Enacting postcolonial digital citizenship: Malay Muslim women,social media and the politics of (un)belonging to “Thainess”

Abstract

Although Malay Muslim women’s increasing role in the peace process in Thailand’s southern border provinces has become a subject of scholarly interest, their use of social media in activism remains largely unexplored. To address this gap, this paper examines how Malay Muslim women activists employ social media to strengthen their human rights advocacy, based on in-depth interviews with 10 women activists. The findings reveal that, given the highly securitized environment and the shortcomings of Thai mainstream media, social media provides an alternative civic space where Muslim women activists form a political subject, namely “pious online rights claimants.” This paper argues that this emerging social media practice contributes to the enactment of “postcolonial digital citizenship” which allows these women to contest the constructed category of Malay Muslims and Muslim women. Such intersectional contestations not only legitimize their political participation in the peace process, but also strategically manage the multifaceted boundaries of belonging as Malay Muslim women in the male-dominant sphere of the peace process and the enduring colonial notion of “Thainess.”