Janepicha Cheva-Isarakul—Cultural Anthropology

Statelessness in Thailand is framed primarily as an issue of legibility to the state, with an assumption that once a stateless person is “properly seen” through documentation, due recognition will follow. Building on emerging literature on the limits of evidentiary approach to solving statelessness,  I use an anthropological framework of “state illegibility” to capture the state’s opaqueness, inscrutable, contradictory and unpredictable bureaucratic practices. Through three ethnographic accounts from the fieldwork in northern Thailand, I interrogate various forms of state illegibility and their implications. I argue that by portraying statelessness as a personal legal status issue to be resolved using a fair and rational evidentiary procedure, the Thai state downplays its past and present illegible practices and marginalisation against certain minority groups, and in turn shifts responsibility to stateless individuals. Failure to recognise state illegibility therefore risks reducing statelessness to an individualised legal status issue, rather than an acknowledged symptom of systemic discrimination.

Janepicha Cheva-Isarakul is a Lecturer and PhD candidate at the School of Social and Cultural Studies, Victoria University of Wellington. Her long-term ethnographic research examines the everyday experience of statelessness among Shan youth in Northern Thailand. Her work illuminates the impact of statelessness on youth and children and provides important critique on the regime of citizenship in Thailand. Janepicha also has had extensive work experience in the areas of human rights, development and policy advocacy with various international and local organizations.