2026/04/24 by Jin Hee Lim · 2 voices
Social Sciences · #Asian Studies and History #Philippine History and Culture #Southeast Asian Sociopolitical Studies
paper · pdf · doi:10.1080/21622671.2026.2658038
openalex publication_date 2026/04/24 · openalex created_date 2026/04/25 · openalex updated_date 2026/06/16
This article explores how stateless people in northern Thailand exercise individual and collective agency, thereby expanding rights and opportunities for people with varying legal statuses, including undocumented persons and migrant workers. It draws on the case of one university student who mobilises strategies of ‘passing’ and provides informal peer support, as well as three grassroots initiatives – two stateless-led organisations and one non-governmental organisation (NGO) project – whose operational strategies to facilitate registration of non-citizens differ significantly. This article demonstrates that even when unspectacular, uncoordinated and lacking immediate structural impact, stateless people’s agency can contest the discursive construction of statelessness as powerlessness and the Thai state’s categorical governance of non-citizens. This article contributes to the existing literature on non-citizen agency in Thailand by foregrounding the social embeddedness of agency. Specifically, it examines how stateless people’s agency is enacted in relation to others, unevenly distributed according to their socio-economic statuses, and has the potential to reconfigure larger flows of oppressive power.