The political landscape dynamics and constraints on political space in Thailand’s Southern Border provinces after the 2019 general election: Implications for the region’s conflict transformation

This study examines the changing dynamics of formal political space in Thailand’s Deep South across general elections of 2019, 2023, and 2026, drawing on fifty in-depth interviews with politicians, academics, civil society and religious leaders, and comparative experts from Mindanao and Aceh, alongside official electoral data. It advances a two-part argument. First, the electoral transformation of the region is interpreted here through a widening representation gap—the distance between the descriptive representation that Malay Muslim identity mobilization secures and the substantive representation that a highly centralized state withholds. As this gap widened, identity politics did not disappear but diffused into a baseline tactic deployed across all well-resourced campaigns. Informants across categories described voters as responding with rational split-voting that separated economic survival from ideological preference, reflected in the failure of progressive challengers to convert party-list strength into constituency seats and in the realignment of local elites toward parties able to deliver resources. Second, the study asks whether formal political space can nonetheless serve conflict transformation and concludes that it remains the most viable route to a nonviolent settlement. Comparative evidence indicates that decentralization, legally recognizing local parties, and capacity-building are conditions for a more durable settlement.