The Construction of Security Agendas: Copenhagen School Securitisation

To understand the Thai state's response to the insurgency, we draw upon the Copenhagen School's securitisation framework, the dominant analytical approach to the social construction of security (Croft Reference Croft2012: 76–77). Securitisation turns an issue into a matter of security, seen as a “special kind of politics” or a “more extreme version” of politicisation (Buzan et al. Reference Buzan, Ole and de Wilde1998: 23). According to the classical Copenhagen School scholars, the speech act is crucial in the process of securitisation. The “enunciation of security itself creates a new social order wherein ‘normal politics’ is bracketed” (Balzacq Reference Balzacq2005: 171, emphasis in the original) by the existential threat against the referent object and the consequent emergency measures to deal with the threat. Classical securitisation takes the securitising speech act by the securitising actor as an illocutionary one, whereby the performance of saying ‘security’ consequently creates security (Balzacq Reference Balzacq2005: 175), akin to the pronouncement of a marriage. Consequently, the illocutionary speech act and the exceptional measures that follow, in response to the threat, are vital elements in the securitisation framework of constructing security.

The use of the securitisation framework has proliferated since its introduction by the Copenhagen School (Gad and Petersen Reference Gad and Petersen2011: 316). It has been applied in studies throughout the world (Bilgin Reference Bilgin2011; Jones Reference Jones2011) and with respect to different issue areas, from traditional security (Stritzel and Chang Reference Stritzel and Sean C.2015), to the entire gamut of NTS threats (Emmers Reference Emmers2003; Febrica Reference Febrica2010; Marchand Reference Marchand2017; McDonald Reference McDonald2012). Furthermore, securitisation can also operate across borders. For instance, Holger Stritzel (Reference Stritzel2014) showed how the securitisation of organised crime was ‘translated’ when it travelled from Italy and the US to Germany. This is similar to Amitav Acharya's (Reference Acharya2009) argument that discourse and ideas are adapted locally when transmitted to distinct environments and adopted in relation to particular events. The widespread use of the securitisation framework has also garnered a host of critiques that served to further improve several of its elements (see Balzacq et al. Reference Balzacq, Sarah and Jan2016; McDonald Reference McDonald2008).

One especially prominent strand of criticism disparages the classical focus on both the speech act and the exceptional or emergency security practices in response to a threat. This critique is inspired by the Paris School, another branch of critical security studies that also views security as socially constructed, although in this case by the practices of security practitioners (Bigo Reference Bigo2002; see also Croft Reference Croft2012: 76–77). Whereas classical Copenhagen School securitisation was linguistically oriented and discourse-centric, the Paris School sees security as “designed through different technical or physical modalities” (Balzacq et al. Reference Balzacq, Sarah and Jan2016: 504). Issues thus become security matters through implementing security practices, rather than by simply labelling something as a security issue; and the securitising actors are therefore the security practitioners (Bigo Reference Bigo2002; Salter and Mutlu Reference Salter and Can E.2013). For instance, in his study of transnational crime in Southeast Asia, Emmers (Reference Emmers2003) emphasised that whilst transnational crime became a matter of security debate in the region, especially within the region's primary international organisation, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), the threat of transnational crime nevertheless only remained at the level of rhetoric without tangible regional security practices in place to combat the threat. As Pouliot (Reference Pouliot2008: 265) highlighted: “the Copenhagen School asserts that security is practice; but in restricting its focus to traditional discourse analysis, it evacuates the practical logics that make the securitizing discourse possible”.

The practice-oriented Paris School further claims that when dealing with a security threat, exceptional measures may not even be necessary or preferred; instead, the mundane and repetitive become important measures to guard against the threat that is being securitised (Bigo Reference Bigo2002; Huysmans Reference Huysmans2011). As Bigo (Reference Bigo2002: 73) of the Paris School put it: “Securitization works through everyday technologies, through the effects of power that are continuous rather than exceptional, through political struggles, and especially through institutional competition within the professional security field in which the most trivial interests are at stake” (see also Huysmans Reference Huysmans2011; Wæver Reference Wæver, Tickner and Blaney2012). For example, Huysmans's (Reference Huysmans2006) study of migration in the European Union (EU) highlighted how regular and banal practices such as border controls generated insecurity, which consequently enabled the securitisation of migration and asylum seekers in the EU. Moreover, it is possible for the exceptional to subsequently become routine. Israel and Singapore are interesting cases in this regard. In Israel, securitisation has taken place so ‘deeply’ that “to politicize is to securitize”; “normal politics” are “immersed in the discourse and praxis of ‘existential threats’” (Abulof Reference Abulof2014: 400, emphasis in the original). As for Singapore, the securitisation of the island-state's vulnerabilities in the immediate years after decolonisation has been so successful and become so entrenched that such a “discourse of vulnerability” has thoroughly pervaded Singapore's strategic culture, resulting in an ever-present “siege mentality” (Chang Reference Chang, Ho and Ong-Webb2019).

For this study, we move beyond the contentious classical Copenhagen School position to a reworked securitisation framework, whereby securitisation can take place either through: (1) discourse, in the form of the speech act; and/or (2) the security practices themselves, whether these are exceptional or routine (Floyd Reference Floyd2010, Reference Floyd2016). In considering the Thai case study, we analyse the discourse of Thaksin and his government to identify securitising speech acts regarding the separatist threat as well as the security practices the administration pursued in relation to the Deep South. Thus, we are able to provide a more holistic examination of the upsurge in violence in the early 2000s, which proved crucial to determining the future course of the conflict (Ball and Farrelly Reference Ball and Nicholas2012: 15) and is relevant to understanding the current situation. Prior to this, the next section first discusses the most widely cited explanations of the surge in violence.

Prevalent Explanations of the Thai Southern Conflict

Existing explanations of the revived conflict in Thailand's Deep South fall into three broad clusters. The first group of arguments is the ‘entrenched enmities’ explanation. These arguments are predominantly concerned with the historical roots of the insurgency and highlight discrimination against the southern Muslim population and exploitation of the resources of the former Patani sultanate as driving factors of the resurgent violence (Croissant Reference Croissant2005; Jory Reference Jory2007; Thanet Reference Thanet2006). The armed insurgency that emerged in the 1950s was basically defeated after a shift from a military response to a more comprehensive political approach in the 1980s (HRW 2007: 16). Public development programs, amnesty offered by the government, and institutional reforms designed to address inequalities and maltreatment, along with other instruments, proved effective measures to end support for the rebels. Nevertheless, despite this recess, southern Muslims continue to harbour grievances, especially regarding their lack of opportunities in education and employment (McCargo Reference McCargo2006a: 3). Croissant (Reference Croissant2005) cited economic deprivation, continued political subordination, and social discrimination as direct causes giving rise to the new episode of conflict that began in 2001. Similarly, a detailed report by the Human Rights Watch (HRW 2007) attributes part of the violence to revenge for the state-sponsored abuse of Malay Muslims. Statements made by protagonists in the conflict further back up such a conclusion. Wan Kadir Che Man, a former leader of the umbrella group of separatist organisations, Bersatu, stressed “internal colonialism” as the main driver of insurgent indignation (cited in Funston Reference Funston2008a: 8). In a similar vein, Surayud Chulanont, who was appointed Prime Minister after Thaksin's ouster in 2006, started his term by publicly apologising for the Thai state's failure to deal with existing grievances in the south (Harish and Liow Reference Harish and Joseph2007). Based on this reading, the reasons for the violent resurgence of the conflict were similar to those underlying previous waves of extremism: the perception that an exclusive central state threatened the religious, cultural, and linguistic identities in the south (Thanet Reference Thanet2006).

If it is true that the insurgency never effectively disappeared and that the militants were, instead, simply waiting for the right conditions to re-launch their struggle, what were the catalysing effects that emerged in the early 2000s? In an aptly named article subtitled “The Poverty of Structural Explanations”, Jitpiromsri and Sobhonvasu (Reference Jitpiromsri and Sobhonvasu2006) examined the structural variables and found no strong correlation between these and the resurgence of violence in the early 2000s. Two issues that make the ‘entrenched enmities’ explanation less likely are significant herein. First, in a March 2005 survey conducted by the Assumption University and the Prince of Songkla University in Pattani, almost half the respondents from the three southern border provinces thought that separatism was a “far-fetched” idea, and only eight per cent agreed that they would “support the removal of the three southern border provinces from Thai sovereignty” (Jitpiromsri and Sobhonvasu Reference Jitpiromsri and Sobhonvasu2006: 101–102). Second, in 2005, Muslim victims of the attacks began to exceed Buddhist victims (Jitpiromsri and Sobhonvasu Reference Jitpiromsri and Sobhonvasu2006: 116), a trend that has since continued (Abuza Reference Abuza2014). Considering these conditions, the ‘entrenched enmities’ explanation clearly falls short of accounting for the upsurge in violence in the early 2000s.

Besides historical animosities, a second set of explanations, the ‘transnational terrorist influence’, represent the renewed armed struggle as being carried out by an Islamist unity against the Thai state. Observers agree that the religious consciousness in the south has risen over the past two decades (Funston Reference Funston2008a: 11; ICG 2005: 32; Jory Reference Jory2007). Unlike in previous periods of the resistance, calls for solidarity are made under the banner of Muslim unity, fused with Patani nationalism (Melvin Reference Melvin2007: 23), and use religious metaphors to justify the insurgency. However, a narrative of the conflict in line with global or regional jihad is absent both in public statements (Farrell Reference Farrell2014) and in Islamic schools (Liow Reference Liow2006). As Liow and Don Pathan (Reference Liow and Don2010: 30–44) noted, the religious language used to justify the struggle draws upon oral instructions of religious teachers and not, as has been the case in Indonesia, for instance, on established theological theories or the teaching of foreign clerics. Neither can a global, jihadist narrative be read in the way the insurgency is fought. In contrast to Islamist international terrorism, foreigners or other Western targets have rarely been in the sights of Thai insurgents. Except for the incidents on the island of Koh Samui in 2014 and 2015, a series of bomb attacks on popular tourist destinations that were attributed to southern rebels, the conflict theatre has remained limited to the southern provinces.

Other contributions that emphasise religious aspects approach the conflict from the perspective of terrorism studies (Abuza Reference Abuza2009, Reference Abuza, Clad, McDonald and Vaughn2011; Gunaratna and Acharya Reference Gunaratna and Acharya2013; Gunaratna et al. Reference Gunaratna, Arabinda and Sabrina2005). These works all point to personal relations and interactions between militants in the Thai south and members of the transnational Al-Qaeda and/or JI networks. However, experts on the insurgency have criticised their work for presenting shaky evidence to sustain such linkages (Liow and Don Pathan Reference Liow and Don2010: 70–73; McCargo Reference McCargo2009). Contact between foreign jihadists and Thai radicals has existed since the late 1980s, but after almost two decades of armed conflict, there has still not been any proven involvement. Newspaper reports corroborate the inconclusive nature of the available evidence. In January 2007, The Australian read: “Members of Thai intelligence were reported to believe that a JI figure based in the south was behind the New Year's Eve bombings in Bangkok” (quoted in Funston Reference Funston2008a: 13, emphasis added). Similarly, in early 2008, the closest to a proof reported by the Bangkok Post was that a “security source” said that “insurgents probably received funding from, and shared their ideology with, international terrorist groups” (Bangkok Post, 30 January 2008, quoted in Funston Reference Funston2008a: 13, emphasis added).

Hardly any observer would disagree that the possibility of direct involvement of JI/Al-Qaeda exists, yet this is insufficient to sustain the claim that international terrorism led to the upsurge in violence. The strongest evidence against such an argument is provided by Liow and Don Pathan's (Reference Liow and Don2010: 23) interviews with members of the insurgency. The interviewed insurgents cautioned against a strategy of linking up with an international network, since being associated with anti-Western global jihadism would risk undermining the legitimacy of the southern Thai cause and was likely to prompt the intervention of a Western power.

Whilst the two sets of arguments discussed thus far highlight the role of the insurgents, the third set focuses on the role of the Thaksin administration and the way it handled the conflict. It is suggestive to establish a causal link between Thaksin and the resurgence of the southern conflict, since the beginning of a new phase of violence coincided with the start of Thaksin's tenure (Ball and Farrelly Reference Ball and Nicholas2012). In this context, different explanations have been put forward. One account submits that Thaksin manipulated Thai Buddhist chauvinism against the Malay Muslims in the south to rally support and distract attention from political shortcomings (Ukrist Reference Ukrist2006). A related, widely cited argument holds that Thaksin, in an attempt to assert his authority against the near monopoly of control held by the Democrat Party in the south, committed a grave mistake in revamping the unique governance structure that was in place and reshuffling local commanders (ICG 2005; Liow Reference Liow2004; McCargo Reference McCargo2007). These reforms cut existing channels for dialogue and intelligence gathering and disrupted the delicate equilibrium between security personnel, local leaders, and criminal gangs operating in the border areas, which together increased the potential for violence on all sides. The different security forces present in the south have traditionally held considerable power and prerogatives. Thaksin relied more on the police than on the military, which, according to McCargo (Reference McCargo2006b), helped strengthen the Prime Minister's support base within the former.

According to McCargo (Reference McCargo2007) and the International Crisis Group (ICG 2005), such ill-informed policies were grounded in Thaksin's misinterpretation and even ignorance of the conflict:

The various arguments related to Thaksin's approach to the insurgency are conclusive and well grounded, but they tell us little about where the ideas shaping his policies came from. Because a deviation from path-dependent policies can take an ample range of forms, it is worth studying the facts, actors, and influences that determine a new approach. Based on the securitisation framework presented above, the following section puts forward a novel argument to complement the existing explanations for the surge of violence in Thailand's Deep South. As we will show, the Thaksin administration securitised the insurgency based on two narratives belonging to the hegemonic security agenda of so-called new threats: narcotics and Islamist terrorism, as part of the GWOT. This securitisation led to a violent response to the insurgency, begetting further violence on the part of the insurgents.

Securitising the Thai Southern Conflict

To explain the increase in violence in the Deep South in the early 2000s, we focus on the external environment informing the government's behaviour in the conflict. In so doing, we treat the separatists as an aggregated actor, acknowledging that we do not account for the different organisations and loosely connected cells that make up the insurgency. Nevertheless, we do so to explicitly account for the dialectic relation between the two parties and the spiralling dynamics driving the escalation. Specifically, we ask how Thailand's political elite securitised the insurgency and why it used particular securitising moves, as opposed to others.

To answer these questions, we proceed inductively, using a macro-level type of process-tracing for two different types of inference (see Waldner Reference Waldner2015). The first is descriptive, showing how securitisation occurred. Second, we make causal inferences to provide an analytical explanation of whether and how the hegemonic security agenda influenced the formulation of domestic security policies. The method has its limitations, in that the evidence presented is necessarily selective, especially since it turns a blind eye to processes at the micro-level (see Askew Reference Askew2007; Ball and Farrelly Reference Ball and Nicholas2012). Nevertheless, these caveats are mitigated by the fact that we offer a complementary account rather than a rival argument (Levi Reference Levi, Shapiro, Smith and Masoud2004; Tannenwald Reference Tannenwald2015). Therefore, we believe that the following narratives provide a reliable reconstruction of the events, showing that it is necessary to take the external environment of the Thai state's approach to the southern insurgency into consideration.

Our analysis commences in 2001. Standard accounts of the recent episode of conflict establish its beginning in January 2004 (see Abuza Reference Abuza, Clad, McDonald and Vaughn2011: 100–101), “when a spectacular raid on a military arsenal in Narathiwat province saw perpetrators escape with ammunition and firearms” (Ball and Farrelly Reference Ball and Nicholas2012: 5). Ball and Farrelly (Reference Ball and Nicholas2012: 5) rightly state: “After the raid, violence increased dramatically”, even as they note that a period of small-scale attacks had already begun in 2001. According to Croissant (Reference Croissant2005: 24), seventy-nine per cent of the “1,975 violent incidents that were recorded between 1993 and late 2004 took place from 2001 onwards”. How, then, did events between 2001 and 2004 preface the qualitative change in violence that occurred in 2004? We argue that it was during this time that the Thaksin administration undertook crucial moves to securitise the southern insurgency. These were based, first, on a particular narrative belonging to the hegemonic narrative of NTS threats, namely the war on drugs. The availability of this hegemonic narrative had two implications. On the one hand, the government's approach to the insurgency could draw on a legitimising discourse. On the other hand, the narrative freed resources to pursue a policy against ‘drug criminals’ in the south that was blind to the needs of a region where an insurgency was taking hold again. Surprisingly, the GWOT narrative, which was prominent at the time and also part of the hegemonic NTS discourse, figured less significantly in informing the Thai state's response to the conflict, in terms of securitising moves. Whilst the GWOT led to the adoption of securitising practices against Muslim insurgents in the Deep South, in the official discourse, it failed to become a frame of reference for the insurgency despite the conflict's clearly religious overtones. In the latter part of this section, we explain this curious phenomenon and show how the GWOT narrative influenced the Thai state's policies with respect to the southern conflict, and reinforced the distorted approach adopted as a result of the war on drugs agenda.

Summary and Discussion

The securitisation of the southern conflict did not occur in a linear fashion. Through narratives and sustained practices, the narcotics frame had a direct effect on the conflict, in that it legitimised exceptional measures. Since the crucial securitisation of the southern conflict in 2003/2004 via the hegemonic NTS agenda, in this case the war on drugs, the prevailing approach has hindered open discussion of a regional autonomy arrangement as a solution to the conflict. Under the GWOT frame, substantial and sustained security practices were enacted, despite the lack of accompanying securitising speech acts, even if their impact was less direct. The deliberate de-emphasis on the politics of religion informed by the GWOT helped to reinforce the existing erratic approach, rather than enable a new policy. Thus, the over-reliance on, and overemphasis of, the NTS agenda in the form of increased securitisation of drug and terror NTS threats in dealing with the southern separatists actually worsened the situation, leading to an upsurge of violence in the early 2000s, the consequences of which are still visible.

How did the NTS agenda become hegemonic, and what is the significance of its dominance? The new NTS contrasts with that of traditional security, which is limited to the military sector and directed towards external threats against the state's sovereignty and territorial integrity. The project to widen and deepen the traditional security agenda had begun before the end of the Cold War, for instance, by European critical security studies schools such as the Aberystwyth, Copenhagen, and Paris Schools (Peoples and Vaughan-Williams Reference Peoples and Nick2010: 3–11; Wæver Reference Wæver, Tickner and Blaney2012). However, it was only in the post-Cold War era that the NTS agenda took the lead amongst influential policy-makers, with the watershed 9/11 attacks reinforcing this trend (Buzan and Hansen Reference Buzan and Lene2009: 187–255; Peoples and Vaughan-Williams Reference Peoples and Nick2010: 7–9). The bipolar balance of power between the communist Soviet Union and the democratic-capitalist West had been a lid that served to keep the simmering pot of non-military threats from boiling over during the Cold War, especially in the developing ‘Third World’. As Zimmerman (Reference Zimmerman2016: 4) highlighted: “At the end of the Cold War, Asia faced a strategic security situation characterised by previously suppressed, unrecognised or emerging sources of insecurity”. Post-Cold War, increased attention was focused on these simmering threats (Hathaway and Wills Reference Hathaway, Michael, Wills and Hathaway2013: 4), and “resources once devoted to coping with military threats” were diverted to “deal with such nonmilitary threats as domestic poverty, educational crises, industrial competitiveness, drug trafficking, crime, international migration, environmental hazards, resource shortages, global poverty, and so on” (Baldwin Reference Baldwin1995: 126).

The NTS agenda proliferated across the Asian region, as a result of increased globalisation. NTS threats have blazed headlines, filled policy papers, and crammed academic journals across the world. One example is the ‘war on crime’ being conducted by Philippines President Rodrigo Duterte (Channel News Asia 2018). To illustrate how widespread and hegemonic the NTS agenda has become, a simple search on Google Scholar for the period between the end of the Cold War in 1991 to this time of writing returned about 11,800 hits for ‘non-traditional security’, more than half of the approximately 21,100 for ‘traditional security’. For the corresponding length of time prior to the end of the Cold War, only 14 hits for ‘non-traditional security’ were returned, compared to 658 for ‘traditional security’, a mere fraction. Caballero-Anthony (Reference Caballero-Anthony and Caballero-Anthony2016), one of the foremost experts on NTS in Southeast Asia, attributes the spread of the agenda to an epistemic community of scholars from various think tanks and research institutes in the region (see also Zimmerman Reference Zimmerman2016).

Nevertheless, in general, “Asian nations have been slower than the United States to align budgetary resources and bureaucratic structures to reflect this new security paradigm”, as “the end of the Cold War competition between Washington and Moscow did not carry the same strategic significance it held for the United States” (Hathaway and Wills Reference Hathaway, Michael, Wills and Hathaway2013: 9). Today, Asian states still very much hold onto traditional security concerns such as geopolitical rivalry. Asian states can thus be seen as a “vestigial modernist remnant in a postmodern flat world”, with priorities still focused upon interstate competition (Chang Reference Chang, Feichtinger and Hensellek2016: 138). However, even as the Asian states reacted to these ‘new’, NTS threats, the development of the NTS concept itself “owes much to the postcolonial approach and security thinking from the Third World” in a paradoxical and reflexive manner as well, since these so-called ‘non-traditional’ threats were already “representative of the kind of contemporary challenges that seriously affect people's security in the developing world” (Caballero-Anthony Reference Caballero-Anthony and Caballero-Anthony2016: 5).

For example, one strand of such thinking was the notion of ‘comprehensive security’, which went beyond one-dimensional military security to encompass multidimensional objects and subjects of security. The idea of ‘comprehensive security’, developed in Japan in the 1970s, resonated with other Asian states, particularly those in Southeast Asia (Dewitt Reference Dewitt1994: 2–4). After all, most of the so-called NTS threats have had long traditions in Southeast Asia. Take, for example, piracy, a perennial concern for the maritime Southeast Asian states, or the terrorism prevalent in various regional states. Both piracy and terrorism have been linked to separatist movements that arose from the import of the concepts of the ‘Westphalian state’ and ‘sovereignty’ into a region where before, conceptions of space and power were fluid and characterised as mandalas (Chong Reference Chong2012; Wolters Reference Wolters1999). In Southeast Asia, the fact that such ‘comprehensive’ concepts were adopted early on had much to do with the challenges the post-colonial states faced (Alagappa Reference Alagappa1995). Providing social order and economic development (now labelled new security concerns) were already top priorities to ensure regime survival since independence. In Malaysia, for example, the former and now re-elected Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad stated: “National security is inseparable from political stability, economic success and social harmony. Without these all the guns in the world cannot prevent a country from being overcome by its enemies” (quoted in Dewitt Reference Dewitt1994: 4). The ‘new’ NTS agenda fitted the realities of most developing countries far better than the ‘old’ emphasis on traditional threats external to the state (Haacke and Williams Reference Haacke and Paul D.2008: 777).

Thus, whilst the end of the Cold War and 9/11 radically changed the foreign and security agendas of the US and its European allies, for Southeast Asia, internal political violence, its links to foreign actors, and the contestation of political identities, were already long-standing concerns (Liow Reference Liow2016). There was less realignment of resources to counter such threats, simply because these old threats had already been on the agenda of Southeast Asian states since they became independent. The extremely ethnically diverse state of Indonesia, for example, was so concerned with separatist threats that for decades, its armed forces were primarily focused on maintaining the internal coherence of the archipelagic state, rather than on resisting external military threats (Anwar Reference Anwar1996). For the states in Southeast Asia, the new threat agenda was mostly a case of packaging old wine in new bottles. Nevertheless, the ‘new packaging’ of the hegemonic NTS agenda, with its emphasis on security and ‘contemporary’ referent objects and issue areas, did trigger a change in discourse, and importantly, distorted policy adoption, as we demonstrated with our case study of the Thai southern conflict.

The Thai south is not the only instance of hegemonic distortions in Southeast Asia. Febrica (Reference Febrica2010), for instance, examined the securitisation of terrorism in Indonesia and Singapore, in response to the US's GWOT post-9/11, arguing that in Indonesia's pluralistic political system, securitising terrorism was difficult, whereas in Singapore, a one-party state, it was relatively easy, since the government had greater control. In the case of Singapore, it can therefore be argued that securitisation of the terrorism threat was hegemonically distorted by the global NTS agenda related to the GWOT, since the issue of terrorism was far more straightforward, less political, and objectively less of a threat than in Indonesia. Similarly, Mak (Reference Mak, Caballero-Anthony, Emmers and Acharya2006) demonstrated that the securitisation of piracy in the Malacca Straits post-9/11 was only partial in Malaysia, despite efforts by the International Maritime Bureau (IMB) to try to persuade Malaysia, whereas Singapore took a much keener interest and adopted a hard-line stance, sending out naval patrols. One would have expected the reverse, given: (1) piracy has been a traditional danger in the Malacca Straits, (2) Malaysia's coastline makes up most of the Malacca Straits, and (3) Singapore's comparatively more successful record of law and order. Malaysia resisted the hegemonic distortion of the global NTS agenda linking terrorism to piracy, seeing “the main maritime security challenges as [traditional] illegal trafficking in people, small arms, and narcotics” (Storey Reference Storey2008a: 110). In this sense, our hegemonic distortions thesis further echoes international relations scholarship on Southeast Asia, where the discipline is widely recognised as a hegemonic discipline, and “received wisdom in Asia-Pacific academic and policy circles has had it that international relations (or IR) theory bears little, if any, relevance to the region's international politics” (Tan Reference Tan and Dickens2002: 30). Scholarship on the region's international politics, as such, is largely a mimicry of this “American social science” of international relations (Kristensen Reference Kristensen2015: 161–63).

In conclusion, the global hegemonic NTS agenda affects security and securitisation, with hegemonic distortions setting in and influencing what local factors would, instead, suggest. In our case study, hegemonic distortion resulted in worse consequences for the Thai south, with the increased violence continuing today. However, adopting the hegemonic NTS agenda need not necessarily result in negative outcomes. In their study of NTS threats in Southeast Asia, Hameiri and Jones (Reference Hameiri and Lee2015) convincingly established how the NTS agenda can cause states to rescale the governance of such threats, in order to realign resources for positive outcomes, instead. The above example of Singapore securitising terrorism to actively bring resources to bear to prevent and stop terrorist attacks is a largely positive outcome, albeit with some trade-offs in liberty, resulting from its internal security act, which allows suspected terrorists to be detained without trial (Febrica Reference Febrica2010: 577). Nor do we make the case that hegemonic distortions was the sole reason for Thaksin's mishandling of the crisis. Rather, this external environment argument further supports the widely accepted ‘Thaksin factor’ explanation of domestic political contestation and incompetence. Our article thus expands the understanding of the Thai south conflict to explain the international dynamics behind the surge in violence from the early-2000s that has not abated, despite the various changes in government since.

Finally, as the NTS narrative has become a global phenomenon, there are numerous cases and policy areas for future research to submit insights induced from the Thai case study for further tests and refinement of the conditions under which securitisation takes place across different levels of analysis. Hegemonic distortions is only one effect stemming from the interlocking of global and lower-level securitisation dynamics. Furthermore, the hegemonic NTS agenda is only one of several existing global security frameworks that the Copenhagen School calls ‘security constellations’, which serve “to avoid a picture of isolated securitisations unrelated to social identities and political processes at other [higher or lower] levels” (Buzan and Wæver Reference Buzan and Ole2009: 257). Hence, other effects from other security constellations could potentially be explored in future research on how security is constructed.