Border Humanitarians: Gendered Order and Insecurity on the Thai-Burmese Frontier by Adam P. Saltsman (review)

Reviewed by: Border Humanitarians: Gendered Order and Insecurity on the Thai-Burmese Frontier by Adam P. Saltsman Don Selby (bio) Adam P. Saltsman, Border Humanitarians: Gendered Order and Insecurity on the Thai-Burmese Frontier (Syracuse University Press 2022), ISBN 9780815637639, 288 pages. Adam P. Saltsman's Border Humanitarians is a welcome addition to scholarship that takes both a critical and ethnographic approach to understanding humanitarian practices. The research underpinning this work extended for the better part of a decade, and Saltsman conducted a significant portion of it while working with an international humanitarian organization in the border province of Mae Sot, Thailand. Consisting of five chapters, plus its introduction and conclusion, it explores the work of humanitarian [End Page 734] work on gender-based violence among Burmese migrants in Mae Sot. A stage-setting introduction describes the area along the Moei River where migration into Mae Sot occurs, the labor camps and makeshift communities that have arisen there, and the variegated migrant neighborhoods, communities, and congregations that live in the area. It also sets out the book's theoretical ambitions: Border Humanitarians brings together the threads of geographic theorizing on bordering and borderscapes and scholarship on performativity, political subjectivity, and positionality in relation to gender and gender violence in contexts of dispossession in the deployment of the idea of gendered positionalities.1 In addition, Saltsman argues for the methodological value of reflexive ethnography, and of close attention to the ordering force of discourse at sites of humanitarian intervention. The second chapter provides the political-economic history (both colonial and post-colonial) shaping the emergence of borders, and of labor migration with respect to these borders. Borderlands, and the sorts of exploitation and politicaleconomic possibility they provide are not simply given, here, but are produced by capital flows and the history of political maneuvering among colonial powers. In chapter three the voices of Burmese migrants make their appearance. Participant observation seems to have been impossible in work camps and the precarious, make-shift neighborhoods cobbled together by Burmese migrants, leaving a certain ethnographic depth unrealizable. Interviews with migrants, however, were possible and do important work to develop a picture of migrants' palpable insecurity and constraint in Thailand, and how the immediacy of their vulnerability contributes to the circulation of "conservative notions of home and culture" among Burmese in Mae Sot.2 These notions play an important role in perpetuating conservative understandings of femininity and masculinity, which feed, in their turn, gender-based violence among Burmese migrants. As Saltsman explains it, this chapter: centered on how precarious work, the challenges of displacement, and gender traditions intersect in a mutually constitutive fashion in the homes and community spaces for Burmese migrants as opposed to the factory floor or the field. Migrants' narratives about violence outside their workplaces provide an important angle for considering how economic production and dispossession permeate all aspects of their social lives.3 Chapter four marks a shift toward a form of research that more closely resembles ethnographic field work. It is also the chapter in which Saltsman makes his first sustained case for a reflexive methodology, as the site of this field work is the Global North humanitarian organization in which he worked. As elements of the reflexivity running through the chapter he places emphasis on several other key analytical concepts, including positionality, performativity, knowledge construction, the production and circulation of gendered discourse, and assemblages. The chapter focuses on ways in which "humanitarianism and its logics are performatively reproduced and asserted."4 [End Page 735] This included, first his own position as a research leader who must describe the research group's findings in terms donors and non-governmental organization supervisors can digest. Second was an exasperated assertion by an American aid worker of a definition of gender-based violence that seemed torn from the pages of World Health Organization literature on the subject, which had the effect of both shutting down discussion among Karen, Burmese, and Thai group members, and provoking a kind of policing of her intervention by Saltsman himself. Finally, there was the research group's employment of professionalized, abstract language to describe violence among their migrant interlocutors. Through these foci, he sees how discourses produced...