Work On The Southern Thai Conflict
From 2005 to 2010, McCargo worked primarily on the violent conflict affecting Thailand’s southern border provinces, spending a year driving around the region and interviewing more than 270 informants. His Southern Thai project has resulted in two more books to date: the edited collection Rethinking Thailand’s Southern Violence (2007), a revised version of a special issue of the journal Critical Asian Studies; and his research monograph Tearing Apart the Land: Islam and Legitimacy in Southern Thailand (2008). The latter volume has been widely reviewed; Time magazine wrote:
No armchairs for this author: he researched the book by crisscrossing southern Thailand in a temperamental 1989 Mercedes, hastening back to the town of Pattani by nightfall to avoid militant booby traps. McCargo is the real McCoy.
Pacific Affairs wrote of Tearing Apart the Land: “The nuances and complexities of this argument can be obtained only by a thorough reading of the book. It is by far the best analysis to date of the complexities of life in the insurgent area.” (Volume 82, No. 4 – Winter 2009/2010, pp. 740–41). In a full length review essay in London Review of Books, Joshua Kurlantzick declared: ‘Thailand, once known as one of the most stable democracies in Asia, is in political and economic crisis. . . . Southern Thailand now resembles a war zone. . . . McCargo gives a thorough explanation of why unrest began in southern Thailand, and why it has spread. . . .’(25 March 2010). Reviewing the book in the Journal of Asian Studies (May 1010) Robert W. Hefner wrote ‘McCargo has sifted through the details of this tragic conflict with extraordinary diligence and insight. The result is a small masterpiece of investigative rigor and balance.’
McCargo’s core argument is that the Southern conflict is a political problem; militants are tapping into local resentment concerning Bangkok’s refusal to grant the region any real say in the management of its affairs. Without some form of political compromise, the conflict may prove intractable – but such a solution remains perfectly possible.
Tearing Apart the Land won the Asia Society's inaugural Bernard Schwartz Book Prize for 2009, worth $20,000 Jury co-chair Professor Carol Gluck described it as a 'vivid on-the-ground account of the Thai insurgency showing how national politics, rather than minority religion, drives the violence that is too often ascribed either to ethnicity or Islam. This is a lesson that applies not only to Southeast Asia but to many parts of the world. McCargo published a second single-authored book on the South, Mapping National Anxieties: Thailand's Southern Conflict in 2012.
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