State illegibility in the containment of labour unrest on the Thai-Myanmar border

Abstract

In the literature on governmentality, rights have been posited as technologies of rule, encouraging individual self-government, as well as active participation in the institutions of the liberal state. In the context of globalised industrial production, however, a realisation of justiciable rights may, by raising wages and other labour costs, challenge the ability of states to attract capital investment. In the present article, I take as a point of departure this apparent contradiction – between the liberal promise of rights through governmental incorporation and the reality that a realisation of such rights threatens profitability, and potentially viability, in domestic capitalist production. Empirically, my research is grounded in an ethnographic study of the garment sector at the Mae Sot industrial zone in north-west Thailand. Over the past decade-plus this site has seen an expansion of governmental interventions targeting the local Myanmar migrant population. Yet the vast majority of these migrants continue to earn wages far below the legal minimum, and face other egregious violations of labour rights. This gap, between the promise and the realisation of rights, leads to the state's illegibility. This illegibility is, I argue, of significance for theorising state regulatory regimes and the containment of labour unrest at sites of low-waged industrial production embedded in contemporary global supply chains.