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Paper short abstract

This paper examines how public education services in Thailand’s conflict-affected Deep South are expanded, contested, and sometimes weaponised. Using new district-level data, it explores how school investments and their disruption shape violence, authority, and imagined futures.

Paper long abstract

This paper uses the lens of basic service delivery to understand conflict and authority in Thailand’s Deep South. In Pattani, Yala, Narathiwat and parts of Songkhla, public schooling is one of the most visible and contested faces of the Thai state. I assemble a new district-fiscal-year dataset that links Ministry of Education budget data to geocoded conflict events, allowing me to track how the expansion, disruption, and targeting of schools relate to patterns of violence over time. I distinguish between different forms of education spending (e.g., staffing, operations, and school construction and renovation) and use panel models with district and year effects to explore their evolving association with conflict incidence and lethality.

Rather than treating education as a straightforward peace dividend, this paper approaches schools as a site where power is exercised, negotiated, and resisted. Education services can be deployed to claim legitimacy and demonstrate responsiveness, to channel resources and patronage, or to project administrative control into contested areas. At the same time, schools can become focal points for grievance, obstruction, or attack. Preliminary results point to a complex, evolving relationship between schooling investments and violent contestation - one that varies by spending type and timing, suggesting that the same service-delivery expansion may have different implications in the short versus longer run.

The paper contributes to debates on how basic services operate in crisis-affected settings as both instruments of governance and potential targets or tools of resistance, and highlights the conditions under which expanding education may help rework state-citizen relations.