Producing Thailand as a transit country: borders, advocacy, and destitution

ABSTRACT

The space of the ‘transit country’ is increasingly depicted in policy and NGO rhetoric as a taken-for-granted space where migrants pass through on their way to seek protection in the Global North. Yet I argue that the ‘transit country’ is a contested space, a space where ‘temporariness’ may be produced purposefully in order to limit opportunities for protection. In this paper, I argue that Thailand produces itself as a transit country in order to manage and control refugee and asylum seeker populations. Through several discursive and material tactics, including security spectacles, legal maneuvering, and migrant destitution, Thailand maintains and exploits the status of a ‘transit country.’ The purposeful construction of a place where ‘no one will stay’ challenges depictions of migration as linear movements defined by sources and destinations, where transit spaces become only more distance to traverse. While the production of transit countries has always been political, the case of Thailand suggests that the politics involved need not center the migration deterrence efforts of traditional destination countries of the Global North, but have implications within states and regions of the Global South as well.

KEYWORDS:

• Transit
• migration
• asylum
• refugee
• Thailand
• mobility

Acknowledgments

The Thai government has charged cited author and refugee advocate Puttanee Kangkun with criminal defamation for her work on behalf of urban refugees in Bangkok, and she currently faces eight years’ imprisonment for tweeting, re-tweeting, and authoring Facebook posts about the state of urban refugees in Thailand. I am grateful for the incredible bravery of refugee advocates in Thailand who continue this important work. Thanks to the advocates, policy-makers, and NGO employees who offered their time and energy towards this project in Thailand, as well as Marshall Knoderbane, whose time and energy at home allowed this research to go forward. This paper benefited by the careful and thoughtful reading by three anonymous reviewers and the editorial staff at Mobilities.

Disclosure statement

This work was supported by the British Council under the Researcher Links Travel Grant of the Newton Fund as well as Durham University.

Notes

1. Refugee, asylum seeker, and migrant have all become not only terms with legal meaning, but deeply politicized connotations. In Bangkok, no asylum seekers are recognized by the Thai state as refugees, yet many have qualified for refugee status through the process administered by the UNHCR. In this paper, I attempt to use terms precisely: asylum seeker for migrants who seek protection; refugees for those who have been granted refugee status from the UNHCR; and migrant in more general cases or where the status of the people is unknown.

2. By precarity, following Waite (2009, 415), this analysis refers to ‘life-worlds that are inflected with uncertainty and instability.’ Feeling temporary, as migration scholars note, exacerbates precarity (e.g. Coutin et al. 2017).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the British Council and Durham University.