Cross-border regions and border town development have emerged as fields of study, and important sites for studying urban and regional strategies for economic development in many parts of the world. This dissertation focuses on the two largest border towns of the Thai-Myanmar cross-border region; i.e. the town of Mae Sai and the city of Mae Sot were selected as case studies.
The dissertation employs a critical historical analysis and ethnographic fieldwork to reveal both the peculiarity and generality of the functions and formation of the border town in the cross-border economy of the region. The analysis examines the political economy and geopolitics of Thailand and Myanmar structured by intense armed ethnic struggles at the frontier of Myanmar and the expansion of export-led industrialization of Thailand from the capital city to its border. Both political economy and geo-politics of cross-border development at the Thai-Myanmar cross-border area created an unevenness of development not only in terms of economic unevenness between the two national spaces, but also the unevenness in border regulations of the two national spaces. The unevenness produces a specific form of cross-border economy and urban development at the core area of the cross-border region.
Central to the argument is the formation of the regimes of "border partial citizenship"; i.e. the Thai systems of Minority Immigrants and Registered Illegal Immigrant Workers from Myanmar, Laos, and Cambodia. The regimes are a form of spatial regulation imposed upon an individual body to achieve both border surveillance and the creation of the vulnerable, cheap, and disciplined workers. The workers are granted temporary permission to stay at the demarcated and confined area with limited welfare. These specific forms of border regulation confine immigrants into the border area and bar them from the political rights of unionization, social welfare, and the economic freedom of being able to move freely to fine less exploitative job. These regimes of border regulation help create economic growth based on a situation of primitive accumulation connected with a global economy of trafficking, trade, and production.
This dissertation has implications for city and regional planning as the detailed analysis reveals the way certain forms of spatial practice in fact shape the status of citizens in the city and how this is driven by both the state's surveillance practice and capitalism's drive towards exploitative accumulation.
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