From the CIAO Atlas Map of Southeast Asia 

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Business and Bodies Across Borders: Transnational Political Economy and Human Rights in Thailand and Burma

Jennifer Hyndman
Arizona State University West

International Studies Association

March 18-21, 1998

In this paper I want to explore the potentially transgressive politics of transnational feminist theory. An example of binational economic cooperation between two governments in Thailand and Burma grounds this approach and introduces the concept of transnational political economy. Transnational investment across the Thai-Burma frontier and transnational displacement of people across this same border are juxtaposed in an effort to underscore the relationship between political economy and human rights. While this panel is entitled "Feminists Theorize the Transnational", I interpret feminist in a broad sense, taking it to mean here analyses of power relations and their political implications. At the same time, I pay attention to the deconstructive impulses of some feminist theory, especially to those which contribute to post-sovereign and transnational geographies of migration.

 

Denationalizing State-centric Discourse

...anxiety abounds today about this most unnatural miscegenation of core and periphery, First and Third Worlds, development and underdevelopment, miscegenation whose hybrid progeny now occupy the same space and time.... (Koptiuch, 1996).

Nation-ness may still be the most universally legitimate value in the political life of our time (Anderson, 1991). Imagined communities and displaced nations, however, undermine the normative territory and temporality of the nation-state. The nation-state is challenged by the increasingly transnational relations of production, trade, and international migration -- both voluntary and involuntary. "Regions and region-states increasingly override national borders and older territorial forms and create speacial economic zones of uneven development and transcultural hybridity" (Wilson and Kissanayake, 1996: 2). State-centric notions of immigrant, refugee, guestworker, and citizen no longer suffice (Alexander & Mohanty, 1997). Yet, as state borders break down and the primacy of the nation-state as the basis for social, economic, and political organization is challenged, what are the potential costs?

This paper explores the relationship between processes of transnational economic integration and of human displacement. It addresses the ways in which intergovernmental cooperation generates a transnational economy which takes apart the meaning and importance of political borders between states. In turn, the meaning and value of migrants who cross these borders has changed. More specifically, people seeking asylum and safety in a neigbouring country are increasingly part of a regionalized economic zone which does not recognize their plight and status as refugees. Instead, there is a transnational trade (off) in which human rights and asylum are exchanged for lucrative access to natural gas and other natural resources.

Class, cultural, and political relations shape people's access to mobilty, just as they shape access to the wealth produced by transnational transactions. These relations mark those who are dispossessed by their own government and situated in a borderland, both politically and materially. The story told here is of transnational trade across one border, where people's labour, homes, and passports are exchanged -- in an obscured fashion -- for investment, resources, and economic cooperation. As transnational economic integration proceeds, the protection of nationals declines.

Below a short discussion of migrant appellations illustrates the shortcomings of state-centric discourse. This is followed by a brief outline of transnationalism as a theoretical approach and some of its political implications. The analyses then moves back to Burma and Thailand where a transnational trade in human rights and resources raises a dilemma for feminists theorizing the transnational.

Transnational diaspora versus the refugee/immigrant Concepts of 'immigrant' and 'refugee' are not sufficient to analyze transnational migration and displacement. Both 'refugee' and 'immigrant' are defined by juridical and political apparati of national governments predicated on the political borders of individual states. They are pure categories of migrant status, but are not without their contradictions. A refugee is defined as one who is outside the borders of her nation-state due to violence or persecution, and displaced from what has become the centred norm of citizenship, or 'placement', within her country. While it may be strategic to invoke refugee status in order to ensure protection for people at risk, it is insufficient as a tool for analyzing important links and identity markers which transcend the state line. "Whether the national narrative is one of common origins or of gathered populations, it cannot assimilate groups that maintain important allegiances and practical connections to a homeland or a dispersed community elsewhere" (Clifford, 1994: 307). This applies also to immigrants whose function is to integrate into their new home and place within a narrative circumscribed by the nation-state. An immigrant is seen to replace one nationalist identification with another (Kaplan, 1996), despite articluations of identity and material exchanged which extend beyond the borders of the nation-state.

The immigrant is a newcomer, a former outsider now authorized to participate in, if not 'belong', to the host society. The refugee is expelled from her state; the immigrant is incorporated into his. Both are territorially rooted, sometimes overlapping, conceptions of migrant status defined within or beyond the borders of 'nation.' Forced migrants may cross national borders, but they also breach the conventional identity markers of nationality, ethnicity, culture, gender, and class. Migrant identities are constituted by more than one geographical location and more than one appellation. What often gets lost in discussions of immigration research, refugee law, and international migration more generally are the transnational processes, politics, and multiple positionings that transcend, and/or subvert, the primacy of the nation-state as the de facto unit of migrant identity. I argue here that territorialized and reductionist conceptions of refugee, in particular, fail to capture the transnational relations of power and trade which generate conditions of forced migration. At the same time, the political value of 'refugee', the strategic application of human rights instruments and relevant international law cannot be ignored, despite their state-centric foundations.

 

Introducing Transnationalism

The theoretical literature emerging from discussions of displacement and 'traveling cultures' is comprehensive (Appadurai, 1996; Bammer, 1994; Bhabha, 1994; Clifford, 1992; Grewal and Kaplan, 1994; Malkki, 1995; Said, 1990). The meanings of exile, diaspora, and transnational identity have been debated and discussed at length, with critics charging that such concepts engender 'theoretical tourism' (Kaplan, 1996). This paper does not attempt to summarize or assess these discussions to date. Rather, in an effort to avoid the perils and pitfalls of celebrating displacement or universalizing diasporic histories, I echo the contention that "contemporary theories of exile must delineate the material conditions of displacement that generate subject positions" (ibid.: 105). In an attempt to avoid the hype of hybridity and different diasporas (Mitchell, 1997), I take transnational displacement to have corporeal, social, political and economic identity meanings and geographically-specific historical markers.

A brief overview of transnationalism and its diverse, sometimes contested meanings is instructive. Rouse (1995) argues that transnationalism has emerged from a synthesis of two dominant modes of thought in the 1980s: postmodernism, which emphasized new, more fragmented relations between knowledge and power enabled by new technology; and Marxist critiques which paid attention to the material transformations associated with increasingly global capitalism (Shamy, 1996). While a few notable anthropologists have focused upon refugees within a context that problematizes the identities and boundaries of nations (Malkki, 1995; Shamy, 1996), most authors in the field of transnationalism are concerned with migrant circuits of movement related to their economic activity, with its obvious connections to social relations, and in cultural studies, to the construction and politics of diasporic subjectivities. In this paper, I rely on both sets of analysis to demonstrate the imbrication of migrant identities and the power relations which position these identities unequally in economies of 'nations unbound' (Basch et al., 1994).

"The word immigrant evokes images of permanent rupture, of the uprooted, the abandonment of old patterns and the painful learning of a new language and culture" (Glick Schiller, Basch, Blanc-Szanton, 1992: 1). Nina Glick Schiller et al. have argued that a distinctive kind of migrating population is emerging: transmigrants, who maintain a number of different ethnic, national, and racial identities. Host and home societies are connected through networks not circumscribed by conventional political boundaries. The authors' conceptualization of transnationalism foregrounds the emergence of an increasingly globalized capitalist system and with it increased flows of social, cultural, and political life. These processes of globalization exact a critical rethinking of migration studies. Michael Kearney adds a distinction between globalization and transnationalism: "whereas global processes are largely decentered from specific national territories and take place in a global space, transnational processes are anchored in and transcend one or more nation-states" (1995: 548). Michael Watts (1996) adds that globalization inevitably leads to the erasure of the local. Whereas globalization renders transnational mobility and livelihoods largely irrelevant (except perhaps as a labor source or outcome of multinational capitalism), transnationalism views them as constitutive of distinct social, cultural, political and economic spaces which do not adhere to the more striaightforward categories of nation, class, ethnicity, and gender.

Echoing Basch et al. (1994), Goldring (1996b) cites several reasons for transnational migration, which include it as 1) a survival strategy in the face of economic/or political insecurity; 2) social (and, I would add, political) exclusion in countries of origin; and 3) racialized exclusion in North America. She defines 'transnational communities' as dense social fields consisting of people, money, goods, and information that are constructed and maintained by migrants over time, across space, and through circuits which repeatedly cross borders. Focusing on the patterns of return migration for Mexican workers employed in Las Animas, California, Goldring chronicles the creation and maintenance of a transnational social space across the US-Mexican border.

Feminist authors theorize and politicize transnationalism from within cultural studies by employing a more explicitly postmodern approach to migration and its politics. 'Transnational feminist practices', for example, focus on "the effects of mobile capital as well as the multiple subjectivities that replace the European unitary subject" (Grewal & Kaplan, 1994: 7). Processes which constitute and fragment migrant subjectivity are analyzed within the purview of the geopolitics of postmodernity. Modalities which construct centers and margins, like First and Third World, are challenged by transnational subjectivities which examine ways that women are constructed in subordination or positioned unequally in discourses of nationalism and/or the patriarchal state. While these authors acknowledge the risks of abandoning identity politics, they contend that existing categories of identification elude the representation of certain histories and obfuscate the links among diasporic subject in transnational culture. As Caren Kaplan states, "feminists need detailed, historicized maps of the circuits of power" (1994: 148). Such approaches to transnationalism examine the processes which contribute to identity formation and the unequal links which constitute these maps of power.

The materiality and corporeality of transnationalism, together with these critical interventions, creates a vibrant theoretical and political surface for both subjects who defy national boundaries and those tracing the meanings of their movements. To some extent, the emerging literature on transnationalism focuses on economic and cultural analyses at the expense of political considerations. The conditions precipitating forced migration and the politics it produces are one example. Relatively little is said about refugees, whose politically induced migration no doubt involves elements of cultural dislocation and economic disadvantage. Basch et al. (1994) do note that political and economic crises often act as catalysts of migration and can motivate people to maintain ties and return home, but their analysis does not address the problematic construction of 'refugee' as an expression of national borders. Transmigrants may support an opposition party or movement from afar and/or return to participate in a new government (Goldring, 1996a), but questions of asymmetrical power relations which shape access to mobility, resources, and institutions across space, cultures, and nationalities remain largely unaddressed. Katharyne Mitchell (1997) warns of "the hype of hybridity" and the weakness of the term diaspora in relation to history and political economy. In the remainder of the paper, I present an analysis that captures the political and economic intersections as well as the identity formation processes at play among displaced Burmese men and women within a transnational context.

 

Defying the national order of things: refugee & immigrant positionings

Both refugees and immigrants are positioned as 'others' in relation to nation-states. Their respective displacements and attachments take on normative and typologized dimensions. Liisa Malki provides a critique of "the refugee experience" as a normative human state which "posits a single, essential, transhistorical refugee condition" (1995: 511). The national 'order of things' is assumed; human displacement is viewed as an anomaly in what is otherwise a stable and normal (read: national) society. Just as immigrants evoke an image of permanent rupture with old patterns (ostensibly so that they can 'modernize'), so too are refugees constructed as having lost their identity, traditions, and culture (Malkki, 1992). By focusing on displacment as the prevailing condition of anomalous refugees, Malkki asks the provocative question, "What does it mean to be, or to remain, emplaced?... What is the state of not being a refugee like? How is it denoted?" (1995: 515) These queries highlight the processes which construct displaced 'others', while rendering those of us who are 'in our place' the invisible, yet tangible norm. While I find Malkki's criticism of displacement as pathology important, I part company with her call for an examination of 'emplacement.' She maintains that analyzing constructs of 'home' would prove analytically productive and balance the overemphasis on the pathology of refugees. The 'places' in which people live are not centred, in my view, but can be seen as linked, unequal identities-- always connected to other locations.

I think of the home of a Burmese refugee friend, now a landed immigrant, living in Richmond, B.C., Canada. While 'home' often signifies fixity and stasis, here it resembles more the 'hotel' which James Clifford (1992) uses to 'ground' the tension between dwelling and displacement -- albeit in a more politicized and less bourgeois context. The downpayment for her townhouse came from Singapore where her brother lives. Help with the mortage payments comes from Spokane where her daughter works. Her daughters and adopted son, whom she sponsored to come to B.C., have both Canadian and Burmese names. During both my visits international visitors were being hosted. The location of this home near the airport was not lost on me. Subjects and locations are connected by migrant paths and circuits of exchange at several scales. Transnational migrants maintain multiple identities, moving across borders and often between cultures to create a single, imagined social field geographically distributed. By maintaining identities that link them to more than one nation, they challenge our academic orderings and hermetically sealed notions of nationality, ethnicity, class and gender. Home can be both real and imagined, here and there.

Drawing now on research of displaced Burmese in Thailand, I develop an analysis of a 'transnational economy of trade in human rights and resources' By this, I mean that efforts to minimize the barriers of the border between Burma and Thailand in order to increase trade between these countries is intimately related to the forced migration of thousands of people from Burma to Thailand without recognition of their asylum status. Conceptions of migrant identity as territorially-defined by national borders, irrespective of trade relations and economic interests are no longer sufficient to understand the literal and figurative displacement of Burmese nationals.

 

Events in Burma

Evidence of bi-national economic integration is more recent than resistance to and protests against SLORC. Since 1948, the year of Burma's independence from Britain, a number of ethnic minorities have fought to win autonomy and recognition from Rangoon. Forgotten promises and other legacies of colonialism fuel contemporary politics and ethnic conflict today. In 1962, a military coup led by General Ne Win replaced the post-independence government. Burma has been governed by military regimes since that time.

On August 8, 1988 (8/8/88), unarmed students and civilians took to the streets of Rangoon to protest the repression of the SLORC government. Thousands were shot dead by military forces and thousands more fled the nation's capital to join historically marginalized ethnic minorities living in border regions. SLORC imprisoned political foe and active member of the National League of Democracy (NLD), Aung San Suu Kyi, in 1989. A powerful symbol of opposition, Aung San Suu Kyi's father, Aung San, was the assassinate leader of Burma's independence movement. In May 1990, the NLD in Burma won an overwhelming majority in the parliamentary election, taking 392 of 485 contested seats. However, the military rulers (the State Law and Order Restoration Council) who lost the election never allowed the NLD to take office and arrested many of its members. They continue to govern today. Despite the formal release of Aung San Suu Kyi from house arrest in July 1995, her movements are carefully monitored and activities restricted by SLORC.

Transnational politics at once generate refugee flows and produce oppositional identities and actions. Cross-border exchange and economic cooperation between the Thai and Burma governments generate dispersed, transnational identities among Burmese forced out of the country. This set of recursive processes is predicated on 1) increasing cross-border trade and shared infrastructure between Thailand and Burma; and 2) related army offensives on the Burma side of the border to eliminate rebel groups, whose land is essential to the major infrastructure project and whose 'cooperation' is necessary to 'stabilize' and secure investment.

The use of forced labour by SLORC for government works has been well-documented (Immigration and Refugee Service of America, 1996; Aung San, 1995; New Internationalist, 1996). UN rapporteur, Rajsmoor Lallah, noted in a report released in March 1997 that Burma's military had forcibly relocated and essentially detained or forced into labor more than one million people without compensation (Agence France Presse, March 30, 1997). Burmese citizens, particularly those of minority status, are recruited under threat as porters who carry food and materials to supply government troops. Adults and children are unpaid for their work and poorly treated. Women have been taken as prostitutes by SLORC soldiers, others sold into the same trade on the Thai side of the border (BurmaNet News, 1996). Darkly ironic is the construction of railway lines (Ye-Tavoy), airport facilities, and other tourist infrastructure by modern slaves for what was declared in 1996 as 'Year of the Visitor'. Curious tourists are encouraged to bring their precious foreign currency and witness the new face of Myanmar constructed, in large part, on the backs of Burmese. To strengthen order in 'Yangoon', the SLORC government's appellation for Rangoon, groups other than ethnic Burmans who dominate the government, have been forcibly relocated to ill-equipped villages in outlying areas. Within its borders a geography of displacement is on-going. Many have resisted SLORC's efforts by moving to border areas where ethnic minorities prevail or by leaving the country. The number of people internally displaced within Burma is estimated to be between 500,000 and one million people (Immigration and Refugee Services of America, 1996). At the end of 1996, 184,300 Burmese refugees were living in neighbouring countries, most in Thailand where 350,000 more Burmese are living without documentation, but in refugee-like circumstances (Immigration and Refugee Services of America, 1997).

Infrastructure across the Thai-Burma border has multiple meanings. A bridge is under construction over the Moei River which delineates part of the Thai-Burma border. The bridge has economic value as a potential short-cut from Bangkok to Rangoon; it has strategic value as a means of returning refugees from Thailand to Burma; and it has official significance as a 'friendship' bridge which signals the cooperative (and lucrative) relationship that has been forged between SLORC and the Thai Government. The bridge is based on "the desire of both countries to bring prosperity to the area" (Reuters in the Bangkok Post, March 13, 1997). The 'friendship bridge' opens up the unsettling possibility of returning displaced refugees without status in Thailand to the country from which they initially fled. A superhighway that would link Thai and Burmese coasts, running west of Bangkok, has also been planned, ostensibly to allow Thailand's huge tourist population easy access to a country that has isolated itself since a military coup in 1962. Significant Thai investment in the nascent hotel industry in Burma is further related to this cooperative cross-border venture.

While eager to maintain favour with the international community, the Thai Government has proven more interested in the bi-national economy and, in particular, in the natural gas pipeline soon to be completed between Burma and Thailand. The border this pipeline crosses is the same border where ethnic minorities groups, such as the Karen and Karenni, as well as student groups, have fought to resist SLORC troops and control their own territory since Burma's independence. On the other side, the Thai Government appears anxious to clear out refugees from the border areas where the joint infrastructure projects are planned with SLORC (Agence France Presse, March 30, 1997). Transnational economic integration confounds and displaces the territorialized identities of national and refugee. These people are not simply forced to move from one country to another, but literally without place -- their identities under erasure.

As Thailand's relations with Rangoon have warmed considerably over the past few years, refugee reception of Burmese asylum-seekers in Thailand has become less hospitable. The old adage of trade versus aid takes on a new meaning, as trade interests conflict with humananitarian need and aid. Thailand has denied the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) permission to establish a permanent presence to assist refugees, many of whom live in makeshift camps along the border. The Karen Refugee Committee has urged the Thai Government to allow UNHCR to provide aid and assistance to refugees seeking shelter along the border following SLORC's recent military onslaught, beginning early in 1997 (Bangkok Post, March 23, 1997). The Thai response has been to accuse the Karen National Union of trying to make its fight with Burma an international issue which would draw attention and perhaps intervention from the outside world when Thailand considered the matter a Burmese internal affair. If UNHCR were allowed to operate in Thai camps for Burmese refugees along the border, it would 'complicate' the border situation and might also cause some 'misunderstanding' with Burma. Humanitarian intervention could be harmful to Thai trade and cooperation with Burma. The suggestion that refugees in Thailand are the internal affairs of Burma represents the domestication of violence and subsequent human displacement not on a national scale, but within the bi-national economy of Burma and Thailand.

Obtaining humanitarian status and UNHCR assistance requires precarious travel and substantial resources for unrecognized Burmese refugees in Thailand. Only those refugees able to afford the trip to Bangkok where UNHCR has a branch office, and to negotiate police harassment en route, have a chance of being assessed as 'persons of concern', i.e. not refugees but people who warrant UNHCR protection. Those granted this status are then sent to what is officially called a so-called 'safe camp' in Ratchaburi outside of Bangkok where, under Thai guard, they must wait for the chance to be interviewed for possible resettlement. Transnational trade liberalization and cooperation comes to this Southeast Asian region at considerable human cost for those marked by the 'wrong' or 'other' cultural, social, and political positionings. Within the bi-national economy of Thailand and Burma, the displacement of Burmese refugees is at once domesticated and effaced. Political protest and related displacement are dismissed as internal state matters. Land and labour are treated as state resources subject to SLORC objectives.

This condition of transnationalism at various scales presents a dilemma. While nation-states are no longer sufficient venues for analyzing or incorporating political, economic, and cultural differences (if they ever were), talk of transnational relations of exchange and integration populate academic, governmental, and corporate domains, without much attention to standards or safeguards that might protect people affected by these supra-national constellations of power. There are no 'ethics of encounter' (Shapiro, 1996) to mediate the variegated politics and processes of regional integration. One is left with the imperfect, state-centric, but existing standards of conduct outlined in human rights instruments and international law. The other option, of course, is to create something else.

 

Reason for the dilemma

1. Human rights discourse is problematic at a number of levels, with critiques ranging from its Eurocentrism to its racism, and from its inherent cultural imperialism to its fickleness as a trade-based morality. All of these criticisms have some basis. Human rights discourse is an expression of humanism and takes, as its starting point, the universal, individual subject. While the universal subject has lost any real purchase in critical social science, a transformative politics has yet to reform or replace UN legal and human rights instruments.

2. There is an unmistakable contradiction when one employs the norms of modern statehood (i.e. human rights instruments) to critique the modern state as an insufficient venue in which to understand the geo-politics and cultural dislocation of migration. The strategic deconstruction of state-centric norms is a critical task because these norms have historically prevailed at the expense of 'other,' formerly colonized and imperially constructed locations. But, is there also a strategic moment of redeploying state norms when culture-based violence or genocide occur? Is a strategic ontological commitment to these standards necessary in the absence of other protective measures?

The blurring of borders at once opens up new possibilities, but poses new dangers. A call has been made to trace the 'transnational imaginary' -- "the as-yet-unfigured horizon of contemporary cultural production by which national space/identities of political allegiance and economic regulation are being undone and imagined communities of modernity are being reshaped at the macropolitical (global) and micropolitical (cultural) levels of everyday existence" (Wilson and Dissanayake, 1996: 6). Currently, the conventions and agreements among nation-states are the only codes of conduct for identifying and possibly intervening in the affairs of governments, corporations, and other bodies, despite the historical and geographical mismatch they embody. Until alternate and more equitable ways of moving between cultures and economies are developed, these international instruments remain the only strategic tools of protection and constitute a basis for positive change in the face of violence, abuse, and displacement.

The movement of bodies across borders is intimately related to trade in other goods. The geography of displacement outlined here calls for a new way of doing politics. Political action, or "(p)raxis is not prohibited by a politics of not belonging.... it is important to disrupt the home/abroad and the margin/center constructs for more complex positionings" (Grewal, 1994). Ironically, it is the politics of belonging -- based on beliefs in common origins -- that decisively include and exclude certain groups of people, giving rise to possibilities of political mobilization, on the one hand, and the tragic potential of ethnic cleansing, rape, and war, on the other (Ignatieff, 1993; Watts, 1996).

 

Conclusions

As long as the Thai and SLORC governments continue to cooperate in economic terms through trade liberalization and investment, and SLORC maintains 'order' at the border to secure the flows of Burmese resources and possibly tourists, a transnational economy of trade in bodies for goods will continue. The border is 'open for business' in every sense of the word. As refugees flee, natural gas will soon flow south, from Burma into Thailand. These transnational politics generate corporeal, cross-border movements of refugees, though these people are no longer recognized as such by Thai authorities. As both Canada and the US agree to resettle displaced Burmese selected from the so-called 'safe camp' outside Bangkok, the Burmese diaspora in these countries grows and with it the political struggles that led to its migration.

The venue of the nation-state cannot adequately capture the historically contingent experience, politics, and geographically inscribed identities of this group. Regional economic and political integration usurps the protection of nationals in the Thai-Burma case. While the relevance of the state is questionable, strategies and interventions based on state-centric and ethnocentric human rights and legal instruments remain the imperfect 'ethics of encounter' in relations between, in this case, the SLORC government and the people of Burma. There is an obvious gap here: where transnational trade is on-going and transnational identities are produced through displacement, extant safeguards and standards of conduct have practical and political shortcomings. What kind of strategies might be developed that do not rely on the approval of 'the West', nor on state implementation given the potential absence of political will? This remains a question of the transnational political economy of migration.

 

References