Bangkok flooded: re(assembling) disaster mobility

ABSTRACT

The paper investigates mobility options and practices of irregular migrant workers and international urban refugees during the 2011 flood in Bangkok, Thailand. Contributing to debates on disaster mobility and climate change induced displacement, the paper explores how citizenship and racialized differences unfolded during the flood event and how such differences had (de)mobilising effects for specific subgroups of Bangkok’s irregular population. Drawing on the concepts of assemblage and affect the paper proposes to perceive of race as emergent within concrete interactions between bodies, rather than a pre-given social category or a purely discursive trope. From this perspective the body itself may become a repository to subvert or manipulate racialized perceptions. The paper argues that approaching race as an emerging assemblage helps to shed light both on the demobilising effects race had on people’s mobility as well as on the fleeting moments of generosity and care between people that proliferated alongside such demobilisations.

KEYWORDS:

• Disaster mobility
• Bangkok
• urban floods
• race
• assemblage
• affect
• lines of flight

Acknowledgments

I would like to gratefully acknowledge Dr. Andrew Baldwin for his feedback on an earlier draft and thank the two anonymous reviewers of this paper for their guidance.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Given the frequently vulnerable position of migrant workers/refugees as well as NGO workers, I anonymised all sources in this paper to protect the privacy of the respondents. Furthermore, I am refraining from identifying the names of some of the NGOs as several people asked me to obscure this information.

2. Thailand continues to shelter more than 100.000 people from Myanmar, Cambodia and Laos at its borders. Yet, Thailand has never ratified the 1951 United Nations Refugee Convention and is only granting temporary shelter under the condition of resettlement (Davies 2008). The Convention not only grants protection but furthermore stipulates e.g. a refugee’s right to work and welfare provisions within a receiving state that is signatory to the convention. (For the full text of the Convention and Protocol see: http://www.unhcr.org/3b66c2aa10.pdf) Without these rights refugees and asylum seekers’ status in Bangkok is reduced to that of ‘irregular migrants’ subject to arrest, detention and deportation.

3. For more details see: UNHCR Thailand: https://www.unhcr.or.th/en/about/thailand.

4. For a reflection on the partial and distributed agency of urban refugees in Bangkok and their strategies to move through the city without risking detention, see Tuitjer & Batérau, CITY, forthcoming.

5. For critical reviews of the development of these terms and the related debates see: Morrissey (2012) and Piguet (2013).

6. Furthermore, media reports that represented the displaced Afro-American communities as ‘disaster refugees’ made implicit statements about the (mobility) rights and the (imagined) belonging of the people displaced by the hurricane (Masquelier 2006). The term ‘refugee’ hereby implied not only a loss of homes and possessions through a violent event but also called into question the citizenship status of the people displaced from their home town and scattered across the country, as refugees are – by legal definition- foreigners.

7. In other regional context it has also been observed that (irregular) migrant workers were discouraged from seeking help from authorities due to uncertain legal status (Donner and Rodriguez 2008). Similar findings from the Tsunami in 2004 suggest that the Thai government has still failed to address this problem (Yuan Fu Yuang 2007).

Additional information

Funding

The data for this paper was collected during PhD work funded by the Economic and Social Research Council, UK (grant number 1333726).