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

Kate Coddington

Mobilities, 2020, vol. 15, issue 4, 588-603

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.

Date: 2020
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/17450101.2020.1759928 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:taf:rmobxx:v:15:y:2020:i:4:p:588-603

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/rmob20

DOI: 10.1080/17450101.2020.1759928

Access Statistics for this article

Mobilities is currently edited by Professor Kevin Hannam, Professor Mimi Sheller and Professor John Urry

More articles in Mobilities from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst ().