Legal Status, Land, and Labor: the Gendered Dimensions of Citizenship and Agrarian Transformation in Highland Communities in Northern Thailand

Abstract

Denial of legal status has long been an obstacle for highland Indigenous communities in northern Thailand in forging meaningful, land-based livelihoods. As such, drawing from 8 months of multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork, this project examines the gendered dimensions of citizenship law and practice in the Thai highlands. Specifically, through the use of ethnographic data and analysis of primary documents and secondary literature, this project highlights the gendered dimensions of citizenship administration, conferral, and adjudication in the highland context. Moreover, it situates these dynamics in an agrarian context, illustrating not only how rural subject positions have been implicated in the production of statelessness, but also the ways that citizenship has become increasingly necessary to forge productive and profitable agrarian livelihoods. As the project illustrates, an analysis of citizenship in agrarian and rural contexts is justified because of the centrality of land and property in both conceptions of citizenship, and in agrarian life. Moreover, specific attention to gender is warranted given the disproportionate role highland women play in securing citizenship for their kinship networks, but also their disproportionate roles in agricultural labor. As such, while considerable programmatic efforts by governmental, non-governmental, and international governmental organizations alike variously portray and purport to address deprivations created by statelessness and insecure legal status, this paper illuminates how highland Indigenous women have forged agrarian livelihoods and futures in the Thai highlands against mounting political, ecological, and social odds.