peace and reconciliation and the opposite of 
conflict and war.17 In this notion of reconciliation, CMCP members also mention the 
idea of patience (sabr) as a tool for succeeding in finding inner peace and for sup-
porting conflict transformation processes, where the internal struggle with oneself 
as the ‘greater jihad’ is important as the main narrative of self-transformation. These 
applications of Islamic narratives of peace are crucial, according to my interlocutor, 
to end the personal and emotional impulse of revenge.

As one of the pressing issues to be addressed in peacebuilding is to break down the 
entanglement between the various conceptualizations of peacebuilding and recon-
ciliation to practical implementation, CMCP also urges their members to be actively 
involved in promoting women’s participation in peacebuilding in cooperation with 
other grassroots women and the state. This includes urging their members to take 
membership in women’s organizations that can play an important role in maintain-
ing the social and political fabric of their communities, such as the above-mentioned 
Southern Women Network Overcoming Violence and Peace Agenda of Women 

15 A peace treaty was signed between the Muslims of Medinah and the Quraysh tribe as the Mecca op-
position in 628. The treaty came about as the Quraysh did not grant Muslims access to the holy site in 
Mecca. In order to make peace and decrease tensions between the two cities, the treaty enabled the Muslim 
community to perform their pilgrimage the following years (Armstrong, 2007, pp. 175-181).

16 Interview with two women scholars in Pattani, 8 December 2018.

17 Ibn Qayyim employs the salafi hermeneutic and follows Ibn Taymiyya’s exegesis on different issues 
(Moustafa, 2017, pp. 1-43).



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(PAOW). PAOW was established by local women leaders with the assistance of both 
national and international donors and has gathered different groups from the Chinese 
and Malay ethnic communities. As an interethnic and interreligious organization, 
PAOW has a significant role as the link between current peace negotiations and the 
current women’s peace network.

One of PAOW’s achievements, as my interviews with its leaders reveal, was the 
implementation of safety zones in 2005, which were agreed upon by the Thai military 
government and the Mara Patani (Majlis Syura Patani, the Patani Consultative Council), 
a coalition of several Patani Malay separatist groups.18 Today, POAW’s concept of 
safety zone is still the most referenced strategy on the issue of women’s participation 
in peace processes from the Thai government, the Mara Patani, local human rights 
activists, and groups of academics (Peace Survey, 2019). Buranajaroenkij’s (2017, p. 12) 
study finds that PAOW has been influential in the conflict area in promoting the idea 
of resistance against violence while urging women to take a social role as “peace-
makers”. The PAOW advocates that those who have limited access to justice should 
increase women’s public representation by mobilizing women in the public arena. It 
was able to deliver tangible results and increase women’s representation at the peace 
negotiation table. In my observation, today, PAOW has become the most preferable 
representative of actors in civil society to advocate women’s involvement in peace-
building, particularly as a middleperson who can invite various conflicting parties 
to a dialog forum. Because of its effective civil society organization and strategic 
integration of women into public affairs, various parties in the conflict area consider 
members of PAOW as influential actors in the peacebuilding process.

Regardless of its success, PAOW is facing numerous challenges. Abdulsomad’s 
(2017) study on women’s participation in the Pattani peace process finds that one 
of the obstacles to PAOW’s gender-inclusive participation is a lack of political lit-
eracy. Thus, she argues, the meaningful participation of women at the negotiating 
table, which is one of the most fundamental components of the WPS agenda, is 
largely unattainable. To this, my interlocutors responded that cultural gender prac-
tices have caused the difficulties to attain political literacy. My PAOW interlocutors 
explained that political knowledge and skills in politics are still largely men’s domain. 
At the same time, meaningful participation in the ceasefire negotiation is often still 
regarded as the sphere of (male) security actors.19 It is understood as the responsibility 
of men from different parties on the battlefield. 

18 In 2013, the first formal peace talk was initiated by Yingluck Shinawatra’s government. It acknowl-
edged the need for a political solution to the conflict. Dialog parties involved only the Thai government 
and the most powerful separatist group, Barisan Revolusi Nasional (BRN, National Revolutionary Front). 
The second round in 2015 was followed by the military. This time, talks were held with Mara Patani as a 
new actor but without BRN at the table (Pathan, 2019). Scholars argue that talks that do not include the 
BRN are meaningless because the people who are able to control the fighters are not at the negotiating 
table. The BRN refuses to join the peace talks unless some conditions are fulfilled. These include the re-
lease of political prisoners, amnesty for the BRN delegation, and an impartial international third party to 
mediate the talks (International Crisis Group, 2016). The government has been avoiding the internation-
alization of the conflict which could lead to foreign involvement (McDermott, 2013).

19 The call for safety zones has been adopted by women representatives as a security notion in the Deep 
South to promote peace. The panel that represents Malay-Muslim separatist leaders in exile had proposed 
to launch a limited ceasefire in the conflict area to enhance the peaceful resolution (International Crisis 
Group, 2016).



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Amporn Marddent

There is also an inherent stereotype of women’s security within certain spaces. 
For example, groups of women’s rights advocates and members of civil society, with 
whom I have cooperated for advancing gender equality in Muslim dominated areas, 
express that PAOW’s suggested safety zones agreement and the peacebuilding efforts 
in Patani are actually less gender-sensitive than expected. The safety zone concept 
with its focus on removing the conflict from certain spaces, such as markets, places 
of worship, and schools, has not raised gender security in larger public spaces.20 The 
choices to secure these spaces are based on the common stereotype of where women 
conduct their activities, and are hardly about ensuring human security in general. 
With such a lack of comprehensiveness in implementing the WPS agenda, the pro-
posed idea of women as peacemakers continues to position the role of women in the 
peacebuilding process as supporting an agenda developed by men. PAOW has also 
been criticized by other women’s groups because they have been neglecting other 
important issues, especially ending torture, extrajudicial killings, and sexual as well 
as gender-based violence (women’s forum in Narathiwat, 24 March 2017).

Furthermore, women leaders in PAOW, such as Soraya Jamjuree and Patimoh 
Poh-etae-da-o, who are acknowledged by the state and international agencies such 
as OWAFD and UN Women as representatives of the women’s group to become the 
driving force for women participation in the peace process, have raised two key nor-
mative issues in our several interviews. First, mainstreaming Salafi peace discourse 
is challenging because Salafism has often been blamed for religious fundamentalism 
that has deepened the conflict. The term Salafi is a sensitive tin in Thailand since it 
is related to religious fundamentalism and rebellious movements against a secular 
state; although this is not the case in southern Thailand. Followers and leaders of 
the Salafi movement, thus, rather prefer to identify themselves as ahli sunnah wal 
jammah.

Salafism as one of the Islamic reformist movements has urged Muslims to return 
to and strictly follow the sacred sources and to purify Islamic ideas and practices from 
later innovations (bid‘ah). Such fundamentalist views have often been assessed as 
exclusively religious and incompatible with the spirit of democratic dialog. Thailand’s 
Salafi movement, however, has advocated peace for social change through tarbiyyah 
(education) by working within the Thai constitutional framework. In Pattani, Salafi 
women’s groups are highly influenced by the teachings of the well-known tradition-
alist orthodox religious leader Ismail Lutfi Chapakia who is the founding rector of 
Fatoni University and an avid promoter of peacebuilding. As a local, he is also the most 
respected contemporary religious leader of the Saudi style of Salafism in Thailand to 
provide a religious narrative of peace (Liow, 2011, pp. 29-58; Yahprung, 2014).

Women’s activism requires a reconstruction of the practiced norms of women’s 
position in the Islamic society and their roles within the household. Hence, although 
PAOW was successful in bringing various actors to peace negotiations, it has since 

20 I am the main author of a joint CEDAW shadow report entitled “The Situation of the Rights of Malay-
Muslim Women in Southern Thailand”. It was submitted to the CEDAW committee and written by the 
PATANI Working Group for Monitoring of International Mechanisms (2017). The working group is main-
ly comprised of local advocates, members of civil society, academics, human rights activists, and lawyers 
from a collective of 14 organizations and networks. The report focuses primarily on the issues faced by 
Muslim women in Thailand’s Deep South in general, but also on security issues they face in public spaces.



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been prevented, if not excluded, from participating in the formal peace dialog because 
women in general are not viewed as representatives in the traditionally patriarchal 
Islamic society.

Due to the tendency of women to be favorable towards the peace project, wom-
en’s groups have taken on new tasks and responsibilities. They are key partners on 
the ground to support and advocate peace policies and their related strategies. 
Accordingly, in this context, WPS should be understood as a part of the peacekeep-
ing process in which the formal participation of women and their representation are 
highlighted. Women’s groups have an important role to play not only in preserving 
existing social norms but also in changing traditional social roles during a time of 
conflict. In many forums I have attended, the contention was raised that the endur-
ing conflict has changed traditional roles, and particularly how it has opened new 
spaces for women to redefine social norms and gender relations. When Malay-Muslim 
women acquire new social status through new responsibilities, it challenges exist-
ing social norms about women’s roles in civil society. For example, as their husbands 
had died because of the armed conflict, many women became the sole recognized 
caregiver of the family replacing male dominance. Yet, the voices of these wom-
en-victims are not united in public affairs because there is an absence of a unifying 
forum. Accordingly, as a collective, women’s groups lack the legitimacy to participate 
in peacebuilding discussions and are undermined by their male counterparts. This 
situation hinders their advancement towards increased participation.

Disagreement also emerges between activists. Although both share a common 
goal on delivering a gender equality narrative to the public, PAOW leaders like Soraya 
and Patimoh do not share the same strategy and trajectory in advancing the gender 
discourse. Soraya expressed that Malay-Muslim women are expected to firstly finish 
household chores and receive permission from their husbands before they leave their 
homes to engage in public affairs. Thus, she views that women’s activism as peace-
building engagement without completing these requirements could evoke a rupture 
in tradition.

Patimoh, the director of the women’s advocacy group We Peace, by contrast, tends 
to focus on changing the gender norms in which Soraya operates. Patimoh and her 
team urge for greater women’s participation in the political sphere. Women should 
not have to ask for permission as they have already earned a seat at the negotiating 
table. In her argument, household tasks need to be shared with male family members 
because women are now sharing the role of peace keepers. Patimoh highlights her 
activities on gender-based violence, women’s human rights, and their inclusion in 
politics. She chooses to adopt the tool of changing social norms rather than playing 
by them. By working with the government and receiving funds from national and 
international donors, her group’s activities frequently include both men and women. 
She has been criticized by women in the network and local religious leaders for risk-
ing Malay-Muslim women’s religiosity as they work in a mixed-sex context. An ideal 
situation would be if local men could also recognize the importance of their wives’ 
activism. For example, in the case of kak Yae, her candidacy for the Social Action 
Party right after her graduation from a university in Malaysia was encouraged by her 
husband and male local Malay politicians (Marddent, 2017, pp. 229-246).



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Amporn Marddent

FUTURE CHALLENGE: MAKING GENDER NORMS WORK

Women’s groups and Deep South civil society organizations have been studying the 
peace process in neighboring countries, such as in Mindanao, the Philippines, and 
in Aceh, Indonesia. They found that the WPS agenda and related tools have been 
successfully applied and implemented, particularly through NAPs for those areas.21 
Therefore, women’s groups and a few other activists in Patani are trying to apply the 
models of peace resolution from those two areas as a means to encourage the main-
streaming of gender equality norms as an intermediate step for the peace process.22 
The question is then: Which gender norms could be applied – or which are even 
suitable – in the context of the conflict in Thailand’s Deep South?

Although gender relations vary depending on culture and other aspects, it is 
accepted among theorists that gender is a set of discourses that represent and 
construct the social meaning of being a woman or a man (Connell, 1990). Gender 
discourses also affect how men and women are positioned in conflict areas, as con-
figurations of gender security are also operationalized in the local context. Here, the 
work of Yaliwe Clarke (2013), who has intensively researched a range of civil society 
organizations in military societies with a state-centric approach to security in the 
south of Africa, is essential. She develops analytic perspectives around the meaning 
of gendered security for women, and therefore argues that security should be focused 
on “collective security” through which women are also ascribed the right to being 
“secure”. She proposes that legislation simply does not change norms; norms would 
likely change through dialog and learning spaces as well as through arguments and 
agreements that would encourage the change (Björnberg, 2012). Clarke’s (2013, p. 89) 
perspective on gender and security traces the debates concerning women’s situated 
knowledge and the essential aspect of peaceful femininities.

In conflict areas, she underscores the role of militarized patriarchal gender iden-
tities and the place of subservient masculinities and femininities as root causes of 
war. In her analysis, the ways in which the complex relationship between gendered 
capitalist processes and militarism has impacted women are particularly important 
(Clarke, 2013, pp. 88-90). Consequently, security in the feminist security framework 
has expanded beyond state security to human security. To reconceptualize violence 
from the perspective of feminist scholarship, violence at home and in war ought to be 
considered equal violations of human – particularly women’s – security. Thus, if we 
follow Clarke’s approach, gender norms in the security narrative of Thailand’s  Deep 
South need to be viewed from the two main subject positions of women: (1) as victims 
of conflict-related sexual and gender-based violence; and (2) as agents of change.

This paper has exemplified how local women leaders have attempted to catalyze 
a security discourse that is akin to what Clarke (2013) identifies as being essential 
for a gender-sensitive concept of security. In relation to the comprehensive concept 
of collective human security, women have already proposed extending the scope of 
the agenda to create peace and stability for individuals and society. They also put 

21 Countries that have adopted a NAP in support of UNSCR 1325 are currently on the list of Women’s 
International League for Peace and Freedom (2019).

22 Discussion with two human rights analysts and human rights defenders, Bangkok, 6 July and 10 Sep-
tember 2018.



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Religious Discourse and Gender Security in Southern Thailand

high consideration on the designs offered by the state and the UN while also having 
attempted to navigate these powerful sets of permissible and reproducible hierarchi-
cal ordering policies with pragmatic peacebuilding steps. In this endeavor they have 
used Salafism as a peacebuilding narrative and have shown how a fundamentalist 
religious narrative could support a peacebuilding effort in a secular state. 

The complexity arises, then, not only from the dimension of participation, but 
the contestation of norms as they are negotiated with their religious and traditional 
values as well as the tools the state makes available to them in their attempts to cre-
ate an alternative setting for peacebuilding. For example, from the critical point of 
view of women activists in the region, the WPS agenda might be the step needed for 
including more women from grassroots levels, but the state’s implementation of the 
agenda, specifically its failure to include it in a NAP, fails to be transformative. Thus, 
women leaders have to navigate both the patriarchal culture and the structural set-
ting of religious society and the state’s failure to consider their voices in their policies 
to address what they term “unrest”. They further criticize the state’s implementation 
of the WPS agenda as it does not aim at structural change in the region but supports 
gender inequality. Thus, women’s meaningful participation in peace processes has 
become stuck or entangled not only within state agendas and global bureaucracy of 
norms, but also on the ladder of existing local social norms.

To breakdown traditional structures and the militarization of society, local women 
peacebuilders confront the obstacle of inequalities with socio-cultural spaces that 
attempt to address the difficulties women face in trying to obtain a seat at the nego-
tiating table. The masculine ‘heroes’, the Thai military government, and the current 
opposition party, Mara Patani, have been officially ascribed a peacekeeping role. This 
is intimately connected to the traditionally gendered norms that promote the power 
of men over women. Proposals made by women are only seen as symbolic, as women 
cannot be a part of the formal decision-making process. Moreover, the collective forms 
of development remain in managing the existing situation of women in conflict areas. 
Nevertheless, women are busy working on the ground. Their time is occupied not only 
by taking care of family members but also by running projects and mobilizing women 
in the communities to get engaged – no matter how limited – in peace forums.

During the ongoing conflict in the southernmost provinces of Thailand, con-
sideration of gender and contextual aspects are fundamental dimensions that all 
stakeholders should address to reach a gendered solution to both war and peace. 
In relation to the WPS agenda, it still has a clear aspiration towards deconstructing 
patriarchal gender orders in favor of equality. Social norms enable gender discrim-
ination, and this, in turn, limits women’s abilities to engage in the formal level of 
peace processes. If significant steps forward are to be made in taking a gender-based 
approach to the issue of security, the notion of equality and meaningful participation 
of women in human and social security are crucial matters that need to be addressed 
in the relationship between gender and security.

CONCLUSION

In order to address gender-sensitivity in peace processes, local women are push-
ing for a public discourse on women’s peace policy, including the UNSCR 1325 



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Amporn Marddent

and subsequent resolutions23, the CEDAW, SDG 5, and SDG 16 in particular. They 
accordingly hope to join negotiations as part of the state’s top-down peacebuilding 
policy and carve out a space for more bottom-up and gender-sensitive peacebuilding 
processes while also reconceptualizing local norms in order to formally guarantee 
more gender freedom. The WPS agenda, UNSCR 1325, and its related mechanisms 
will not be able to deliver greater peacebuilding success if these are only interpreted 
as a means to fit women into the current peace and security paradigm, rather than 
as opportunities for assessing and redefining peace and security through a gender 
perspective.

In Thailand’s  Deep South, the meaningful participation of women in peace pro-
cesses has been wedged between the state’s top-down agenda and the hierarchy of 
local social norms that often put women in marginalized positions: on one hand, 
men’s dominant military notion of security and, on the other hand, religious and 
traditional discourses about the role of women in society. Thus, in order to create a 
collective notion of security, it is necessary to address the sources of inequality and to 
identify the decision-making institutions in conflict resolution. Efforts to strengthen 
women’s participation in conflict resolution should go beyond the evaluation of par-
ticipation rates; they should also recognize their role as agents in delivering both 
formal and informal peacemaking policies. Accordingly, evaluating women’s partici-
pation in the peacebuilding process should also pay attention to the implementation 
of the WPS agenda as well as other related mechanisms, and look at how they are 
consequently contested. This paper provides examples of how women actors’ sense 
of ownership in the peacebuilding agendas is also diverse. Women belong to different 
agencies, and this means that they are associated with different groups and networks. 
Moreover, as the differences between the PAOW, CMCP, Soraya’s, and Patimoh’s cir-
cles show, they have various means and strategies to achieve their conceptualization 
of peace. There is, therefore, no one-size fits all policy for engaging women in the 
peacebuilding process. Conflict resolution in Patani is challenging; there are multiple 
points of view, and when certain policies and local norms are inconsistent in provid-
ing a space for women, they place women on a lower step in the hierarchy than men. 
This is primarily the result of how women are positioned in a specific context, this is 
the home. 



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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Amporn Marddent is the chair of the Center of Excellence on Women and Social Security and 
a lecturer at the School of Liberal Arts, Walailak University, Thailand.

► Contact: mamporn@gmail.com

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This paper is part of the studies Women, Security and Peace Building in Asia, which was funded by 
Thai Research Fund, and Women Networks Increase Accountability of Religious and Governmental 
Institutions to Reduce Violence Against Women in the Deep South of Thailand, which was funded by 
Oxfam. The draft for this paper was written during my fellowship at the Collaborative Research 
Center 1095 “Discourses of Weakness and Resource Regimes”, Goethe University Frankfurt, 
Germany, funded by the German Research Foundation (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft). 
I would like to thank Ario Seto for his suggestions throughout this paper.