in between

"Agamben recognizes the sovereign power over human life "being in force without significance (Geltung ohne Bedeutung)". In effect, the refugee from Burma becomes a biopolitical body: a primary object of a sovereign power. The production of a biopolitical body is the original activity of sovereign power; it is the "originary inclusion of the living in the sphere of law," which in turn results from the sovereign's decision of the exception. That is, the structure of law locates its force in the possibility of the suspension of the rule and order such that a state of exception emerges."

"The decision of the state of exception does not decide whether the grefugee or his act is licit or illicit. Rather it inscribes life from "outside" in the sphere of law so as to animate the law and suspend it (Agamben)."

"The refugee from Burma is a naked life, who encounters her nakedness and extreme vulnerability. My deployment of the notion of nakedness follows Agamben. In a nutshell, this notion has two angles. The first refers to the sheer fact of living (zoe), as opposed to form of-life (bios); the second refers to the life quintessentially abandoned through sovereign exception. Whenever the sovereign threat is materialized, the first angle of naked life emerges: we as forms-of-life (bios) are stripped, and we as sheer facts of living (zoe) are revealed."

"Many of the forcibly displaced peoples from Burma arriving at Thailand's "door" find their quotidian lives have been placed under a state of exception; various parts of the Thai-Burmese border zones have regularly been transformed into spaces of emergency by the two sovereignties."

"For those who would be granted temporary shelter, the result would be, in a Kafkaesque sense, to be given stools to sit at Thailand's door."

"In some areas, the two rivers are the Thai-Burmese state boundary. There are many "doorways" where people can traverse across the two countries' state boundary, especially during the dry season when the Moei River is very shallow in areas. Arriving along Thailand's doorways, or "gates," the forcibly displaced peoples from Burma can choose to be "before the law" or to proceed through these unpoliced gates. The difference is that the life of those who choose to be before the law would be inscribed into Thai laws, whereas those who pass through the doorways are beyond the law-at least until they are caught."

"In contrast to its reaction when displaced peoples from Indochina arrived in the 1970s, however, the Thai government did not want to "put the world spotlight on Burmese refugees": a low profile was the norm. It was the armies of ethnic nationalities who provided security to these communities of displaced peoples, and a number of international NGOs working in Thailand, composing the Burma Border Consortium, supported the displaced peoples materially, educationally, and medically. The UNHCR had no role in these. Not until fourteen years later was the UNHCR allowed by the Thai government to have any presence along the border zones. Hence, since 1998, despite its nonaccession to the Refugee Convention of 1951, Thailand has allowed the UNHCR roles in five aspects: witnessing the process of admission, assisting the Thai authorities in registration, assisting the Thai authorities on the relocation of temporary shelter areas, providing complementary assistance in existing temporary shelter areas, and assisting the displaced peoples from Burma for their safe return."

"Many displaced peoples from Burma can be fleeing fighting and be "illegal" economic immigrants at the same time. From the statist perspective, all three categories signify both security and humanitarian problems. Behind these problems lie a set of entanglements produced by the confrontations between the international protection regime and the Thai nation-state's sovereign power. These are the entanglements that shape the fate of the forcibly displaced peoples."

"Not only does the geopolitical map of states represent the structure of approved sovereignties, it is also one of the primary forces determining recognized political subjectivity (Shapiro). In effect, only those who exist in and belong to the nation-state's juridical map are qualified political subjects. The univocity of the statist discourses render so-called unqualified political subjects both inaudible and invisible (Guha). Moreover, certain events and actions are assigned to history by specific values and criteria, which Guha calls the "ideology of statism": "the life of the state is all there is to history." This ideology "authorizes the dominant values of the state to determine the criteria of the historic" (Guha 1996, I) and becomes the common sense of our understanding of history, which has invariably disregarded many "unqualified political subjects" as outside history. Consequently, those who have been living and struggling along the nation-states' border zones have more often than not fallen between the cracks of human awareness."

"Ranciere's idea of the "unaccounted for" (l'horscompte) refers to those who have no qualifications to part-take in the arche, i.e., no qualification for being taken into account by the logic of beginning/ruling."

"I am interested here in connecting Ranciere's politics of imperceptibility with Agamben's classification of naked lives by coining the term imperceptible naked lives as an apparatus of recognition to account for the experiences of the forcibly displaced Karens. 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 their practices of enunciating and/or demonstrating themselves as qualified political subjects-are the process of constructing political spaces, even if labeled as illegitimate, and often as illegal, by the state."

"The whole procedure (of obtaining a permit to visit the camps) therefore reinforced a statist partition of the sensible, with its specific general laws: how the temporary shelter areas are usually not the place to look into; and how only certain appropriate subjects are qualified to look, to judge, and to decide about them. Even so, the police logic that governed the perceptibility of the temporary shelter areas, and of whatever was inside, in this case, also ordered an approved researcher's body: defining the allocation of his ways of doing, ways of being, and ways of saying."

"As far as the forcibly displaced peoples are concerned, the sovereign power that has attempted to silence their plight is ironically the pathway for their perceptibility and recognition... So-called temporary shelter areas exemplify statist security discourses. They are security spaces that must be placed out of sight; and as little noise from inside as possible should be heard-the littler, the merrier. These are spaces of exception, spaces of pollution (Malkki), heterotopias (Foucault) to the attempted utopia of the Thai nation-state. These spaces contain elements of chaos from another failed attempted utopia, Burma. When these suffering clements arrived at the door of the neighboring countries, they therefore had to be contained, disciplined, and ordered. The discourse of humanitarianism has been the sole impetus that has obliged the kingdom to receive the forcibly displaced peoples from Burma."

(Decha Tangseefa, "Temporary Shelter Areas and the Paradox of Perceptibility: Imperceptible Naked-Karens in the Thai-Burmese Border Zones", 2007)