In 1993, a leading scholar of international relations, Samuel Huntington, published an article, “The Clash of Civilizations?” in Foreign Affairs. He argues that, rather than ideological differences or economic competition, the fundamental source of conflict in the future would be differences among civilizations. The state as a source of identity is weakening, whereas religious and other cultural identities that make up civilizations will replace the state in primacy; cultural identity tends to be less mutable, less able to be compromised, than political or economic identities. Differences among civilizations strike at the core of human singularity and are increasingly evident, given that the world is becoming a smaller place. The clash of civilizations will dominate global politics in the twenty-first century, and the fault lines between civilizations will become the world's new battle lines. Huntington specifically points to conflicts between Islamic civilization and Western civilization to illustrate how the clash of civilizations will come to dominate global politics.

Huntington's thesis garnered broad attention. The general public and mass media were terrified by such speculation. Many scholars from various disciplines embraced the prophecy, pointing to the possibility of wars between different “civilizations”. However, some scholars, especially those working on Islam and Muslim politics, questioned Huntington's thesis. John Esposito (1999) maintains that the thesis overlooks the plural nature of Islam, the diverse political realities of the Muslim world, and its diverse relations with the West. He argues that disputes and civil wars have more to do with political and socio-economic grievances than with religion and that there are similarities and constructive connections between Islamic civilization and the Western world. Bassam Tibi (2001) contends that Islam as a civilization is composed of a variety of local cultures and, as such, to take Islam as monolithic vis-à-vis the West is misleading. He adds that Islam is both a religious faith and a cultural system but not a political ideology. It is not Islam or Islamic civilization but the politicization of Islam that is not only hostile to other civilizations but is also a threat even to Islam itself. The heterogeneity and “clash” within Islam are emphasized by Robert Hefner (2001; 2002), who points to struggles within Muslim societies, especially Indonesia, where the proponents of civil society and democracy have clashed with the supporters of an anti-pluralistic Islamic state in imagining the Muslim public.

My roommate Najmudin is a fascinating individual. He is a native of Baunae Jeudong village, about 15 kilometres away from Guba. But given that his maternal grandmother and relatives live in Guba, he has travelled to the village since he was young. He spent his youth and early adulthood in Yala city with “unconventional” friends, many of them Thai Buddhists. Then, he worked as a driver for Shakib, the Arzeulee SAO chief executive who at the time was an antique dealer. However, for various reasons, he quit that job and began to work for other people, mostly as a driver. After two years of being a freelance driver, Najmudin settled into the house of the family I stayed with, mostly driving and doing other chores for the family. The day I began my field research in Guba, Saifuldin and other family members assigned me to stay on the second floor of the house. The floor has one room, which belongs to Aiman (the homeowner), and outside the room is an old bed with a shabby mattress and pillow covered by a torn mosquito net, where Najmudin spends the night. The empty space between Aiman's room and Najmudin's area was allocated for me to make a sleeping place with some old mats. It is largely from our before-sleeping talks that I gradually learned how fascinating Najmudin's life is.

In addition to helping the family out with various matters, Najmudin does some work for one kratom cocktail producer/seller, getting paid in product. If there is no work in the family, he hangs out with his friends, most of them living on the fringes of the law, during the day and returns home late at night. His life is like a mystery, and many residents regard it as extraordinary. However, he is still committed to being a good Muslim. He regularly performs Friday noon prayers at the mosque, and he attempts to fast during Ramadan despite the pain this causes because of his kratom addiction. Meanwhile, he also considers himself a Malay. In addition to participating in various Malay cultural activities with Aiman, he wears a waistband with ta krud (tiny, rolled pieces of metal inscribed with magic spells), a local belief he considers not in conflict with Islam, because, he said, “I don't revere it”.

This book is about how the Malay Muslims of Guba, a village in Thailand's Deep South, live their lives in the wake of the ongoing insurgency that was reinvigorated in 2004. It argues that the unrest is the effect of the way in which different forms of sovereignty converge around the residents of this region. It also argues that the residents at the same time have cultivated themselves and obtained and enacted agency through the sovereigns. As such, rather than asking why the violence is increasing and who is behind it, like most scholarly works on the topic, I examine how different forms of sovereignty impose their subjectivities on the residents, how they have converged in so doing and what tensions have followed, and how people have dealt with these tensions and cultivated themselves and obtained and enacted agency through the sovereigns.

The question of sovereignty in southern Thailand dates back for many centuries. Between the fourteenth and eighteenth centuries, the question revolved around the ambiguity of sovereignty over the region. On the one hand, the region was composed of Malay sultanates, whose sovereignty had to be realized. On the other hand, the region was regarded by successive Siamese kingdoms as vassal states whose sovereignty needed to be recognized as well. A suzerain-vassal relationship was attempted, in order to address the ambiguity, but to no avail, resulting in wars between the Malay sultanates and Siam that recurred over the course of centuries. The question of ambiguous sovereignty was put to an end when the sultanates were incorporated into Siam in a process that began in the late eighteenth century and was only completed at the turn of the twentieth century. Now, Siamese sovereignty was the only form of sovereignty to be realized over the clearly demarcated territory.

However, singular sovereignty over the territory did not put the question to an end. Rather, it generated a new question and a new form of conflict — a question of sovereignty over subjectivity, which led to the emergence of separatist movements. That is to say, although Siam's nation-building project was first launched inclusively, it was later carried out exclusively, associating the nation with Thai ethnicity and Buddhism at the expense of other ethnicities and religions.

During a hot, breezy afternoon in Guba — a Malay Muslim village in southern Thailand — a schoolchild halted and reoriented a routine conversation at a roadside pavilion by bringing in a decorated, footed tray. The tray had been made for the opening ceremony and parade for Tadika Samphan, an intramural sports game among members of Taman Didikan Kanak Kanak (Tadika) in Raman district of Yala Province. The tray contained tricoloured sticky rice that inscribed a sentence, “เรารักนายหลวง” (rao rak nay luang), purposely meant to mean “We love the king”. It would not have drawn much attention from those at the pavilion if the word for “king” had been spelled as it should have been. Instead of “ในหลวง” (nai luang), “the king” — the most commonly used phrase for designating the Thai monarch — what was inscribed instead was “นายหลวง” (nay luang), a term that literally means “Mister Luang” and that, for Thai-speaking people, has nothing to do with the Thai monarch.

After my remarks on the title nay luang, the others at the pavilion had various reactions. Some were surprised and said they had never before realized that the nay spelling was incorrect, despite the virtual omnipresence of the phrase rao rak nai luang nationwide, especially after state-supported campaigns in 2006. Others — especially those who had been involved in making the decorated tray — seemed embarrassed, as they had been particularly attentive in making it, and it had already been displayed in the parade and at the official opening ceremony, where senior government officials had been present. “It should not have happened”, one of them said in disappointment. Still, although some wondered if the incorrectly spelled phrase nay luang could be considered blasphemous to the highly revered Thai monarch, most of them did not take the issue seriously, considering it a small mistake they could joke about among themselves.

The misspelled rao rak nay luang would have simply passed as an illiteracy issue, a failure of formal education, or an unintended consequence of the state's propaganda had it not been written by a group of Malay Muslims from southern Thailand, in a period when Malay Muslims were attempting to negotiate their subjectivity in questions relating to the state, their ethnicity, and religion.

The separatist movements in Thailand's Deep South, which reached their peak in the late 1960s and 1970s, started to decline in the 1980s (Forbes 1982, p. 1061). On the one hand, the decline was brought about by changes in central government policy towards the region. The forced assimilation policy of the Phibun government was discontinued, Malays’ cultural rights and religious freedoms were encouraged, many separatists were offered amnesty, and a “development as security” approach was implemented in the region. On the other hand, the decline also resulted from conflicts and ruptures within the separatist movements themselves and from the movements’ failure to gain the broad support of the local Malay population (Croissant 2005, p. 23). This led observers to describe the separatist movements as “waning” (Rabasa 2003, p. 55) and “relatively quiet” (Tan 2003, p. 109). However, the unrest was resurrected around the turn of the millennium. A total of 1,975 violent incidents were recorded between 1993 and the end of November 2004. Of these, 21 per cent occurred before 2001, and 79 per cent took place from 2001 onward (Croissant 2005, p. 24). On 4 January 2004, about thirty armed men stormed Krom Luang Narathiwat Ratchanakarin Military Camp in Narathiwat Province, stealing 300 weapons and killing four soldiers. Incidents that occurred at Krue Se Mosque in Pattani and in Tak Bai, Narathiwat on 28 April and 25 October 2004, killing thirty-two and eighty-five Malay Muslims, respectively, aggravated the situation. These incidents combine to mark the year 2004 as the beginning of a new round, or “dramatic upsurge” (Askew and Helbardt 2012, p. 779), of unrest in the Deep South, which from 2004 to 2016 claimed 6,850 lives and 12,547 wounded and still goes on unabated (Deep South Incident Database 2016; Srisompob and Supaporn 2016).

Guba has not been immune to the resurrection of southern unrest. Drive-by shootings, roadside bombings, arson, and the distribution of threatening leaflets have not been uncommon to the settlement. However, Guba's specificity — its division into three different parts (northern, central, and southern), the “wildness” of its recent past, and its cordial memories and bonds with the Raman Sultanate demonstrated in the previous chapter — differentiates the ways in which the unrest has played out in the area.

INTRODUCTION

Myanmar has undergone significant reforms in recent years. A commonly accepted view is that, unlike many of the political shifts experienced elsewhere in the world in the twenty-first century, their impetus came not “from below” but from national elites, prompted by military decisions to open the country to the world and begin to democratize (Pederson 2012, Fink 2014). Much of the literature on Myanmar's transition thus focuses on national dynamics, seeking insights on what has changed, why, and how, by examining shifts among political elites, the business community, and the upper echelons of the Tatmadaw (see Pederson 2012; ICG 2012; Jones 2014). These changes emerged from a variety of elite-led processes, including the drafting of a new constitution in 2008, and accelerated under the Thein Sein-led government starting in 2011. Yet while analysing the motives and strategies of elites is vital for understanding the national impetus behind Myanmar's reforms, it leaves little space for assessing how the transition has played out among the broader populace, particularly in the rural villages where seventy per cent of Myanmar's people live. It also overlooks how the prevailing social institutions at the local level have responded to the various forms and sources of contention (actual and/or potential) inherently accompanying such major changes, and the associated implications for policy and practice in Myanmar.

This paper seeks to contribute to research on Myanmar's social transformation by analysing how governance reforms and changes in the life experiences of people in rural communities are altering the social contract at the village level. The paper argues that the nature and extent of the “social contract”—i.e., the terms on which citizens interact with one another, and the basis on which contending views of citizens’ core rights and responsibilities are negotiated with and legitimately upheld by the state—is being re-written in Myanmar. Three areas of change, especially since 2011, have affected how citizens in rural areas interact with the state: village governance, citizens’ expectations of the state, and connectivity. Responding to these challenges will require strategies informed by the best available evidence.

A key principle underpinning Myanmar's peace process has been the principle of “all-inclusiveness.” Initially, this principle represented a commitment to the inclusion of all ethnic armed organizations (EAOs) in a nation-wide ceasefire agreement (NCA) that would serve as a basis for reconciliation, political dialogue and negotiation over constitutional reform. When President Thein Sein's transition government (2011–16) began making peace overtures, the principle was widely embraced by EAOs and the military, and ultimately enshrined in the text of the NCA. When Aung San Suu Kyi's National League for Democracy (NLD) came to power in 2016 and made the peace process its top priority it, too, championed the principle of “all-inclusiveness.” However, as the NLD and the military struggle to convince more EAOs to sign the NCA, it has become apparent that, for all its good intentions, the principle of “all-inclusiveness” has become an obstacle to the peace process. This chapter reviews the peace process to date to examine the problems that have emerged around the concept of “all-inclusiveness.” Drawing on interviews with signatories of the NCA and other key stakeholders, the chapter highlights a central challenge confronting the government in its efforts to advance Myanmar's stalled peace process.

THE ORIGINS OF INCLUSIVENESS

When the NLD was elected in 2015 as Myanmar's first civilian government in more than half a century, NLD leader Aung San Suu Kyi declared that reconciliation with the country's fractured and warring ethnic groups would be her government's top priority. The NLD assumed leadership of a peace process initiated under Thein Sein's Union Solidarity and Development Party (USDP)-led transition government (2011–16). As part of wider efforts to end six decades of conflict and to build a new political culture based on compromise and consensus, President Thein Sein made peace overtures to the country's multiple ethnic armed organizations (EAOs). The USDP government acknowledged that peace could not be achieved if the central government refused to negotiate political settlements with EAOs or provide stability and development opportunities for the frontier regions. From 2011 the government initiated a series of talks and confidence-building measures designed to eventually lead to peace agreements and political integration into a reformed federal democratic system of government.

Myanmar is currently undergoing significant political and social reforms, in a context of ethnic and religious diversity, growing inequalities and ongoing armed conflict. Critical to the success of reforms, and to the ongoing peace process, is sustained political legitimacy. Where previous governments have sought legitimacy based on notions of security, the challenge for current and future governments is to build legitimacy on a foundation of equitable pluralism. In such a context, social protection offers a pathway to build public trust, and establish legitimacy based on consent, consistent with social contract theory which obliges mutual benefits and responsibilities between the state and citizens. Although Myanmar has a rich tradition of non-formal social protection and norms of reciprocity, the wider implementation of social protection is still in its infancy. However, the policy direction and implementation approach followed in developing social protection mechanisms are crucial to the success of building public trust and a sustainable peace process. This includes ensuring adequate state funding, potentially through: appropriating mineral revenues; giving sufficient attention to inequalities; identifying and building on existing repositories of social capital; facilitating a more devolved and localized approach to planning and delivery of social protection; and developing more localized approaches to accountability and transparency.

This paper is organized in five sections and is based on existing literature, reports by relevant government departments, development partners, and media as well as personal observation through interactions with ordinary citizens. The first section outlines the key issues of political legitimacy in the Myanmar context, including why political legitimacy is important in the current power structure in Myanmar. The second section considers the “trust deficit” which currently challenges the development of political legitimacy in Myanmar. The third section introduces the general concept of social protection, and the fourth section summarizes historical trends and the current status of social protection in Myanmar. The final section draws on both international evidence and evidence from Myanmar on how social protection acts to build trust and legitimacy and concludes with recommendations on the future direction of social protection in Myanmar, in particular approaches to social protection policy which can contribute to building public trust.