Borders and borderworlds
Like many political geographers, my work challenges the idea that borders of nation-states map onto the boundaries of our social and political lives. I am interested not only in how individuals live across borders, but also how people relate to one another because of them. They make worlds that are shaped by, but which transcend, the nation-state.
I began to see borders in this way when, in 2016, did research on migrant lives along the Thai-Myanmar border. To me, it did not make sense to see migrant workers as individual, economic subjects; rather, they lived within a system of social reproduction that had thrived outside the purview of any state. Schools, clinics, and associations functioned in a legal grey zone, sustaining migrant families and communities. But as I document in Political Geography, during Myanmar's "transition" (2012-2021), the extension of state power across the border threatened this social system. Migrant labour was increasingly legalised, but this thrust the border social system into a more precarious state. Individuals could survive; communities struggled.
During my DPhil, I turned towards civil society networks on the Thai-Myanmar border. I began to see the Thai-Myanmar borderworld as a patchwork of spaces - frontier towns, refugee camps, and resistance-controlled territories - from which various actors could challenge postcolonial statebuilding. These were spaces of intense creativity, where new forms of non-state territory could emerge, such as the Salween Peace Park. Again, the borderworld is made out of relationships, persistent but precarious, built over decades, the threat of state violence notwithstanding.*
*I am in the process of writing up this research. Please contact me for drafts and/or a copy of my DPhil thesis.