Stay Where You Are Until Our Backs Are Turned’—Imagining the Border from Kuala Lumpur and Bangkok

Abstract

This thesis examines the security situation along the border between Thailand and Malaysia by conducting a discursive analysis of the security concerns of government officials on both sides of the border. The border between is the site of considerable contradiction. At once, dividing two ethnically and linguistically disparate states with different conceptions of security, the border also serves as the site for a number of cooperation efforts, including joint military patrols along the border, a cooperative mineral extraction regime encompassing a disputed territorial claim in the Gulf of Thailand, and one of the only border walls in the world that has been constructed jointly by the states on either side. In this thesis, I explore the concept of security and the imagined geography of the border from the perspective of both states, drawing extensively on two sources: personal interviews with mid-level government and military officials on both sides as well as local news media reports about border security issues over the last 15 years. In approaching the study of the border region in this way, I challenge the argument that borders are best studied at the local level. Instead, this paper seeks to return agency to state actors who ultimately wield the economic and military might to define borders performatively, and are in any case, the referent objects of local resistance movements.