Age, life stages and legality: insights from long-term ethnographic research in northern Thailand

October 2024

In this blog post, Janepicha Cheva-Isarakul, Lecturer in Sociology and Social Policy at  Victoria University of Wellington (Te Herenga Waka)’s School of Social and Cultural Studies, considers how age intersects with legal status to shape life experiences for stateless people. Drawing on long-term ethnographic fieldwork with 1.5 and 2^nd generation Shan youth in Thailand, she highlights the particular challenges that occur around their transitions between childhood, youth and adulthood.

With over half a million registered stateless persons, Thailand has one of the largest stateless populations in the world. It is also a place where, since 2015, I have been conducting my long-term ethnographic research on a sub-group of stateless persons: children of Shan migrants in Chiang Mai, Thailand. Most of my participants, who were around 14-18 years old when I first met them, are now well into their 20s. During almost a decade of patchwork ethnography, time unveiled to me how legality intersects with age and life stages to produce a certain set of challenges at each stage of life. In this post, I share three main observations from my longitudinal research and identify opportunities for intervention from civil society organisations. While my focus is on the Thai context, I hope that some of these insights might be useful and applicable to some other contexts.

Firstly, in the contemporary regime of statelessness in a country such as Thailand, where stateless persons have access to certain rights as children (particularly the right to education), statelessness is not necessarily a fully and actively internalised status since birth but a dynamic condition that constantly undergoes re-interpretation by the affected youth at punctuated moments at various life stages. My participants’ experiences echo Gonzales’s research on 1.5 generation undocumented young Latinos: illegality that has little direct impact on most aspects of childhood becomes ‘a defining feature of late adolescence and adulthood’ as it prevents these youth from following traditional pathways to adulthood. At this life stage, they begin to understand how their lack of legal citizenship affects their life choices, aspirations and abilities to participate in “normal” adult activities such as voting, getting a driver’s license, travelling or buying a house. Upon becoming aware of the limitations of statelessness, my participants engage in what I call ‘recalibration,’ which involves not only scaling down dreams, hopes, aspirations and expectations, but also searching for solutions and spaces of belonging. Physical transformation from being a child to a young adult also has weighty ramifications. Being a child (especially one in a school uniform) allows them to blend in and be perceived by the public as de facto legal. Being an adult (especially one who is no longer a student and without a Thai identity card), by contrast, may provoke different sentiments and subsequent classification as “illegal” subjects.

The main challenge of being a stateless child in the twenty-first century regime of partial inclusion is, therefore, not necessarily about lack of any rights, but the fact that their rights, entitlements, social recognition, and formal and informal protection diminish once they turn into adults, or when they are no longer a “student”. While “aging out” has been explored in the context of foster care, the question of transitioning from a child to an adult in the context of statelessness remains underexplored. Within the public discourses and campaigns on childhood statelessness, including #IBelong, the focus tends to be on upholding the rights of the child, but there needs to be more discussion on how to support youth in their transition to adulthood and help them navigate the crossroads of age and legality.

Secondly, a state-issued identity card becomes an increasingly prominent feature in one’s life once one crosses the child-youth boundary. In Thailand, it is needed for everyday transactions such as opening a bank account, registering a sim card, buying a bus or an airline ticket, and sitting in the required national exams to qualify for university entrance. Increasing securitisation means further connectivity of various databases across sectors. I came across a recent case that demonstrates how this phenomenon might present critical issues for those who do not possess any state-issued IDs. Thanks to the universal education policy, Boon (a pseudonym) could access public education and obtain a high school diploma without having a state-issued ID card. He recently enrolled in a public university but could not be issued a student ID card. At his university, a student ID is linked to a bank account, allowing students to access an ATM/debit card with their student IDs (this seems common among Thai universities). Boon is unable to open a bank account due to the lack of a state-issued ID, which is causing difficulties for the university to issue him a student ID card. Although this situation seems rather absurd and should be fixed easily, it is an actual example of the type of everyday challenges still facing those without a legal document, despite having managed to reach tertiary education. A research informant from an educational institution also told me that some students, similar to Boon, were denied scholarship opportunities under the same constraints. The explanation provided was that they lacked a bank account to transfer the money to. Yet, these issues and practices are not interpreted as discriminatory by those at the institutions. They are simply seen as “national security issues” that are beyond their scope of responsibility.

In instances such as Boon’s and as stateless youth transition into adulthood, we must remember that it is the adult citizens who interpret the laws, make exceptions (or not) to the rules, find alternative solutions and create or deny spaces for inclusion of stateless youth. Adult citizens who have some form of authority over their lives — be it their teachers, administrators of various types of institutions, district officials or any other state officials — play a significant role in hindering and/or helping stateless youth on a daily basis. More research and activism targeting adult citizens is needed.

Finally, amendments to Nationality law to expand legal inclusion should be celebrated, but they should also engaged with critically. In Thailand, a citizenship pathway was announced in 2016 for stateless children born in Thailand to “alien” parents; Among its criteria is a BA degree (or equivalence). This law has influenced my participants and other stateless youth to continue their education to the tertiary level.  To them, higher education now represents a beacon of hope that might lead the way toward citizenship. Some pay high fees to be enrolled in private institutions. As a researcher, I am highly critical of positioning education as a formal proof of “deservedness” and a channel to citizenship rights. As put by Joppke (2024, 1664), we must recognise that “earned citizenship is neoliberal because it is contingent on the demonstrated capacity of the self-responsible individual to achieve and to contribute”.  In seeking higher education, my participants are aware that a degree allows them to be seen by the state as somewhat worthy of protection, but it is not a status that everyone can afford to have. Space of inclusion for stateless persons must go beyond education, in which stateless persons can be seen as a new group of “consumers”.

My research findings emphasise how the impact of statelessness can vary depending on a person's life stage. Particular challenges that arise as a child transitions into adolescence need to be better recognised by CSOs in order to provide more targeted support. Educating and sensitising adult citizens must be prioritised in advocacy work around statelessness, as they hold the key to interpreting and determining stateless persons’ entitlements. We must also advocate for space of inclusion for stateless persons beyond the context of education and be wary of making education a requirement of a right to nationality.

This blog post is based on a chapter that I wrote for the 2024 edited collection on Statelessness in Asia. See Michelle Foster, Jaclyn Neo and Christoph Sperfeldt, Statelessness in Asia (CUP, forthcoming 2024).

_{Image by Maxim Berg on Unsplash}