Department of Political and Social Change Seminar Series
Research on borderlands displacement in the Thai-Myanmar border has focused on populations from Karen, Karenni, and Shan States, with little disaggregation of religious diversity or discussion of displacement events outside of armed conflict, positioning the history of borderlands displacement often outside of wider movements of people in and from other parts of the country. Lack of disaggregation of ‘Myanmar migrants’ or ‘Myanmar refugees’ obfuscates the differentiated impacts of migration amongst Myanmar communities in Thailand and returnees at home. Drawing on collaborative fieldwork on the Thai-Myanmar border, archival research, and life story interviews, this talk explores the inter-generational experiences of Myanmar’s religious minority borderland communities. Through documenting cross-border histories of citizenship and displacement, we ask how the intergenerational production, trajectories, and experiences of statelessness and citizenship regimes impact everyday life in Myanmar’s borderlands? Viewed from the borderlands, ‘displaceability’ can be understood as inherited and layered with other processes of displacement and dispossession. Those experiencing inherited displaceability, minorities with limited physical and social mobility in Myanmar due to lack of citizenship documents, may find increased recognition and social belonging in the multiple-status and mobile regime of borderlands citizenship.
About the speaker
Dr Elizabeth Rhoads is currently a researcher at the Centre for East and South-East Asian Studies, in the Department of History at Lund University in Sweden. She is an interdisciplinary legal scholar, whose work draws on legal history, legal anthropology, legal geography, urban studies, and human rights studies in understanding the everyday lived experience of citizenship, property relations, and minority-state relations in Southeast Asia. Her research has been funded by the Fulbright Commission, British Academy, the European Commission and theSwedish Research Council. Her work has been published in Geopolitics, Citizenship Studies, Journal of Contemporary Asia, and Critical Asian Studies.