University of Chicago doctoral student, Malavika Reddy, with the guidance of Dr. John D. Kelly, will investigate situations where people who otherwise have little to no legal standing in a country, are nevertheless able to make claims on labor laws in that country's courts. The research will examine the central contradiction of such cases under study, which is that they adjudicate claimants' rights under labor law without adjudicating the legality of claimants' presence. Reddy hypothesizes that the legal process forges a simultaneously illegal yet legitimate standing, for which she proposes the term, "licit belonging."
The research will be conducted in Thailand where the researcher will focus on the legal claims made by Burmese migrant workers. Reddy will use a variety of ethnographic methods, including participant observation, interviews, and focus groups, as well as discourse analysis to observe whether, and how, a licit identity for alien workers is formed within the Thai legal system. Detailed field notes and transcripts will be analyzed by focusing on particular moments of discourse when actors debate what comprises authoritative legal practice. This will make it possible to connect discussions that are seemingly internal to the workings of the law with the broader phenomena of an emergent form of licit belonging within the Thai nation-state.
By investigating how foreign workers are able to mobilize the law on their own behalf, the study will analyze how legal systems influence and are influenced by the cross-border movements of people and capital that have come to be the hallmarks of global capitalism. The research will thus contribute significantly to both social science theory of globalization and economics, and to knowledge that can inform an improved public policy. Funding this research also supports the education of a social scientist.
Since 2003, Burmese migrant workers in Mae Sot, a town on the Thai side of that country’s border with Myanmar, have started to make legal claims in the Thai justice system. Foreign investment, national economic policies, and migration across a nominally closed border have in the past twenty years transformed Mae Sot into an industrializing boomtown. The toil of labor from Burma has serviced the town’s growth. Because of the insecurity of their jobs and legal standing, these workers inhabit lives frequently described as precarious or vulnerable. In the decade since the first victory on behalf of migrant claimants, new jobs, practices, arguments and infrastructure have developed to facilitate legal claims and, more broadly, a proliferating emphasis on legal redress and status. For migrant workers in Mae Sot today, Thai law has many faces. Through worker registration programs, in interactions with officials, in NGO advocacy, in manuals about workers’ rights, in court, at police checkpoints, law is made increasingly indispensable to migrants’ lives. Yet, the legal status of the average migrant remains tenuous. Even those who have registered with the Thai state find that evidence of their legality, their work permits and other documents, are subject to scrutiny and doubt. An analysis of this legal landscape was the objective of this project. The research, conducted through 15 months of ethnographic observation of legal aid officers and their clients, finds that there is, in the Mae Sot border area, the emergence of what this study calls licit jurisdiction, an authority in the shadows of the law with which the breadth of both legal and illegal migrant livelihoods can be adjudicated. This jurisdiction is licit, working through the gray areas of law, because it concerns a population that is perceived to be illegal but necessary, in breach of law but vital to Thailand’s comparative advantage. A main feature of this jurisdiction is that conflict resolution unfolds not according to legal statutes, but by using law and legal procedure as a foil or context to negotiation. That outcomes are often inconsistent with law is considered of little importance, hence the frequent instances of government arbitrators issuing decisions in labor disputes that stipulate wage rates below mandated minimums. This jurisdiction resonates with broader Thai legal culture through the concept of satisfaction (phaw jai). At the heart of legal talk concerning migrants, "satisfaction" is both a Thai legal concept and discourse, functioning as a threshold to further action (she is satisfied with the settlement and does not wish to pursue matters further) and as justification for the exploitation of certain populations in capitalism (Burmese workers are satisfied with less than minimum wage). It resonates with Theravadan values about the relation of the self to the social order, to the limits of the latter to alleviate the suffering of the former. It connects with ideas within the culture of neoliberalism about the morality of self-sufficiency, an ethics that has specific charge in Thailand because of the Thai monarch’s promotion of self-sufficiency as a development strategy. And it has its own phenomenology as a culturally and historically specific feeling, one that speaks to the experience of engaging the law in a border economy in Thailand. The study also connects lawyering along the border to a student led democratic movement that briefly held power in the 1970s and, accordingly, to the shifting aspirations, over the past forty years, of a generation of politically-engaged Thais from a 1970s revolutionary spirit to a present day human rights based progressivism. By writing this history, the research attempts a corrective to the Thai studies literature. While there is consensus that the events of the 1970s have not settled into a stable historical past, instead reverberating through mainstream politics, what is less understood is how that movement continues to impact law and legal activism in Thailand today. This project will also contribute to social scientific understandings of law and capitalism. Research in legal anthropology has started to theorize the increasing emphasis on legality and law in social life. The present study advances the discussion by focusing on the importance, amidst this proliferation of law, of distinctions among the legal, the illegal and the licit. By showing how the licit is given shape through the work of a diverse group of people engaged in law, this research demonstrates that a key outcome of legal practice in Mae Sot is the formalization of a space for action that is simultaneously illegal and legitimate. This space is indisputably productive to capitalist development. Yet, an analysis of this jurisdiction, of the values, like satisfaction, which give it meaning, of the historical dynamics of which it is part, and of the motivations of the actors involved, will provide an account of the interaction between law and capitalism that does not reduce the former into either a tool of or a barrier to the latter.
