In Thailand, political violence has been variously linked to Buddhist monks. During the Cold War, the right-wing monk Kittivuddho was famously quoted as stating that it was not a sin to kill a communist (see Keyes 1978). Writing about much more recent events, Michael Jerryson (2009, 2010b) has provided an interesting ethnographic account of a “military monk” operating in the troubled southernmost provinces of Thailand. Soldiers there have ordained as monks in order to guard Buddhist temples and populations of Buddhists threatened by Muslim insurgents. Unlike other modern examples in Sri Lanka and Burma, these monks not only are involved in promoting violence, but are actually carrying handguns and war weapons, ostensibly for defensive purposes. Buddhist temples have been converted into de facto army bases, with defensive military barracks constructed on temple grounds and large numbers of soldiers residing in temples, thus using spatial symbolism to discursively and materially link Buddhism and monks with the state military apparatus and state-sanctioned violence against Muslim insurgents and their supporters.