Flight to/through “the Door”:
Imperceptible Naked-Karens & the Thai-Burmese In-between Spaces
by Decha Tangseefa

Peace Information Center
Foundation for Democracy and Development Studies
Faculty of Political Science,
Thammasat University
Prachan Road, Bangkok 10200
Thailand

International Convention of Asian Scholars (ICAS3), Singapore, 19-22.08.2003
R 16 Agency and Narrative in Southeast Asia Borderland I, Alexander Horstmann, Chair
I. Precarious Lives along the Thai-Burmese Border Zones

Experiences inside Burma/Myanmar have been harrowing. Like many lives under fire elsewhere, peoples’ agonies under the Burmese dictatorship have not been adequately “accounted for” by the world community. Conservative figure shows that 600,000 – 1,000,000 people have been forcibly displaced. Many of these peoples have taken flight through doorways along the Thai-Burmese state-boundary. Among them are the Karen indigenous peoples, who have been situated in the border zone long before the demarcation of the Thai-Burmese boundary. To offer a glimpse into the plight of the forcibly displaced Karens in the Thai-Burmese border zones, I invoke here the following story. The story was written by one of my students in my Introduction to Politics class taught while I was conducting fieldwork in what the Thai state names as a “temporary shelter area.” Except for excluding the names of some places, following ethnographic etiquette, I maintain the text as original:

The hardest time in my life was when I was 18 years old. I was studied at…school [on the Thai side] with my two younger sisters. It was the year that I had to face many difficulties. In the end of our school year, because of the DKBA [Democratic Karen Buddhist Army], all of the students and teachers were very frightened. The situations was getting worser and worser until we had to go to sleep between the mountains. One of my younger sister was weak and she was very tired of climbing the mountain every evening. We studied in the day time and after our dinner, we went to the mountains to sleep there.

One day the situation at the school was very bad, because the…village is situated in the border of Thailand and Burma. Because of this reason, we had to close our school as fast as we could. Our headmistress told us that we had to go back to our families. So all of the teachers and students gathered and had a short meeting and said good-bye to each other. Because it was late in the afternoon, we couldn’t come back to the…camp [a temporary shelter area]. So we stayed at the village for one more night.

That night because of my youngest sister was very tired, we went to the village to sleep with our Thai teacher. Unfortunately, at 7 p.m., we had to run away from the village again because of the Burmese and the DKBA threatened. My sister was sick now and she couldn’t walk no longer. I carried her on my back and my friend also helped me. We had to walk one hour to reach the place where many villagers were hidden.

We slept there one night, early in the morning we came back to the village. And my Thai teacher told me that, we should go to the hospital. Then we set for the hospital immediately. She was unconscious on the way to the hospital and I was very worried. Then we arrived at the…hospital [in Thailand] and she was better again. She asked for water because she was thirsty. After 15 minutes later, she was dead. I couldn’t believe my eyes because it was like a trick for me. I cried bitterly for my poor sister. She didn’t have malaria nor anything else.

I didn’t know what to do with her body and I felt very upset as I was torn apart from my body. Then we went back to the village to bury her. We waited for our relatives and my older sister. At that time, my mother was in Bangkok and my grandparents were also away from us. I felt very painful for myself and our poor lives. I couldn’t do anything except crying.

It is the hardest time for me in my life. It happened on Feb. 1997.

Stories such as this one have been imperceptible to those of us whose lives have not been under war or dictatorship regime, and hence have lived under adequate juridical protections. Other stories, however, have been perceived, but ignored. Inside the Burmese nation-state, the forcibly displaced Karens are living in danger zones, where the territorial sovereignty of the despotic state renders them imperceptible to the outside world. On the Thai side, they have often been regarded by the Thai society as aberrants whose lives are generally not qualified to be (ac)counted, whether they are living “legally” in a string of the “temporary shelter areas” or living “illegally” outside the shelters. Whether in Thailand or in Burma, the forcibly displaced Karens’ voices are usually ignored. No matter how loud they have screamed, a tremendous amount of the forcibly displaced peoples inside the Burmese nation-state have been left silently tortured, dead, and dissolving back to the soil they have hoped to be their homelands. Many indigenous peoples or ethnic nationalities, therefore, have taken flight across the Thai-Burmese state-boundary in search of sunlight; many of whom, however, have been living in darkness on the Thai side.

This paper’s task is fourfold. First, following Giorgio Agamben and Jacques Ranciere, this paper briefly articulates “imperceptible naked lives” as a conceptual strategy to account for forcibly displaced peoples – the parts that have no parts in the world community, or the unaccounted-for. Second, the paper articulates the notion of in-between spaces together with weaving a methodology from three topics of anthropology in order to explore the main political entanglements and complex realities of the Thai-Burmese border zones. Such articulation and weaving help the readers better recognize both the atrocities committed upon forcibly displaced peoples and the interconnections between borderlands’ cultures and cultures of state terror. Third, inspired by Agamben's treatment of the nexus between sovereign power and human life as exemplified in Franz Kafka's parable Before the Law, the paper concludes by deploying the parable to articulate the displaced Karen's flight through "the door." Lastly, this paper narrates the effects on Karens’ lives caused by atrocities, territorial displacement, and the incommensurabilities between nation-states' juridical maps and displaced peoples' cultural maps. Those effects range from tragic memories and experiences to strategies for survival.

It is important, however, to first address who the “Karens” are and why I chose to study them.

II. Who are the “Karens”?, Why study the “Karens”?

My study is a writing journey into the spaces of the forcibly displaced Karens, who have taken flight from within the Burmese nation-state. The term “Karen” was originally used by outsiders, and its derivation is uncertain. The Karens were officially renamed by the ruling State Law and Order Restoration Council (SLORC) in 1989 as “Kayins,” a name that, according to Martin Smith, the Karen nationalist leaders have rejected “as strongly as they do the historic Burman term for their country, ‘Myanmar’” (1999: 37). Under the name Karen, there are three major groups: the Pwo, the Bwe, and the Sgaw (e.g., Marshall, 1922: 1).

Although I employ the term “Karens” in this paper, my use of this term is, however, not meant to signify the Karens as a “frozen” people. For inasmuch as identities are contingent on the performative, I deploy the term as a signifier of those who enunciate, perform, and reenact “Karen-ness.” In this, I wish to retain Gayatri Spivak’s notion that identities are strategically essentialized in encounters or political struggles (e.g., Spivak/Harasym,1990: 11). Following Jacques Ranciere, such strategical essentializing of the Karens is an enactment of subjectification – the enunciative and performative acts attempting to render themselves perceptible and intelligible – with an intention to render themselves recognizable as qualified political subjects.

Accordingly, to understand the sufferings and struggles of the forcibly displaced Karens in the war zones of Burma, or inside and outside “temporary shelter areas” on the Thai side, it is critical that one understands how crucial it is for the Karens to re-enact themselves as Karens. For many illiterate, forcibly displaced Karens, Karen dialect(s) are their only language, their only enunciative vehicle. After days, months, or years of running for their lives, for the civilians who have taken flight in the war zones, it is critical to be able to trust that they belong to a “community” somewhere, a community that they believe can help them. For the members of the Karen National Union (KNU), after more than half a century of fighting in the name of the Karen nationhood, it is crucial to be able to trust that the “community” is not nameless.

There are two main reasons for focusing on the Karens rather than other ethnic nationalities situated along the Thai-Burmese border zones: their size and their persistence. Within the territory of Burma/Myanmar, the Karens are the second largest ethnic nationality after the Burmans. The Karen National Union (KNU) is one of the last remaining armed resistance organizations and the longest-standing one in Burma. They have been fighting against the Burmese government since the official announcement of their revolution, as they call it, on January 31, 1949. Since then, they have attempted to gain, originally, a separate country of the Karens and, later, an autonomous region for their Karen State under the Federal Union of Burma. My study, however, emphasizes mainly on civilians who have been forcibly displaced rather than on the political actors in the Thai-Burmese border zones.

III. Imperceptible Naked-Karens

The concept of “imperceptible naked-lives” follows the writings of Giorgio Agamben and Jacques Ranciere. Whereas the idea of “naked life” is Agambenian, “imperceptible” is formulated from Ranciere’s articulation of “the political.” Agamben’s concept of “naked life” illuminates the interlocking relations of sovereign power and human life, and hence enables me to discern the state terror inflicted upon the existence and bodies of the displaced Karens. Ranciere’s conception of “the political” allows one to understand that the struggles of forcibly displaced peoples – the practices of enunciating and/or demonstrating themselves as qualified political subjects – are the constructions of political spaces, even if they are labeled as illegitimate, and often “illegal,” by the state.

In a nutshell, Agamben’s notion of naked life has two crucial angles. The first angle refers to the quintessentially abandoned life through the sovereign exception. The second refers to the inevitability of life being threatened by the sovereign power. Whenever the sovereign threat is materialized, the first angle of naked life emerges. As human beings under sovereign power, our lives could be threatened; and when that happens, we as forms-of-life (bios) are stripped and we as sheer facts of living (zoe) reveal. This inevitability of life being threatened is the fact of life, as Agamben states by drawing from Benjamin, because the “state of exception” in which we live is the rule.

Although Agamben emphasizes the western notion of naked life, his emphasis on the state of emergency as the rule in late-modernity is applicable to what has happened in Burma. At least since 1948 when Burma simultaneously became independent and a nation-state, it is, for the most part, a country in a perpetual state of emergency, whereby the sovereign decision on the state of exception has been the rule. As I will discuss in more details in the latter part of this paper, my fieldwork conducted in the war zones and “camps” for the forcibly displaced Karens along the Thai-Burmese border zones confirms how crucial Agamben’s works are in evincing the sovereign power over human lives and in revealing the harsh reality in those zones.

As for Ranciere, his conception of “the political” breaks with the consensual logic, which usually means the sharing of a common and nonlitigious experience; and the essence of such logic is “the affirmation of the preconditions that determine political choice as objective and univocal” (Ranciere/Panagia 2000: 123). The principal function of politics, for him, is to disclose the world of its subjects and its operations: to make visible that which had no reason to be seen, by lodging one world into another, constructing a paradoxical world that relates two separate worlds (2001: nos. 21-2, 24). Such construction results from an intervention upon the visible and the sayable, from a battle about perceptible/sensible material, and from the reconfiguration of that which is given in the sensible – transforming a space for the appearance of a subject and “refiguring the space, of what there is to do there, what is to be seen or named therein.”

In other words, politics is to make perceptible that which has been rendered imperceptible. Rancierian politics is contained in a specific mode of relation of “part-taking” (avoir-part, which in French means both a partaking and a partition). Political litigiousness/struggle, Ranciere maintains, is not a conflict between well-defined interest group; it is an opposition of logics that count the parties and parts of the community in different ways. There are two contrasting ways of counting, one is called the police, the other the politics. The first only counts empirical parts, i.e., “actual groups defined by differences in birth, by different functions, locations, and interests that constitute the social body.” The second counts “in addition” a part of the no-part (Ibid.: nos. 1, 19; my emphasis). Politics, therefore, disturbs this arrangement by supplementing it with a part of the no-part identified with the community as a whole. Hence, political litigiousness/struggle is that which brings politics into being by separating it from the police.

Understanding politics in a Rancierian spirit, one better discerns peoples’ attempts to disrupt and/or supplement the normal order of things. The people involved re-qualify their spaces of struggles to be seen as “the spaces of a community, of getting themselves to be seen or heard as speaking subjects (if only in the form of litigation)” (2001: no. 23). Thinking through the history of the Karens in this light, one recognizes that the Karens’ are voices that have endeavored to enunciate their becoming, to be part of the following “communities”: first, of the Burman kingdom of Ava; second, of the British Burma; third, of the Burmese nation-state; and lastly, of the human family.
Yet, in the case of Burma, the statist discourse of territorial integrity has rendered the forcibly displaced peoples’ nakedness imperceptible. Moreover, along the Thai-Burmese border zones, the two nation-states’ sovereign powers (more so by the Burmese than the Thai) have transformed parts of the border zones to be spaces of emergency. Thailand’s and Burma’s separate productions of spaces and lives have produced similar effects – spaces filled with naked lives who are expellable or killed due to their lack of adequate juridical protections and/or recognition. All these effects have, in a way, resulted from the geographical imaginary and the political “lawfulness” that the two nation-states have attempted to produce within their territories, without recognizing the cultural geographies – non-state maps resulting from the practices of spaces and identities in the “in-between spaces” – of indigenous/ethnic/forcibly displaced others, to which we now turn.

IV. The Thai-Burmese In-between Spaces
& Three Topics of Anthropologies

My articulation of the notion of “in-between spaces” is meant to capture the unique characteristics of the Thai-Burmese border zones. I deploy such a notion to disrupt the conceptual framework of the state-centric paradigm, thereby problematizing the Thai-Burmese state-boundary and opening up spaces for non-statist agents. This notion deviates from the statist cartography that demarcates the Thai-Burmese border zones, which stretches a thin line for 2,401 kilometers (about 1,500 miles). There are four dimensions to this notion that I emphasize: philosophical, cultural, political, and violent. To conduct my fieldwork in the Thai-Burmese border zones, I constructed a method that interwove three keys topics of anthropology: the anthropology of borders (e.g., Donnan & Wilson, 1999; Cf. Horstmann, 2002), the anthropology of state terror (e.g., Sluka, 2000; Nordstorm & Robben, 1995; Taussig 1987), and the ethnographic research on displacement and refugees (e.g., Malkki, 1995).

1. The Philosophical and Cultural In-between Spaces,
and Anthropology of Borders

As both affirmations and locations of the dominant geopolitical discourse, state-boundaries create both conflict and violent representations, determining those who do and do not belong. These processes of identity formation “privilege the nation-state as the venue for political contest and change” (Hyndman, 2000: 27). Like other imperceptible naked-lives situated along the Thai-Burmese border zones, the Karens’ transversality is thus a threat to the territorial integrity of both Thailand and Burma (cf. Rajah, 1990; Nagengast, 1994: 118), as well as to their respective national narratives – their “imagined communities” (Anderson, 1991). The processes of demarcating Thailand and Burma territory have established the two nation-states, and simultaneously designated the Karens, as well as other ethnic nationalities and indigenous peoples situated along the border zones, as unqualified forms-of-life (Cf. Thongchai, 1994). Through this inclusive exclusion, these peoples have been abandoned by the two sovereignties. They have been rendered into naked lives devoid of any possibility of appeal. As unqualified political subjects, the Karens have been excluded from the statist politics, their histories and memories have, by and large, been discounted, and their voices, bodies, and actions have been made imperceptible. Also, their enunciation and demonstration are not intelligible because they do not comply with the juridical grammar of the nation-state. In other words, the forcibly displaced Karens’ loci of enunciation are ungrammatical.

Inspired by Agamben, my study contends that the idea of the Thai-Burmese state-boundary is problematic. In the Agambenian topology of sovereign power, borderlands are zones of irreducible indistinction between the outside and the inside of sovereignty’s jurisdiction – between violence and law, law and life. In these spaces, exception and rule flow through one another to the point of literal indistinction. With the discourse of state-boundary problematized and blurred, the in-between spaces signify not only the zones beside the boundary, but also other zones deeper inside, including war zones in the Burmese nation-state. It is in this light that the philosophical dimension of the notion of “in-between spaces” enables us to fathom a variety of entanglements in the border zones.

The anthropological treatment of borders enhanced my ability to grasp such entanglements. The anthropology of border zones studies borders as means to understand nations and states, the relations between the two, and how a variety of peoples therein experience, symbolically and materially, the nation and the state in their quotidian lives along the borders. Moreover, borderlands are spaces where a diverse array of forces and flows entwine: boundary-traversing peoples, cultures, and capital disrupt the nation-states’ territorial integrity and their sovereignties. Border zones thus not only symbolize nation-states’ powers and their limits, but also engender conflicts and accommodation. As spaces filled with cultural actions, they are zones of unique cultural translations and negotiations (Bhabha, 1994: 38; cf. Clifford, 1997). All these features, therefore, highlight cultural aspects of the Thai-Burmese “in-between spaces” where peoples traversed.

2. Ethnographic Research on Displacement and Refugees,
and the Political In-between Spaces

This anthropological methodology addresses the effects of territorial or spatial displacement upon the quotidian lives of forcibly displaced peoples. It pays attention to the becomingness of the displaced. I employ this methodology to discern both the torment and cultural transformation amidst danger of the forcibly displaced Karens, by following some earlier research on displacement and “refugees.” For instance, Liisa Malkki argues that “refugees” see themselves as a nation in exile and some of them consider their situatedness to be “positive, productive status and…a profoundly meaningful historical identity.” Likewise, in my study of the displaced Karens, I ask: If there is something that can be regarded as the Karens’ collective self-understanding of their situations, how has their transformation from being “internally displaced peoples” to being “peoples fleeing fighting” on the Thai side affected that understanding?

In attempting to discern the forcibly displaced Karens’ situatedness, it is critical to problematize a conception of forcibly displaced peoples as universal “victims” (cf. Allen & Turton, 1996: 9). Such is a view held by the international community and particularly by many international relief organizations. When one focuses on the displaced Karens’ signs of impoverishment and injury, more often than not, one ignores these peoples as unqualified political subjects. Worse than that, many forcibly displaced peoples have not even been recognized as political subjects. With this latter attitude, the forcibly displaced Karens become entities without histories, a view that both strips them of their pasts and silences their presents. Even though many Karens have been displaced from their “homeland” and many still have lost their lives, their identities as a people have not been simply lost, they have been reconfigured. Although the displaced Karens today are not in the strong positions that their ancestors were when, for instance, the latter demanded to be perceived in the Burmese public sphere under the semi-rule of the British Empire in the nineteenth-century, many of today’s displaced Karens have been struggling relentlessly to survive and to be perceived as a nation again.

Weaving together the transformational processes of displacement with the entanglements of a variety of forces and flows in the border zones, one is in a better position to recognize the political dimensions of the Thai-Burmese in-between spaces. Specifically, my study is inspired by the Rancierian conception of the political. The in-between spaces are spaces of a meeting among the heterogenous, where the politics acts on the police. Expressed theoretically, the heterogenous meet “in the places and with the words that are common to both [the politics and the police], even if it means reshaping those places and changing the status of those words” (Ranciere, 1999: 32, 33). Hence, after reconfiguring the in-between spaces by conceptually neutralizing them from the police’s logic, and after deviating from the following common terms that are anti-political yet reflect the police’s logic – terms such as “stateless peoples,” “internally displaced persons,” and “refugees” – my study moves in two ways. First, it installs the term “forcibly displaced peoples” as a way to deviate and distance itself from the police logic of the univocity of statist discourses. Second, it deploys the term “imperceptible naked-lives” to conceptually disrupt the statist univocity and to open conceptual spaces for non-statist multivocity. Moreover, discerning attempts by the forcibly displaced Karens to name themselves, to participate in the stage of the common world, this study highlights the Thai-Burmese in-between spaces as spaces of political subjectification, which produce a heterogeneity that was not given “in the police constitution of the community, a multiple whose count poses itself as contradictory in terms of police logic” (Ibid.: 36). Nonetheless, the sovereign power over various subjectivities in its territory often results in the state committing terror upon peoples’ bodies and lives. The anthropological study of state terror then becomes imperative for my study to fathom the situatedness of the forcibly displaced Karens who have taken flight in the Thai-Burmese in-between spaces.

3. Anthropology of State Terror & the In-between Spaces of Terror

The last anthropological approach that my study employs investigates the extent and characteristics of state violence, which are the operating procedures to suppress or eradicate dissenting voices or nations. As a result of these processes of control, cultures of terror emerge and flourish (Taussig, 1987: 242). The culture of terror creates permanent, massive, and systematic threats, uses of violence and intimidation by the state, such as repression, torture, rape, and killing to those who oppose the political status quo (Ibid.; cf. Sluka 1995). My study examines terror from the memories and loci of enunciation of survivors. It investigates the ways in which cultures of borderlands enhance or hinder cultures of terror, and the extent to which both cultural elements affect the forcibly displaced Karens.

Within the Thai-Burmese in-between spaces, both the Burmese and Thai state’s functionaries have committed atrocities upon the Karens and other forcibly displaced peoples – to be sure, those of the former have done more than those of the latter. Although the multifaceted state terror is a state construction, its effects upon the lifeworlds of a variety of peoples in the in-between zones have been far-reaching and beyond the two countries’ territories. The wounds and tormenting memories that the forcibly displaced unwillingly carry with them while traversing the Thai-Burmese state-boundary transcend the Thailand’s and Burma’s territorial sovereignties and their containment strategies. That is, such memories and wounds reflect the universality of human sufferings of those who have had to endure atrocities, let alone the senses of pride as humans that they have lost along the way. Regretfully, there is inadequate knowledge of these peoples’ sufferings. And as little as the sufferings have been perceived, their struggles have barely been recognized. From the Thai statist perspective, for instance, the voices of the forcibly displaced from Burma, expressing the atrocities they have experienced, are generally regarded as voices of the Others, the aberrants – the unqualified political subjects. Nonetheless, when these voices were sometimes listened to, many survivors have become speechless.

By connecting the anthropological studies of atrocities and their effects on the displaced Karens’ collective selfhood within Thai-Burmese border zones, the resulting methodological approach helps me reconfigure the relationships between space, identity/temporality, and culture amidst state terror. Because this research combines philosophy, political theory, and critical comparative politics with in-depth ethnographic research, the study aims to provide some new dimensions to these three anthropological approaches. With brief theoretical and methodological treatments articulated, let us turn to explore the quotidian lives of the forcibly displaced Karens who have taken flight to/through “the Door.”

V. Flight to/through “the Door”

1. Controlled Spaces, Contested Spaces:
The KNU versus the Junta’s Practices of Spaces

A space is never neutral. It is always a part of contests over control. A political space is always produced and controlled by sovereign power(s), no matter how contested such control would be. Likewise, in the Burma’s war zones, one would at first glance find oneself walking in a junta-produced area or an ethnic armed organization’s area. Specifically, in the junta-designated Karen State, either the Tatmadaw (Burmese Army) or its allies (e.g., the Democratic Karen Buddhist Army - DKBA) control the space; if not, one would find oneself in the KNU-controlled area. Hence, it seems that the forcibly displaced peoples were under the “protection” of the KNU or the Burmese state. The two controlled-areas, however, have always been contentious. From the Burmese state’s practice of space, these contested areas are designated in different colors according to the intensity of fighting with the ethnic nationalities’ troops, from black, to brown, to white, with the aim to finally whiten all the areas. As Martin Smith writes:

The map of Burma was divided into a vast chessboard under the Tatmadaw’s six (later nine) regional military commands and shaded in three colors: black for entirely insurgent-controlled areas; brown for areas both sides still disputed; and white was “free”. The idea was that each insurgent-colored area would be cleared, one by one, until the whole map of Burma was white. For the black “hard-core” areas and brown “guerrilla” zones a standard set of tactics was developed which, after a little refinement, has remained little changed till today (1999: 259).

The junta also calls the “black” areas the “free-fire” zones, where troops can shoot anyone on sight without the need to determine identity, which was one of the causes of death of the relatives of the “refugee” interviewed by Amnesty International (Amnesty International, 2001a: 13). This whole zonal categorization, however, is misleading because there have been atrocities committed by the junta’s functionaries in every kind of zone, although in theory this state’s practice of space is intended to win the hearts and minds of the local peoples. This zonal categorization, together with the Four Cuts operations, are military strategies that have resulted in indigenous peoples – be they rural or hill peoples, villagers or peasants – being forcibly relocated, so as to isolate the ethnic nationalities’ troops from the peoples, and to finally gain political, economic, and social control over the contested areas.

In the Karen-Burmese war zones that I was visiting, it was the KNU who had been losing most of its areas of control and communication routes in the jungle. The junta’s Four Cuts strategy had been atrociously effective. It has always been the case that the junta’s troops have attempted onslaughts on ethnic nationalities’ controlled-areas during the dry seasons, roughly between mid-November and the beginning of May. Yet, the civilians have been the ones who have had to bear the horrendous brunt of the attacks by hiding in the jungles with little or no food during the rainy seasons.

Arbitrary and severe atrocities have claimed a multitude of lives. Families, and communities have been scattering throughout the jungles. The attacks of 1994/95 and 1997 inflicted the most serious damage and casualties on the Karens’ side since their retreat to the Karen State in 1974. On January 27, 1995, the KNU lost Manerplaw, its headquarter adjacent to the Thai-Burmese state-boundary. They lost the headquarter after losing many of their “brothers” who called themselves the Democratic Karen Buddhist Army and who had turned to side with the junta and had helped the latter stormed Manerplaw. Such loss of the controlled-areas and communication routes has resulted in many Karen villagers leaving their lands and trying to survive. Some have been able to escape from the SPDC-controlled areas, but others could not.

2. Taking Flight to the Thai-Burmese State-Boundary: A One-way Trip?

Nowadays, there are still many forcibly displaced Karens drifting around in the jungles and mountains, traversing one frontline after another, to avoid the Tatmadaw’s troops or their allies, with limited belongings or necessities they can carry. When the rice that they have brought with them runs out, they survive on animals, some edible plants’ roots, and vegetation that they can find on their way as food and medicine – not everyone has knowledge of herbal medicine, however. During my time traveling with the relief team, I often witnessed that many displaced Karens took their flights with their very small babies and their elders, while they themselves were very sick.

Is it possible that, as Marianne Forro states, “to some people the very ‘state of movement’ is being ‘at home’” (quoted in Tabori, 1972: 37)? I doubt that it is the case here. In another village that we traversed, there was a school that had almost a hundred students and eight teachers. One of the teachers, when asked for reasons for not fleeing to “temporary shelter areas” on the Thai side, said: “we intend to stay free amidst dangers rather than live a secure life without freedom.”

Apart from freedom, there have been other reasons why many displaced Karens have not fled to the Thai side. First, many Karen villagers are Animists whose sense of rootedness to the land and the spirits of the land tie them to their lands. Second, for many villagers, being mountainous or deep-jungle farmers without education and any points of references on lives outside the forests, it is hard for them to imagine how their lives could be in the “camps” of another country, as it were. Third, some of these villagers have heard from other villagers who had returned from Thailand because they could not bare life without farming any longer. Because the Thai government had not allowed them to farm, they could not earn any income; and some of them had not gotten good treatment in the “camp” that they had stayed.

However, once the situations in their ancestral areas become too grave to bear, these villagers would start taking flight to the Thai side. For many of them, this option is a last resort, as written in an editorial of the Internally Displaced Peoples News, a newsletter produced by a group of Karens on the Thai side:

Karen[s]…generally cross the border into Thailand as a last resort, but they try to find other means of survival first in their own country. Whenever armed clashes or search and kill activities occur inside those territories, the fleeing people who are seeking for safer places automatically try to take refuge in Thai territory (CIDKP, 2000B: 3).

To be sure, the paths of the forcibly displaced Karens are not always linear: i.e., becoming the forcibly displaced, attempting to traverse the so-called Thai-Burmese boundary, and finally arriving at one of the “camps” and hence ending their tormenting journeys. Forcibly displaced peoples have passed through “doorways” of the two nation-states in order to find safer or better treatment conditions, which most of them have never found.

3. Before the Law: Threshold

As mentioned earlier, parts of the Thai-Burmese in-between spaces have been transformed to be spaces of emergency by the two sovereignties. When one follows the forcibly displaced peoples’ flight from Burma to Thailand in the Agambenian sense, one recognizes that the admission to asylum is therefore a strategy of inscribing lives from “outside” in the sphere of Thai laws and the agreements Thailand has with the UNHCR. These forcibly displaced lives animate the relevant laws. The inscriptive strategy would name the displaced in two categories. The Thai government wants to grant temporary shelter to only peoples fleeing fighting whereas the UNHCR have been trying to push the criteria to include also peoples fleeing effects of civil war.

In the Thai-Burmese in-between spaces, the fate and struggles of the forcibly displaced peoples from the Burmese nation-state can be articulated in the spirit of Kafka’s Before the Law (e.g., 1984: 213-15) as the following. Following Agamben’s reading of Franz Kafka’s Before the Law and Gerschom Scholem’s formula for the status of law in Kafka’s novel: the structure of the sovereign relation is “being in force without significance (Geltung ohne Bedeutung):’’

…before the Law stands a doorkeeper. To this doorkeeper there comes a teenage girl from Burma, who prays for admittance to the Law. But the doorkeeper says that he cannot grant admittance at the moment. The girl thinks it over and then asks if she will be allowed in later. "It is possible," says the doorkeeper, "but not at the moment." Since the door leading into the Law stands open, as usual, and the doorkeeper steps to one side, the girl stoops to peer through the door. Observing that, the doorkeeper laughs and says: "If you are so drawn to it, just try to go through it despite my veto. But take note: I am powerful. And I am only the least of the doorkeepers. From door to door, there is one doorkeeper after another, each more powerful than the last. The third doorkeeper is already so terrible that even I cannot bear to look at him."

These are difficulties the girl from Burma has not expected; the Law, she thinks, should surely be accessible at all times and to everyone, but as she now takes a closer look at the doorkeeper in his trench coat, with his big sharp nose, and hugely vicious eyes, she decides that it is better to wait until she gets permission to enter. The doorkeeper allows the girl to build a shed to stay by the door. There she lives for days and years. With her perseverance, she makes countless attempts to be admitted. The doorkeeper frequently has little interviews with her, asking her questions about her home and other matters, but the questions are put indifferently, as bureaucrats put them, and always finish with the statement that she cannot be let over yet.

The woman, who has furnished herself with things for her journey, sacrifices all she has, however valuable, in the hope of bribing the doorkeeper. The doorkeeper accepts everything, but always with the remark: "I am only taking it to keep you from thinking you have done nothing." During these long years the woman fixes her attention constantly on the doorkeeper. She forgets the other doorkeepers, and this first one seems to her the sole obstacle between herself and the Law. She curses her bad luck, and since in her attentive observation of the doorkeeper she has come to know even the ants on his trench coat's, she begs the ants as well to help her and to change the doorkeeper's mind. Later, as she gets very weak and very ill, she only grumbles to herself and to her tiny daughter.

Soon her health deteriorates and her eyesight begins to fail, and she does not know whether the world is really darker or whether her eyes are only deceiving her. Yet in her darkness she is now aware of a radiance that streams inextinguishably from the door of the Law. She does not have very long to live and her tiny daughter is very sick, too. Before she dies, all her experiences in these long years gather themselves in her head to one point, a question she has not yet asked the doorkeeper. She waves him nearer, since she can no longer raise her ailing and stiffening body, hugging her sick, tiny daughter. The doorkeeper has to bend low toward them, for the difference in height between them has altered much to the woman’s disadvantage. "What do you want to know now?" asks the doorkeeper; "you are insatiable." "Everyone strives to reach the Law," says the woman, "so how does it happen that for all these years no one but myself and my daughter have ever begged to enter the door?" The doorkeeper recognizes that the woman has reached her end, and, to let his failing senses catch the words, roars in her ears: "No one else could ever be admitted here, since this door was made only for you. I am now going to shut it."
Locating the Thai-UNHCR agreements in the horrendous effects of the Tatmadaw’s Four Cut strategy upon ethnic nationalities (which does not always mean direct fighting), however, one cognizes that the Thai government’s criterion to grant temporary shelter, to only peoples fleeing fighting, is alarmingly narrow. The forcibly displaced’s lives resulting from the Four Cut strategy have become imperceptible. These peoples would be rejected at “the gate” and left outside the threshold of the sovereignty of the agreements, quintessentially situated “outside,” without existing in a corresponding “inside.” For the forcibly displaced who would be granted temporary shelter, they would be, in a Kafkaesque sense, given “stools” to sit down at the side of Thailand’s “door.” The official set up of the “temporary shelter areas” on the Thai side of the in-between spaces for the forcibly displaced from Burma began in 1984. Since then at least one generation of the “shelter members” were born and had grown up to be young men and women. “Temporary shelter areas” have not been temporary. Yet, they will be closed once these peoples will not come to ask for permission at the “door.” All the pertinent laws and agreements will not have to be enforced once the peoples no longer come because they were enacted only for these peoples.

For those who have disregarded the Thai laws and the Thai-UNHCR agreements, they would either have to attempt to traverse through other parts of Thailand’s “doorways” or wander and hide in the war zones – imperceptible naked-lives abound.

4. Mae Sot & Forcibly Displaced Peoples:
A Borderland & Lives along a “Borderline”

Up to this point, this paper has omitted one crucial aspect of many imperceptible naked-Karens’ lives: how they have grasped any available propitious opportunities to create their own spaces and times, hence transforming tragic senses of life into strategies for survival, shifting from poetics of grief to poetics of struggles. After all, for them to be situated along the Thai-Burmese in-between spaces, where there are quite a few borderlands, is to be in a strategic position to maneuver those ample opportunities available. Borderlands are translocalities where a variety of localities merge, a variety of subjectivities mingle, both of which produce lifeworlds that may at first glance be spatially confined by the nation-state’s territory. In reality, however, such lifeworlds transcend and at times disrupt the nation-state’s jurisdiction (cf. Appadurai, 1996b: 42, 44). A genealogy and an ethnography of the translocalities in the Mae Sot contact zone located in the Thai-Burmese in-between spaces will illustrate the possibilities for the Karens’ strategies and struggles for survival and the ways in which borderlands’ cultures enhance or hinder cultures of terror.

The biggest and busiest district on the western front of Thailand, Mae Sot is located in the Tak province across Myawadi, a Burma’s town on the other side of the Moei river, a boundary. Different ethnic groups have lived in this town for over one hundred years: first was the Karens, later on the Tais, the Chinese from Yunnan, the Burmans, the Muslims from Bangladesh and northern Thailand, and the Sikhs and the Hindus from India. Later on, many Tais, Chinese, and Burmans have also fled turbulence in Burma to live here; not to mention the migration of many Chinese from mainland China to Thailand, who came to Mae Sot through Bangkok. Northern Thai and Thai-Chinese merchants from southern Thailand also migrated here later (Anurak, 1998: 14-17). Before the construction of a highway from the city of Tak province to Mae Sot over mountainous terrains, it was far easier for Mae Sot’s residents to trade with people at the Moulmein province of Burma (later renamed as Mawlamyine by the junta), which is a seaport by the Andaman Sea of the Indian Ocean. Under the British rule especially, Moulmein was one of the most important seaports of British Burma (Ibid.: 14). In addition, many international non-governmental organizations from many parts of the globe have their local offices here because three of the ten registered “temporary shelter areas” in western Thailand are located in Tak province. After more than one hundred years, varieties of localities have been produced – translocalities have emerged in and surrounding Mae Sot.

Mae Sot has become and continues to be a manifestation of multi-faced localities (see also Jakkapan, 2000) where both official and black market economic transactions have alternately or simultaneously been thriving. Mae Sot as a border zone has been a site of conflicts and/or accommodation, on the one hand, and cultural translations and negotiations, on the other, for over a century. Some Chinese traders I talked with in Mae Sot recounted the time over two decades ago when they helped their counterparts from Burma who were forced to temporarily leave Mywaddi to the Thai side because of sporadic fighting between the Karen National Union and the Tatmadaw troops. Perhaps it was because of such “specific histories of cultural displacement” (Bhabha, 1994: 172) that have been parts of every town dweller’s genealogies and memories, especially the older generations’ memories, that, in turn, have rendered this town accommodating to “the others.” The memories they refer back to and the discourses that account for those memories are rooted somewhere else. Such transnational dimension of the cultural transformation of these residents has complicated cultural signification – cultures are then always translational (Bhabha, Ibid.). And the Thai national culture has not been easily entrenched here: “The fiction of cultures as discrete, object like phenomena occupying discrete spaces becomes implausible for those who inhabit the borderlands,” write Gupta & Ferguson (1997: 34). The transnational and the translational intertwine and closely akin – they form a hybrid location of cultural value. Cultures become strategies for survival (Bhabha, Ibid.) for every subjectivity in this contact zone.

Moreover, peoples’ spatial histories of displacement within and along the translocalities have more often than not been accompanied by “the territorial ambitions of ‘global’ media technologies” (Ibid.). Together with capital flows, the territorial ambition of “global” media has tenaciously deterritorialized nation-states’ boundaries. As a borderland, Mae Sot has, at least since the opening of the Thailand-Myanmar Friendship Bridge on August 15, 1997, been a zone where the electronic mediation thrives along with capital transactions, creating the capital-electronic circuits, which have in turn been exploited by a variety of subjectivities, including members of ethnic nationalities fighting against the Burmese junta. Specifically, there have been more computer-support and/or internet shops in Mae Sot to serve local peoples, international relief workers, and tourists. Ethnic nationalist organizations located not far from Mae Sot have also exploited cyberspace and technological supports from experts in the town by setting up their own websites to disseminate to the world the causes and the struggles of their peoples in the war zones.

The gradual development and urbanization of the Thai-Burmese in-between spaces in the late 1990s have resulted from a spatial transformation: from contested spaces to Burmese-controlled spaces and from war zones to economic zones, as it were. Through a variety of foreign-invested developmental projects, global capital flows have enabled the Burmese nation-state to weaken and gradually wipe out resistant ethnic armies along the in-between spaces (e.g., ERI & SAIN, 1996). The spatial memories of ethnic nationalities in the Thai-Burmese in-between spaces have gradually been erased, while the two nation-state’s memories have been re-entrenched. However, once the electronic mediation began to surge in Mae Sot in the late 1990s, in comparison to other border towns on the western front of Thailand, such capital-electronic forces have begun to deterritorialize both Thailand and Burma.

The proliferation of the capital-electronic circuits has, in some ways, pushed, and in others, opened, another space for members of ethnic nationalities (and their sympathizers) to also start fighting against the junta in cyberspace. Now, they can publicize their struggles and call for recognition as politically qualified subjects. Moreover, their fights with the junta have, willingly or not, been supported by the global force of the international protection regime through a variety of international relief agencies – especially those of the Karens, whose 120,000 plus people have been the majority of the forcibly displaced peoples in the “temporary shelter areas” in Thailand. If Christianity was the first globalizing force that transformed the Karens, in the nineteenth-century, it is the twentieth-century international protection regime that has maintained the Karens as a people that once was constructed by the British Empire. The significant differences between the two phrases lies, firstly, in the strength of the Burmans against whom the Karens have been struggling, and, secondly, in the interest of the global sovereign powers. The nineteenth-century Burman kingdom of Ava was waning and incapable of withstanding the British global empire, which was also interested in civilizing peoples. The twentieth-century Burmese nation-state has become too strong for any ethnic nationalities to fight against, while indigenous peoples and the ethnic nationalities have been of little concern to the world big powers, who excuse themselves by appealing to their inability to infringe upon the territorial sovereignty of the Burmese nation-state.

Economic opportunities resulting from the capital-electronic circuits, moreover, have attracted a variety of subjectivities to “illegally” pass through Thailand’s “door,” many of whom started working in various translocalities along the border zones and later moved to other parts of the country. Such a mass influx, however, dated back to the arrival of “illegal” migrants and laborers of whatever ethnicities since the massacre/uprising in Burma in 1988. The advent of these peoples has disturbed some Thais and stirred up a sense of animosity from the “host” towards “the others” in Mae Sot, especially in those who do not rely on cheap labor. Mae Sot has since become a town where sweatshops have been bustling (invested especially by either Taiwanese or Thai-Chinese business people). The trafficking of women and the brothel business have particularly been booming. All of these emerge, especially, whenever Thai-Burmese relations are amicable and the Burmese junta do not shut down the border checkpoint and discontinue official trade activities through and from Myawadi.

Of the international boundary between India and Bangladesh, Sankaran Krishna states that “people on both sides were operating within a moral economy that had comfortably internalized the border into their everyday lives” (1996: 205). Such an image accords well with the Mae Sot borderland. Hence, sitting in a restaurant, being serviced at a gas station, shopping at local grocery stores in Mae Sot, a Thai citizen always encounters “the others,” most of whom are “illegal.” Thai visitors to this town, like myself, can keep speaking Thai, but if asking too many questions, he might be returned with just a smile. Coming with Karen friends, a Thai gets to communicate to waitresses/waiters easier. Chinese business owners have not only been able to speak Chinese, central Thai dialect, and northern Thai dialect, but they have also learnt to speak at least some Burmese. Everyone has strategized in order to survive or flourish here. The notion of sweatshop could, from another perspective, be considered absurd. Factories owners get cheap labor and the “migrant” laborers earn the monthly income of a Rangoon (Yangon) physician in just a couple of days – according to a rate in September 2000, the salary was about 500 Bahts per month (about $11, black market rate). On the other hand, female migrants have to worry about being harassed or assaulted sexually by owners or managers of restaurants or factories, some of whom have turned their places into brothels (e.g., TACDB: 2002). AIDs is therefore epidemic.

Here in Mae sot, instead of worrying about the possibility of being tortured by the junta’s functionaries if one is politically active and critical, one must be careful not to stroll on the streets between 6:00 a.m. – 10:00 a.m. lest one be rounded up and deported back to Burma. Even with deportation, however, it is easy to sneak back in – the river is narrow and shallow here for about seven months of the year. Policing authorities and immigration officers have not worked effectively, especially when local politicians and local business people have conspired, and when central power from Bangkok has not been adequately effective. Moreover, as a zone filled with unique cultural translations and negotiations along the Thai-Burmese in-between spaces, Mae Sot can, in many ways and many levels, be called a Burmese town. It is a town where, to follow Edward Said, the “generalized condition of homelessness” (quoted in Gupta & Ferguson, 1997: 37) has become a major beat of life. Gupta and Ferguson write of other translocalities filled with many deterritorialized identities:

In a world of diaspora, transnational culture flows, and mass movements of populations, old-fashioned attempts to map the globe as a set of culture regions or homelands are bewildered by a dazzling array of postcolonial simulacra, doublings and redoublings, as India and Pakistan seem to reappear in postcolonial simulation in London, prerevolution Teheran rises from the ashes in Los Angeles, and a thousand similar cultural dramas are played out in urban and rural settings all across the globe (Ibid: 38).

Similarly, “Burma” has been recreated and cultural differences from the Burmese nation-state have been reenacted in Mae Sot. In this kind of locale, many imperceptible naked-Karens have been able to transform a poetics of grief to a poetics of struggle. From deep jungles and war zones, to camps for forcibly displaced peoples on Burma’s side, to the “temporary shelter areas” on the Thai side, to some of the translocalities along the Thai-Burmese in-between spaces, many Karens have not been subdued by their memories of grief. How can one explain the large market in a shelter area where most shelter members do not have income? What about the Karen medical teams and their supplies going through the Thai-Burmese state-boundary into the war zones in Burma’s side, in order to help the elderly, the sick, the young and those who chose to stay in the jungles? Moreover, as harsh and docile as life can be in “temporary shelter areas,” it is a space where certain potentialities of each subjectivity can be actualized, even more than for many Karens in Burma, especially regarding the study of their language – hence, the reenactment of their nationhood.

5. Karens’ Cultural Maps, Capital Times, and Benjamin’s Now-Time

The Karens’ cultural maps, resulting from their practices of space and identity, have been able to exploit the translocalities and utilize the flows of capital (along with other heterogeneities and fluxes that characterize such flows) in order to struggle for their survival. Such struggles are litigious experiences demonstrating/enunciating in order to supplement, if not disrupt, the statist practices of space and temporality – the police – and thus enact “the political” from their loci of enunciation/demonstration. An idea like “illegality” becomes litigious; the notion itself results from the police’s logic. Hence, the Karen “illegal” bodies must not be visible outside the “temporary shelter areas,” for example, in the streets of Mae Sot or the social imaginary of those who belong on the Thai soil.

The imperceptible naked-Karens’ exploitation of the translocalities and utilization of the capital-electronic circuits, therefore, have been significant tactics for them to survive amidst a variety of threatening situations; and by so doing they have been able to define their own temporalities – times of the “insurgents,” “refugees,” or “illegal migrants.” Since the creation of Thailand and Burma, the two nation-states have attempted to achieve the “amnesiac ‘suspension of historical time’” of others, without realizing that “there is always a trace of nonpresence in presence” and that the presence of the two nation-states’ times has “debts to other times.”
The Karens’ temporalities have participated with the temporalities produced by global economic forces of “capital times,” resulting in turn from the “sovereignty of money” (Alliez, 1996: 6) and the geography of capital (cf. Coleman, 2002). Such capital times produce different dramas of a variety of subjectivities (cf. Shapiro, 2001: 124-25). This is because “money turns value into a flow that tends to escape the juridical frame of political territoriality” (Alliez, Ibid.: 6), and hence, at times, disrupting nation-state’s territorial integrity. Moreover, capital times are disruptive of the nation-state’s ideational management of their pasts, presents, and futures (Shapiro, 2001: 124), producing a nationhood anxiety as an effect. Dictated by market mechanisms, capital temporalities often render problematic any attempt to unify memorial narratives, present self-understanding, and future anticipations of a nation-state. By participating with the capital temporalities, the Karens have been able to disrupt the two nation-states’ ideational management of their pasts, presents, and futures. They have also competed with the two states’ production of space: resulting in a contrariety of cultural maps of the imperceptible naked-lives vis-à-vis juridical maps of nation-states.

Nevertheless, as imperceptible naked-lives living outside state-centric jurisdictions, the Karens’ cultural maps have often been forced to negotiate more extremely than the two nation-states’ juridical maps. Moreover, the translations of their “cultures” have been more ubiquitous than the “national cultures” of the two nation-states. These peoples have to re-enact their identities and attempt to survive – all of which are acts of “living on the borderlines” (Bhabha, 1994: 227). Hence, their identity as a nation has been more contested; and their cultures have become less tenable than the Burmese and Thai “national cultures.” Unlike the notion of national cultures, with their claims to “continuity of an authentic ‘past’ and a living ‘present,’” these peoples’ cultures depends more on strategies for survival (Ibid.: 172) than do Thailand’s and Burma’s “national cultures.”

Nonetheless, there have been times when the imperceptible naked-lives in the Thai-Burmese in-between spaced have been able to grasp the pasts and made the present of the two nation-states appears bizarre – creating the times of the now (Benjamin, 1968: 263). This is because history is “the subject of a structure whose site is not homogeneous, empty time, but time - filled by the presence of the now [Jetztzeit]” (Ibid.). From time to time, then, the imperceptible naked-lives, the Karens included, blasted out of the homogenous continuum of the national time(s) of either or both Thailand and Burma, and, in effect, created another time: a full-time of their own, enunciating their plight with a hope to demonstrate a shared recognition as qualified political subjects. Such full-time could be seen as a time of the “insurgents” or “rebels,” etc. These peoples evoked the pasts that undermined the normalized present – exploding the latter’s hegemonic histories and temporalities. The incidence of the Ratchaburi hospital siege at the dawn of the “new millennium” exemplifies this point. It was an attempt by a group of forcibly displaced peoples’ making themselves perceptible and transfiguring field of experience, but at great and horrifying costs.

It started at about 5:30 a.m. on January 24, 2000 when a group that called themselves God’s Army hijacked a bus from a rugged and hilly area almost two miles from the Thai-Burmese state-boundary and ordered the driver to drive them for about 44 miles to the downtown of Ratchaburi, a province located about 63 miles southwest of Bangkok. Upon arrival at about 7:00 a.m., the group raced into the 770-bed Ratchaburi Regional Hospital and took two hundreds staff and patients at gunpoint, while there were other six hundreds of people in the compound. Not only was there no group, either in war times or not, who would capture a hospital to voice its sufferings and struggles, but also the group’s demands evinced its inability to discern the insidiousness of the figure of sovereign power. In particular, the hostage-takers were non-state subjectivities, who were politically unqualified from the statist paradigms, which, in turn, rendered the possibilities for themselves to appeal to the Thai sovereignty down to zero. The hospital siege, therefore, lasted roughly 24 hours and ended with a lightning commando operation of the army’s special forces and elite police “anti-terrorist units.”

Among the three modalities primary to both the symbolic and material conditions of the quotidian lives in the border zones – cultural encounters, capital-electronic circuits, and the state’s territory (hence sovereign power) – the first two could at times be seen as more prevalent than the last one. Yet, the state territory/sovereign power always re-entrenches itself, at times insidiously. Capital-electronic circuits and cultural encounters can attenuate the sovereign power, hence delimiting the nation-state’s power along the border zones where the demarcation itself could otherwise symbolize the nation-state’s power. Performing terror in the borderlands is therefore one of the nation-state’s acts to signify its jurisdiction. One must not forget, as William Connolly emphasizes, to “occupy territory…is both to receive sustenance and to exercise violence;” hence, there are strains of terror embedded in the logic of territorialization. When necessary, the figure of sovereign power performs terror in order to maintain the territorial integrity of the nation-state where it belongs. The execution of the God’s Army hostage-takers by the Thai commandoes on January 25, 2000 was a stark exemplification.

According to the Oxford English Dictionary, Connolly writes, territory derives from terrere, meaning to frighten, to terrorize, to exclude. And territorium is “a place from which people are warned” (1995: xxii). Not only were the God’s Army “the others” that must be warned on the Thai soil, but they were also imperceptible naked-lives and they had no juridical protections. Although storming a hospital and taking hostages was unacceptable even during wartime, one must however be ready to discern that such act was meant to seek recognition for a claim based on an identity not currently recognized on geopolitical maps. As an attempt of political intervention, the hostage-takers set a political scene through a series of actions and a capacity for enunciation not previously authorized within the statist fields of experience, hoping to transfigure fields that had until then caused many casualties in the forcibly displaced peoples in the war zones, as they had claimed. They were attempting to re-qualify the spaces of their struggles to be seen as the spaces of community of humans, participating in a common-recognizing – getting themselves and the rest in the war zones to be seen and as politically qualified subjects. They wished that those running for their lives in the war zones – the people of no account – would be (ac)counted. All of these they did, but to no avail.

The Thai-Burmese in-between spaces are where we witness a real state of exception, especially for the forcibly displaced peoples, ready to be erupted every now and then. Moreover, they are not neutral spaces, but ones whereby nation-states have attempted to achieve, again, the “amnesiac suspension of historical time” of others. The imperceptible naked-lives’ histories and memories in the spaces are, therefore, forgotten, voices are not heard, practices of spaces and identity rendered juridically ungrammatical. The geographical imaginary therefore tends to neglect the contested history of space (Shapiro, 1994: 494).