This is an announcement to invite you to the CSEAS Colloquium for September 2015.

Date & Time: 24 September (Thursday) 2015, 16:00-17:30

Place: Middle-sized Meeting Room (No. 332), 3rd Floor, Inamori Foundation Building, Kyoto University

Title: Memory, Community, and Future: AEC, SEZ, and Migrants along the Thai-Burmese Borderland

Speaker: Dr. Decha Tangseefa (Lecturer, Faculty of Political Science, Thammasat University)

Abstract:
Amidst the drastic changing landscape of the Thai-Burmese borderland together with the commencement of the ASEAN Economic Community (AEC) on December 31, 2015, this talk will be guided by three key questions: How have memories of varieties of migrant peoples along the borderland shaped who they think they are? How have they woven their sense of community? What are the forms of communities of these marginal peoples in relation to the grand scheme of the AEC? Exploring these questions will shed more light on the nexus between mobility and sovereignty: human lives and the nation-state’s sovereign power. Based on a few research projects since 2008, this talk will juxtapose the pasts of marginal migrants with the aspirations of Thailand and ASEAN in the forms of, respectively, the Mae Sot special economic zone (SEZ) and AEC. Many of these peoples are naked lives: lives without juridical fabric to cover their existence. With or without juridical fabric, to live is to want to be protected. These migrants have strategized to weave different forms of community so that they could be protected at least since 1984. In that year, the Thai state officially allowed for an establishment of the first string of “temporary shelter areas” along the borderland for forced migrants fleeing from war. Presently, wandering, living, or being left along the borderland – voluntary or not, legal or otherwise, in or outside of the shelter areas – they have found themselves either being instrumental as cheap labor for Thai national interest or a hindrance to the Thai state’s border security as residents of those shelters. With the changing contours of communities both along the borderland and the ASEAN itself, one could ask how ASEAN’s motto “One Vision One Identity One Community” rings to the ears of ones of the world’s most vulnerable peoples, and in what ways? This talk will end by attempting to answer these questions.

Decha Tangseefa’s research and teaching interests are political theory, critical international studies, and cultural studies, especially relating to migration and border. He has contributed to major anthologies and journals in Thai and English. Apart from teaching political science at Thammasat University, he has also been working with the civil society along the Thai-Burmese borderland at least since 2008. From 2008 to 2011, he was also teaching in a college in the 50,000-people refugee camp along the borderland. During the past few years, he has been working with Oxford University’s scientists and their global networks to help with social science aspects of mass drug administration (MDA) along the borderland due to the dangerous urgency of drug-resistant malaria.

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