When “people who want elections” come out and call for them as scheduled, some voices say: “even if we have elections, the same faces and the same political parties will bring back the same old problems.”   With this discourse, I think from some angles, the people who say this want to lessen the credibility of elections and say they are not a solution to the problems we complain about. But from other angles, I understand the issues that make them think in such a way.

Basically, ordinary people might love to have the right to choose their own representatives to sit in the top jobs in the country. Therefore, elections matter. It is strange to see a certain group of people in Thailand has come out to show their resolve against elections, on the ground that the poll might not bring ‘good’ people into governance.    While an election would not bring good people or even democracy to the politics, authoritarians in Southeast Asia indeed need elections to justify their governance.

Hara Shintaro compares 2 anti-social organisations: the Japanese yakuza and the Muslim Malay insurgents in Thailand's Deep South. 

No matter who says that elections are only a tradition or full of corruption, before 1958 Thai elections gave necessary legitimacy to political power for 25 interrupted years, even though after that the army seized power and suppressed election after election for many years. However, after the 14 October incident, elections once again returned as the backbone of political legitimacy. The army used other methods to interfere in politics while accepting elections for example, by having a Senate with tremendous power but appointed, or pressuring political parties into supporting a prime minister from the army.

“The absence of a united women’s coalition hinder[s] a collective and strategic effort to call for inclusive and gender-sensitive peacebuilding”, argues Firdaus Abdulsomad in her Master’s thesis entitled ‘Women’s participation in the Patani Peace Process : a case study of the barriers to women’s participation in building peace in Patani’ which can be read here.    Firdaus Abdulsomad who identifies herself as “a second generation Patani Malay who grew up in Sweden” undertook her fieldwork r