Muslim Resistance in Southern Thailand and Southern Philippines: Religion, Ideology and Politics

This study analyses the ongoing conflicts in southern Thailand and southern Philippines between indigenous Muslim minorities and their respective central governments. In the main, the monograph argues that while the conflicts in the two countries have taken on religious hues as a consequence of both local and external factors, on present evidence they share little with broader radical global Islamist and Jihadist ideologies and movements, and their contents and contexts remain primarily political, reflected in the key objective of some measure of self-determination and locale, in terms of the territorial and ideational boundaries of activism and agitation. Furthermore, though both conflicts appear on the surface to be driven by similar dynamics and mirror each other, they are different in several fundamental ways.
          
           The Policy Studies series is published by the East-West Center. Available exclusively from ISEAS for distribution in Asia.