Humanitarian Assistance for the Encamped, Social Services for the Resettled: Exploring the Political Economy of Aid for Burmese Migrants in Thailand and the US

Keywords: Migration, displacement, humanitarianism, Thailand, Myanmar, refugee
Abstract Type: Paper Abstract

Abstract

Recent scholarship has contributed to a deeper understanding of how individuals grappling with displacement and migration are bound up in the value circuits of advanced capitalism, particularly as it relates to the production and containment of surplus labor (Frydenlund and Dunn 2022). Attention to the social practices and relationships of people on the move as they encounter exploitative labor regimes and exclusionary state strategies affords a growing sense of how precarious mobility, subjectivity, and the relations of capital accumulation are mutually constitutive (Saltsman 2022). However, additional work is needed to help explore the ways that mobility and relationships link disparate sites where migrants encounter varying formulations of dispossession and capital accumulation. That is, while multi-sited research on this topic (e.g. Coddington et al. 2020) illustrates the range of mechanisms by which migrants are rendered surplus, an emergent question lies in how migrants move between these sites and thus how their mobilities and transnational relationships are themselves part of the dialectic between subjectivity, dispossession, refuge, and surplus economies. This paper addresses this question through a discussion of displacement and mobility for Burmese migrants (including those from Karen and Karenni ethnic-nationalities) along the Thai-Burmese border and in a rust-belt city in the US northeast. In particular, I explore the ways in which varying regimes of care and humanitarianism have accompanied Burmese refugee mobility from containment in refugee camps to resettlement cities in the United States, and how these regimes constitute important technologies of governance that are embedded in situated political economies.