Negotiating identities and emotional belonging: Shan in northern Thailand

This paper explores the complex ways in which Burmese Shan migrants in Northern Thailand utilise strategic practices of in/visibility and in/audibility to maintain emotional attachments to ethnic identity and belonging while negotiating a double exclusion from national belonging and citizenship in both home and host countries. Fleeing Shan State as a result of the long standing civil war and gross human rights abuses by Burma’s military junta, over 200,000 Shan have entered Thailand since 1996. Based on research conducted among three Shan communities in the small town of Pai, this article examines how strategic deployment and concealment of ethnic identity – in/visibility and in/audibility – allows Shan migrants to navigate different spaces of safety and precariousness while located in a situation of permanent temporariness of national (non)belonging.