Abstract:
This article examines the informal networks of mobility, subsistence, and information utilized by Khmer Krom, Rohingya, and Vietnamese refugees and asylum seekers living in Bangkok, Thailand. It is argued that through such networks, these displaced people are exercising forms of agency that allow for some manoeuvring through Thailand's criminalizing immigration framework as well as Southeast Asia's bleak refugee rights protection landscape. Employed amid constant vulnerability, such agency does not function to transform local conditions in any substantial way but is more reflective of ad hoc coping tactics made necessary by existing conditions. By looking at the regional dimensions of such tactics, however, it is suggested that the informal social networks that are developing through unregulated migration and adaptation practices in Southeast Asia point to alternative social geographies emerging from the interplay between the static constraints of national regulations and the flexible, perpetual, and at times transnational negotiation of these constraints during processes of displacement. It is throughout these transnational routes, spaces, and practices that the nature of social relations and human agency among refugees, asylum seekers, and other vulnerable migrants may be further traced and analysed in a regional context.
Contents:
- Introduction
- Context: Criminalized amid a Patchwork of Migration
- Crossborder Vagabonds: Networks of Movement and Irregular Migration
- Surviving in the City: Networks of Subsistence and Support
- Knowledge Exchange: Networks of Information to Assess and Act
- Agency and Connectivity: Alternative Social Geographies of Urban Refugees in the City and Region
- Conclusion