Thailand’s Regime: Urban and Rural Threats
Dr. Zachary Abuza, an expert in Southeast Asian politics and security issues and a resident of Ipswich, will speak on the twin threats to one of America’s closest Asian allies, Thailand, by an uprising in the capital and a growing but largely unreported Islamist insurgency in the rural south.
“Thailand is a key treaty ally and once a democratic standard-bearer for the region,” says Dr. Abuza, a Senior Fellow at the United States Institute of Peace (USIP) and Associate Professor of Political Science and International Relations at Simmons College, Boston. “But the Bangkok-centric nation is so preoccupied with the political crisis in the capital that there is zero attention being paid to the insurgency in the south where Islamic militants have in effect created an ungoverned territory.”
Dr. Abuza, whose latest book—Conspiracy Of Silence: The Insurgency In Southern Thailand—will be out in June, is the author of Muslims, Politics and Violence in Indonesia (2006) Militant Islam in Southeast Asia (2003) and Renovating Politics in Contemporary Vietnam (2001). He has also authored two studies for the National Bureau of Asian Research—Funding Terrorism in Southeast Asia: The Financial Network of Al Qaeda and Jemaah Islamiya, NBR Analysis (2003) and Uncivil Islam: Muslims, Politics and Violence in Indonesia, NBR Analysis (2004)—and a monograph, Balik Terrorism: The Return of the Abu Sayyaf Group, for the US Army War College's Security Studies Institute (2005), among numerous other publications on these issues.
Dr. Abuza consults widely and is a frequent commentator on SE Asian politics and security issues in the press. He is a visiting lecturer at the U.S. State Department’s Foreign Service Institute and at the Defense Department’s Joint Special Operations University. He received his MALD and Ph.D. from the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy.
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From The New York Times, April 16, 2009:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/17/opinion/17iht-edabuza.htm?_r=2&scp=1&s...