The Political Neglect of Thailand’s Deep South Cannot Continue 

In the Deep South provinces of Thailand, violence is commonplace in January. In this month in 2025, two border patrol officers were killed in Narathiwat when their truck hit an explosive device. Around the same time, nine village volunteers were injured when a bomb planted on a motorcycle exploded outside a police station in Pattani. It was on a January day in 2004 when a raid on the Fourth Development Battalion of the Royal Thai Army at Pileng Camp killed four soldiers and led to the capture of over 400 weapons. The incident has been credited with marking the return of violence in the Deep South that has continued for more than 20 years.

Just after midnight on January 11, still unknown attackers detonated bombs at 11 petrol stations across three provinces – Yala, Narathiwat, and Pattani – one of which detonated near a Border Patrol Police unit. As usual, Thai authorities were quick to respond, sealing off the affected areas and commencing a forensic investigation. Prime Minister Anutin Charnvirakul downplayed the events, suggesting the attacks were timed with local elections rather than marking a return to insurgent violence.

While terrorism is the short-term cause, a more pressing concern should be Thailand’s continued neglect of the Deep South, which, ahead of the general election on February 8, has garnered scant attention. Political attention has been almost exclusively on Thailand’s eastern frontier, where a dispute with Cambodia flared into open conflict twice in 2025. A strong case can be made that the dissolution of Parliament in mid-December and a quick snap election will benefit Anutin’s Bhumjaithai party, particularly as fighting raged deep into December. National attention on the Cambodian border also serves nationalist audiences and benefits military-aligned parties.

However, it is clear that the Deep South provinces haven’t fully entered into Anutin’s political calculus. Bhumjaithai has benefited from the implosion of the Pheu Thai-led government after Prime Minister Paetongtarn Shinawatra’s crippling June 15 phone call with former Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen and her subsequent dismissal in a judicial coup. Anutin has also benefited from anti-Thaksin sentiment in the South and the collapse of the former Democrat Party stronghold built by former Prime Minister and former President of the Privy Council Prem Tinsulanonda in the 1980s. Instead, with the help of Akanat Promphan, a southern power broker and former minister of interior under the Paetongtarn government, has worked connections to develop critical parts of Chumphon, Surat Thani, and Ranong. While these resource-rich and politically important regions have continued to draw development interests, the Deep South remains an isolated and alienated region.

Anutin’s lone move toward peace in the southern provinces was also a calculated political maneuver, arguably designed to appease the military shortly after he claimed power in September. In early October 2025, Anutin appointed retired Gen. Somsak Rungsita, the former head of the National Security Council, as chief negotiator in the south, ensuring a string of negotiators all with connections to the Thai military and the maintenance of the political status quo.

Similar charges of neglect can be attributed to Pheu Thai. Even though the Paetongtarn government was weighed down by the conservative establishment’s long-standing animosity toward the party, it missed critical opportunities to make inroads in the Deep South. When the statute of limitations passed on a last-gasp lawsuit aiming to bring the military perpetrators of the 2004 Tak Bai massacre to justice, Paetongtarn issued a half-hearted apology, even though one of the accused, Pisal Wattanawongkiri, the Commander of the 4th Army Region at the time and a Pheu Thai MP, was allowed to flee abroad. No thought was given to the enforcement of arrest warrants, which facilitated the failure of the accused to show up in court.

Pheu Thai is now led by Yodchanan Wongsawat, a nephew of Thaksin and son of former Prime Minister Somchai Wongsawat. However, campaign appearances have run the gamut of Pheu Thai’s strongholds, from Lamphun to Chiang Mai, as it has traditionally performed well in the north and northeast of the country. Yodchanan has been pressed to not only balance the negative impact of Thaksin on the Deep South, but to defend his uncle’s dubious record in the north, which also extends to criticisms of past negotiations of MoUs with the Cambodian government and his family’s once cozy relations with the Hun family. Predictably, there has rarely been mention of Pheu Thai solutions or policies aimed directly at the Deep South. Instead, more of the same populist policies, such as a guaranteed minimum income, are on Pheu Thai’s agenda, which are intended to up the ante on Bhumjaithai.

Charges of political neglect have circulated throughout the region for years, most recently in an April 2025 NIDA poll, which found that more than a third of people found conditions “as bad as ever,” with more than half suggesting the security situation had not improved or had deteriorated over the past 20 years.

Moreover, neglect is itself a form of violence. When harm accumulates gradually over time, with the bulk of injustices disproportionately affecting a marginalized community in one part of the country, it is akin to a social and political neglect, which has elsewhere been referred to as “slow violence.” This shortened political cycle, coming after the failures of the past two Pheu Thai governments and the lack of attention to the Deep South by all of the contending parties, is evidence of more of the same.