Producing Thailand as a transit country: borders,advocacy, and destitution

ABSTRACT

The space of the ‘transit country’ is increasingly depicted in policy and NGO rhetoric as a taken-for-granted space where migrants pass through on their way to seek protection in the Global North. Yet I argue that the ‘transit country’ is a contested space, a space where ‘temporariness’ may be produced purposefully in order to limit opportunities for protection. In this paper, I argue that Thailand produces itself as a transit country in order to manage and control refugee and asylum seeker populations. Through several discursive and material tactics, including security spectacles, legal maneuvering, and migrant destitution, Thailand maintains and exploits the status of a ‘transit country.’ The purposeful construction of a place where ‘no one will stay’ challenges depictions of migration as linear movements defined by sources and destinations, where transit spaces become only more distance to traverse. While the production of transit countries has always been political, the case of Thailand suggests that the politics involved need not center the migration deterrence efforts of traditional destination countries of the Global North, but have implications within states and regions of the Global South as well.     

Making integrated health care work

This article summarizes the authors' thinking on value added in health care, and offers examples of the major strategies being implemented by integrated systems across the United States to increase their value and improve their competitive positioning. The research results are based on a review of published literature on 150 health care organizations in various stages of integration, and 20 in-depth case studies of integrating systems.