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Paper short abstract

I analyse Thai public education budgets in the conflict-affected Deep South as instruments of rule and negotiation. Using new district-fiscal-year data, I explore how shifts in public education spending relate to violence, and to centre-periphery struggles over authority.

Paper long abstract

This paper examines the budgetary politics of civil conflict through the case of basic education spending in Thailand’s Deep South. In Pattani, Yala, Narathiwat and parts of Songkhla, school budgets are not merely technical allocations, but could also be central instruments through which the Thai state seeks to govern a contested periphery. Education spending promises development and redress, yet it is also bound up with militarisation, surveillance, and struggles over who controls school curricula, jobs, and resources.

I assemble a new district-fiscal-year dataset that links Ministry of Education budget data to geocoded conflict events. The data distinguish between current expenditures (teachers, wages, operations) and capital investments (schools, classrooms, facilities), thereby allowing me to trace how different components of the education budget covary with the incidence and lethality of violence over time. Using panel models with district and year effects, I investigate how fiscal choices around schooling function as a conflict-management strategy, and under what conditions they appear to calm, displace, or intensify contestation.

Rather than treating education spending as a pure developmental tool, the paper foregrounds it as a site of political bargaining between state and insurgent-linked constituencies. Preliminary evidence points to a complex, time-varying relationship between spending and violence, in which the same fiscal flows can operate as attempted side-payments, signals of resolve, or triggers of backlash. The paper contributes to debates on how governments deploy budgets as strategic instruments of power in conflict-affected settings, and what this implies for reimagining development under conditions of enduring insecurity.