State illegibility in the containment of labour unrest on the Thai-Myanmar border
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In the literature on governmentality, rights have been posited as technologies of rule, encouraging individual self-government, as well as active participation in the institutions of the liberal state. In the context of globalised industrial production, however, a realisation of justiciable rights may, by raising wages and other labour costs, challenge the ability of states to attract capital investment. In the present article, I take as a point of departure this apparent contradiction – between the liberal promise of rights through governmental incorporation and the reality that a realisation of such rights threatens profitability, and potentially viability, in domestic capitalist production. Empirically, my research is grounded in an ethnographic study of the garment sector at the Mae Sot industrial zone in north-west Thailand. Over the past decade-plus this site has seen an expansion of governmental interventions targeting the local Myanmar migrant population. Yet the vast majority of these migrants continue to earn wages far below the legal minimum, and face other egregious violations of labour rights. This gap, between the promise and the realisation of rights, leads to the state's illegibility. This illegibility is, I argue, of significance for theorising state regulatory regimes and the containment of labour unrest at sites of low-waged industrial production embedded in contemporary global supply chains.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.007 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".