Border as a Mode of Governance: An Analysis of Thailand’s Immigration Control Regime

ผู้แต่ง

  • Chutima Sudjanya Policy and Planning Division, Rajamangala University of Technology Phra Nakhon, Bangkok, Thailand

คำสำคัญ:

Border Governance, Immigration Control, Political Technologies, Thailand

บทคัดย่อ

This article analyzes Thailand’s immigration control system through the lens of border governance, conceptualizing the border not as a fixed territorial line but as a mode of governance embedded in legal and administrative processes. Existing studies on Thai immigration control have largely emphasized legal frameworks or national security concerns, offering limited insight into how borders operate as ongoing mechanisms of governance. Employing a qualitative document-based analysis, this study examines immigration laws, subordinate regulations, official policy documents, and relevant academic literature published between 1954 and 2025. The analysis is guided by three analytical frameworks: border as governance, political technologies, and uneven borders. These frameworks enable an examination of how immigration control operates across multiple temporal stages—before, at, and after border crossing—and through the coordination of multiple state agencies.

The findings show that Thailand’s border functions as a flexible and uneven governance regime characterized by administrative discretion, multi-agency coordination, and temporal forms of control rather than solely territorial enforcement. Immigration control operates through visa regimes, legal conditions of stay, and bureaucratic procedures that stratify mobility and produce differentiated legal statuses among migrants and travelers. This article contributes to border studies by extending the concept of border governance beyond Western contexts and highlighting the central role of legal-administrative power in governing mobility.

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ดาวน์โหลด

เผยแพร่แล้ว

24.06.2026

รูปแบบการอ้างอิง

Sudjanya , C. . (2026). Border as a Mode of Governance: An Analysis of Thailand’s Immigration Control Regime. Suan Sunandha Asian Social Science, 20(1), 94–107. สืบค้น จาก https://so05.tci-thaijo.org/index.php/ssajournal/article/view/285969

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