Transversal borderings : territory and mobility for human rights activists in the Thai-Burma borderlands

The Thai-Burma borderlands has long been an operational site for human rights activists. It is the location for human rights violations and associated documentation, as well as the site of resources, training and dissemination to larger global audiences. In this article I use an interpretation of Saskia Sassen’s ‘cross-border geographies’ as a framing mechanism for the operations of human rights activists in the Thai-Burma borderlands. I argue that these activists use aspects of the national territories they traverse, such as who belongs and associated rights and obligations, as well as state capital and services. But they also act outside of state sovereignty, in particular through digital infrastructures and transnational networking that connect to other national territories, and their irregular movement across the national border. In this way, human rights activists both operate within national territories and in ways that violate their sovereignty. Activist operations are enabled by an informality attached to the Thai-Burma border, its marginal status to central control, its pragmatic approach to state operations, and its porous nature to flows of information and people. However, tighter regulation of these territories, particularly as the adjoining states attempt to exert their exclusive authority over their territory, is likely to impact the ongoing operations of human rights activists in the Thai-Burma borderlands. Cross-border geographies therefore provides a means for the critical examination of activist operations that occur within and across state and non-state spaces.