Thai-Western Mobilities and Migration. Intimacy within Cross-Border Connections brings together research on the large-scale mobilities and migration pathways between Thailand and ‘Western’ countries, hereby understood as Europe, North America and Australia.

Thailand has long been a popular tourist destination as it is reflected in a large number of foreigners moving in and out of Thailand each year, supported by a powerful tourism industry and infrastructure. Meanwhile, substantial Thai-Western ‘both-ways’ migration pathways have emerged over the last three decades. These have been driven largely by cross-border marriage migration. Hence, it is now common to see Thai-Western couples at airports in European and North American cities, as well as rural regions and urban or beach-sided tourist destinations in Thailand.

Research presented in this book explores the transnational social relationships and cross-border connections between ‘ordinary’ people that arise from the increasingly large-scale mobilities and migrations between Thailand and ‘the West’. While Thai and Western people’s social relationships are usually studied as personal stories within a cross-border marriage migration perspective, this book considers it necessary to see them as more than marriage migration.

Even though a focus on the ‘personal life stories’ of marriage migrants provides valuable insights, it can also mask consideration of the structural context of socially embedded cross-border connections and exchanges, as well as state restrictions, that, first, make people’s decisions to move a possibility in the first place, and second, shape a migrant’s post-migration life-trajectory and experiences, relative to others in their origin and settlement societies.

The chapters on Thai women who marry and move with older Western men, Western men and women who move to Thailand to retire or for leisure, and Thai rural families transformed by mobilities and migration, try to draw out their gendered experiences of transnational living. The individual choices that shaped these lives, and the surprising prevalence of lives like these in Thailand and abroad, need to be understood within context as an outcome of the specific globalisation processes that have shaped Thailand through transnational links to other parts of the world over the last decades. Globalisation and penetration by foreign capital, cultures, and people through mass tourism is key to this explanatory backstory as well as the internal rural/ urban cleavages that drive Thailand’s economic development.

Chapters in this book are (1) Globalising Thailand through gendered ‘both- ways’ migration pathways with ‘the West’: cross-border connections between people, states, and places (Paul Statham, Sarah Scuzzarello, Sirijit Sunanta and Alexander Trupp), (2) Globalising the Thai ‘high-touch’ industry: exports of care and bodywork and gendered mobilities to and from Thailand (Sirijit Sunanta), (3) Living the long-term consequences of Thai-Western marriage migration: the radical life-course transformations of women who partner older Westerners (Paul Statham), (4) Thai wives in Europe and European husbands in Thailand: how social locations shape their migration experiences and engagement with host societies (Manasigan Kanchanachitra and Pattraporn Chuenglertsiri), (5) Practising privilege. How settling in Thailand enables older Western migrants to enact privilege over local people (Sarah Scuzzarello), (6) Transnational intimacy and economic precarity of western men in northeast Thailand (Megan Lafferty and Kristen H. Maher), and (7) Intergenerational strategies: the successes and failures of a Northern Thai family’s approach to international labour migration (Sarah Turner and Jean Michaud).

The Thai-Western Mobilities and Migration. Intimacy within Cross-Border Connections book is edited by Prof. Paul Statham (University of Sussex), Dr. Sarah Scuzzarello (University of Sussex), Dr. Sirijit Sunanta (Mahidol University), and Dr. Alexander Trupp (Sunway University) and published by Routledge (2022). It was originally published as a special issue of the Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies.

Associate Professor Dr Alexander Trupp 
School of Hospitality & Service Management
Email: @email