Negotiating Life Course and Social Change through Transnational Mobility: Cambodian Labor Migrants in Thailand

• In Event: 297. Transnational Borderland Identities in Southeast Asia. Sponsored by AAS SEAC Rising Voices

Abstract

Cambodia’s post-conflict integration into the global economy has engendered a predicament of sustaining traditional peasant livelihoods. Rural outmigration has been drastic, especially among young people. Between a half and one million Cambodians are now working in Thailand. This paper employs a sociological life-course perspective to examine the lived experiences of spatial and social mobility of Cambodian young labor migrants in Thailand. More specifically, it explores how these labor migrants experience transnational mobility and existence as part of their life course and social mobility in a context of uneven economic developments as well as repressive cultural and political power relations in both countries. Based on a study conducted in Cambodia and Thailand in April–September 2015, this paper draws on biographically oriented interviews with 29 Cambodian labor migrants (aged 16–30) in Thailand (Bangkok and Rayong), supplemented by field observations at their workplaces and residences, eight key informant interviews in Thailand, and field observation and 13 in-depth interviews with return migrants and villagers in a Cambodian village near the Cambodian-Thai border. The paper first demonstrates how transnational mobility and experience of Cambodian labor migrants have been shaped by repressive cultural, political and economic power relations in both Cambodia and Thailand. Despite multiple risks and challenges, these migrants, it is argued, articulate their agency and undertake such mobility to stake a claim to improved social and economic positions in a rapidly transformed social space. Their transient existence and mobility represent processes whereby existing power relations are being contested and even potentially transformed.

Author

• Chivoin Peou, Royal University of Phnom Penh