Anti-Categorical Legal Thinking in Mae Sot, Thailand, or the Bridge and the Boats on the River Moei

• In Event: 60. Crossing and Contesting Borders in Island and Mainland Southeast Asia

Abstract

In 1997, after extended bilateral waffling, the Thai-Myanmar Friendship Bridge opened, the first road connection between Mae Sot, Thailand and Myawaddy, Myanmar. The bridge joined an existing network of longtail boats to create the infrastructure of cross-border mobility that is visible in Mae Sot today. From the perspective of its impending twentieth anniversary, it is clear that the infrastructure of the boats and the bridge must be understood as shaping more than the channels of trade and migration between Thailand and Myanmar. Drawing from two years of ethnographic research at a legal aid clinic in Mae Sot and from sources on the history of the bridge, I analyze the boats and the bridge in relation to the ways in which legal activism on behalf of migrant workers has taken shape in Mae Sot. I find that the boats/bridge infrastructure and legal aid realize what I characterize as an anti-categorical power, a tendency to hold categorical distinctions between the legal and the illegal in suspense. Against the use of additional categories like ‘illicit’ and ‘licit’ to theorize the Mae Sot/Myanmar borderland, I find that the border infrastructure and its legal order are in fact built upon an eschewal of categorical thinking. The work of holding categories in abeyance is productive on multiple scales, from ensuring that negotiation remains interpersonal rather than systemic to allowing the cross-border movement of goods and people to occur during wildly shifting economic and political moments. I use these observations to consider how infrastructure structures law.

Author

• Malavika Reddy, University of Chicago