Producing and Embodying the Humanitarian Border

The Gendered Geopolitics of Responding to (and Preventing) Gender-Based Violence Among Burmese Displaced in Thailand

Datos Bibliográficos

ID3948394
AutoresAdam P Saltsman (0000-0002-1991-3091, Worcester State University, autor de correspondencia)
Año2023
Páginas1-22
Fecha de publicación2023-08-07
Peer ReviewedSí
Open AccessNo
TipoARTICLE
RevistaGeopolitics (JOURNAL)
Identificadores de la revistaISSN: 1465-0045 • E-ISSN: 1557-3028
EditorialInforma UK Limited (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1080/14650045.2023.2240251
OpenAlexW4385636766
IdiomaEN
Citas recibidas1
Referencias citadas34

Recent scholarship on forced migration, geopolitics, and the aid industry has built on William Walter’s concept of ‘humanitarian borders’, which refers to the ways in which humanitarian aid delivery becomes entangled with the enforcement of Global South-Global North borders. In this article, I apply a feminist geopolitics lens to expand on this idea, looking at humanitarian action related to the prevention of and response to gender-based violence (GBV) among Burmese who are displaced in Thailand. I ask how humanitarian borders themselves are gendered, produced through gendered violence and implicated in the ways forced migrants navigate exile. Based on ethnographic research conducted on the Thai-Burmese border over a ten-year period, this article analyzes multiple levels of discourse related to GBV intervention, including the perspectives of Global North donors, international aid workers, Thai and Burmese women’s rights advocates, and Burmese forced migrants who work on farms and in the garment industry. Following the work of feminist geographers, I offer a lens that recognises the linkages between multiple forms of violence, especially those between intimate partner violence among Burmese forced migrants in Thailand and the violence of the exploitative living and working conditions faced by Burmese forced migrants outside refugee camps . Through this lens, I show that the humanitarian border operates not only to contain forced migrant mobilities vis-à-vis the Global North, but to affix the border and its insecurities to forced migrants in ways that reinforce gendered geopolitical hierarchies

Burmese · Ethnography · Geopolitics · Humanitarian aid · Political science · Politics · Refugee · Scholarship · Sex work · Sociology · Anthropology · Asian Geopolitics and Ethnography · Gender Studies · Law · Migration, Health and Trauma · Migration, Refugees, and Integration