Concluding Remarks

Malay-speaking Muslims living in the southern border region of Thailand both suffer from and take advantage of the presence of the national border, much like residents of borderlands elsewhere in the world (Donnan and Haller 2000; Donnan and Wilson 1999). As members of an ethnic minority on the national margin, they navigate their lives maneuvering among ambiguous and multiple identities. Yet how much one can control and use such ambiguity to advantage depends on the position an individual occupies in the “power geometry” (Massey 1994, 149) of the region. Furthermore, in the “gendered geography of power” (Pessar and Mahler 2002), individual agency is influenced not only by politico-economic and judicial forces, but also by various types of imaginations and desires.

Border-crossing is neither all-empowering nor all-oppressive to Thai-Malaysian “borderlanders” (Horstmann 2002; Takamura 2004). The ability to choose to stay or move is not available equally to everyone at the border, but is structured by gender, ethnicity, and class. Men and women of different generations and marital status in Malay-speaking Muslim communities in the southern border region of Thailand experience the borderland and border-crossings with different degrees and forms of limits, pressures, and advantages.

As attaining dual nationality is becoming increasingly difficult due to tightening state control, women have come to play ever more important roles in establishing cross-border networks. While men often view themselves as transient workers in pursuit of money in a land that is “not their own,” young single women working in Malaysia maintain and create social links that the national border shapes, while cultivating new possibilities unlike those offered by conventional gender relations at home. (https://kyotoreview.org/issue-7)