Safe Migration and the Politics of Brokered Safety in Southeast Asia

Front matter

Routledge Series on Asian Migration

SAFE MIGRATION AND THE POLITICS OF BROKERED

SAFETY IN SOUTHEAST ASIA

Contents

Acknowledgements vii

List of figures vili

1 Introducing safe migration 1 PARTI

Index

Acknowledgements

This book would not have been possible without the generous support, patience and goodwill from a range of individuals and institutions. First of all, I would like to thank all my informants who generously allowed me into their lifeworlds, whether in the form of migrant dormitories, safe migration training, outreach activities, planning meetings, office environments, temple grounds, private homes, virtual spaces, deportation centres, border checkpoints, village communities, and various other places where safe migration interventions unfold. I am especially grateful to Kritsana Pimonsaengsuriya, Sujira Thiensathaporn, and Manichanh Keoviriyavong who provided me with outstanding support with field research and data collection. I would also like to thank Niphattra Harivatorn and Chaiyuth Chavalitnitikul at Thammasat University for generously hosting me as a visiting professor during my research, and the Australian Research Council for providing financial support for the research project (project ID: DP160103322). I am also very grateful to Francesca Coin, Ivan Franceschini, and Jon Harald Sande Lie who facilitated respective academic visits to Ca’Foscari University and the Norwegian Institute of International Affairs, which enabled stimulating intellectual environments to work on the manuscript. Iam also immensely grateful to the Routledge Series on Asian Migration Editors, Nicola Piper, Yuk Wah Chan, and Jonathan H.X. Lee, as well as two anonymous reviewers for robust feedback on my manuscript. In addition, I would like to thank several other individuals (in alphabetical order) who have in different ways either supported my research in the field (by facilitating research access) or provided feedback on earlier drafts of my manuscript: Anna Olsen, Antje Missbach, Assi Dorron, Ben Harkins, Carly Schuster, Christine Helliwell, Daniel McFarlane, Fouzieyha Towghi, Francesca Merlan, Jacqueline Pollock, Kearrin Sims, Luke Bearup, Michiko Ito, Nick Cheesman, Nicolas Laines, Patrick Guinness, Paul Buckley, Rebecca Miller, Rebecca Napier-Moore, Rory Mungroven, Roy Huijsmans, Ruji Auethavornpipat, Sara Riva, Sebastian Boll, Simon Baker, and Wai Hnin Po. Finally, I owe an eternal debt to my wife, Samorn (who have read and edited substantive parts of earlier drafts), and my two daughters, Stella and Astrid, for their immense patience and support throughought the research which at times has not been the easiest to combine with family life.

Figures

Network map of safe migration and aid programmes

Thai police and TPSMC provide safe migration advice during a deportation procedure

MMA'S explaining the MOU recruitment process

Newly arrived Lao migrants at the post-arrival training centre Post-arrival training session, Nong Khai, May 2018

Example of a 7/11 receipt for CI processing

Brokers advertise their services

Mobile CI vans as part of the one-stop service centre Migrants queuing at a one stop centre

Siriwan’s endorsement letter, allowing her to act on behalf

of the embassy in migrant assistance cases

Line messages requesting MAM’S assistance

The “global compact for safe, orderly and regular migration” will seek to enhance international cooperation in governing migration and focus attention on migrants, the people they leave behind and the communities they join. It will aim to protect the vulnerable; leverage the many benefits migrants bring to their host and home countries; and tackle the drivers of irregular and forced migration. (Antonio Guterres, Secretary General, The United Nations (2017))

The schoolyard buzzes with students passing time whilst waiting for their classes. Some of them sit chatting while others read their textbooks. Many are preoccupied with their smartphones, which have become a ubiquitous accessory amongst the students. Others help themselves with food in the canteen. There must be at least a few hundred students in the schoolyard area. For a passer-by, the school could be mistaken for an ordinary Thai school; yet, Myanmar Migration School is entirely made up of young adult labour migrants from the greater Bangkok area. Despite the school’s lack of official credentialisation, the Sunday school emulates the formal Thai education system including compulsory school uniforms which includes the school’s name and logo. As such, Myanmar Migrant School is highly public.

While I walk towards the canteen area, I notice a video screen displaying old speeches by Aung Sang, the revered Burmese National Independence Leader. By chance, today is “Burmese Martyrs’ day,” an auspicious occasion on Myanmar’s official calendar. The School Director, U Ba Sein, whom I have met several times before, spots me and comes over. He explains to me how the school operates. He tells me that language training is central, not only for students to master Thai but also to “build national and labour discipline.” Our conversation is brief as the next sessions of classes begin in a few minutes. U Ba Sein grabs a microphone and gives a short speech in remembrance of Aung San, the great independence leader of Myanmar. The students stand up in silence whilst U Ba Sein speaks. The address ends. Chatter refills the schoolyard. Classes in the rooms upstairs recommence.

U Ba Sein takes me around to some of the classrooms to introduce me and my “safe migration” research to the students. Rather than any conversation about labour migration assistance, he continues the theme from the schoolyard downstairs. After a short monologue regarding the importance of national unity and democracy in Myanmar, he asks the students “who are the famous leaders of the Shan, who are the famous leaders of the Karen?.” He then explains to the students that I was a researcher interested in “safe migration” and wanted to learn about students’ migration and work conditions. Later on, outside the classroom, U Ba Sein tells me that it is important to build national and political identity of the students. “In order to have national solidarity” he says, “you must have labour solidarity.” As I would learn over time, for U Ba Sein, the welfare and work conditions of labour migrants were inseparable from Myanmar politics; a disposition which made sense given U Ba Sein’s long-term residence in Thailand as a political refugee in the aftermath of Myanmar’s 1988 student protests. As several other Myanmar political exiles in Thailand, the fate of labour migrants had become an additional topic of concern over the years.

His preoccupation with national and labour solidarity may seem disconnected from “safe migration.” Yet, his school was an extended arm of a large “safe migration” programme, funded by international aid. With the school’s relatively large enrolment of nearly a thousand predominately Myanmar students (and a handful of Khmer and Lao labour migrants), the school had potential as a conduit for aid programmes that target labour migrants. Through donor funding, the school had a status as a “migrant resource centre” (MRC).

MRCs have become a common ingredient amongst several aid organisations that implement safe migration interventions and other forms of migrant assistance. Nominally, an MRC serves as a focal point where labour migrants can seek advice relating to migration status (passport and work permit policies) and assistance with lodging complaints relating to underpayment, work accidents, and abuse. Although the language school’s formal role appeared to be an odd fit, the classrooms served as an entry point for awareness raising for labour migrants. The school’s potential as a conduit to labour migrants was also significantly amplified by the ubiquitous use of social media amongst the students. Despite the school being highly localised (in spatial terms — a school), its social and spatial reach straddled well beyond the schoolyard through Facebook and other social media platforms. The school’s own Facebook account had more than 12,000 followers (as later chapters will show this is a tiny following compared to other migrant assistance groups) where a range of migration-related media content could be shared (such as information on new visa regulations, etc.). Furthermore, language training made sense as a safe migration intervention given the importance of language acquisition in order to obtain better employment thereby pre-empting poor work conditions, and — importantly — equipping migrants with skills to seek help if needed. The Migration School is one out of numerous examples of safe migration initiatives scattered throughout Thailand and its neighbouring countries.

Brokered safety

This book examines safe migration — migrant assistance that comprises pre-emptive and protective measures to enhance labour migrants’ work conditions and well-being — which has become an emergent aid modality in the Mekong region and elsewhere. The school visit I describe foreshadows the multifaceted ways in which safe migration interventions unfold. The language school serves as a central component within a supply chain of international aid assistance, glossed in policy terms as safe migration interventions. At the same time, the school indicates how “safe migration” goes beyond a narrow focus on “legal” and regulated migration. Ultimately, language training is more important than training on labour rights at the Myanmar Migrant School. As U Ba Sein himself told me, “you may be legal but still not happy,” hinting at the commonality of underpayment and abuse in his students’ workplaces regardless of their legal status.

At the same time, the school denotes how aid interventions become (re) appropriated and altered through implementation. Despite the school serving as an MRC under the auspices of a “safe migration” intervention, any programme jargon is overshadowed by a Burmese-specific discourse that marries labour migration with Burmese political futures and pan-ethnic solidarity. This is not to say that the school ignored its role as an MRC. Language training was after all recognised by the donor as the main activity that took place. The classrooms were often used as a social space where students’ migration-related problems could be expressed. Yet, it was evident from conversations with both U Ba Sein and several of his students that despite a specific focus on labour rights and migrants’ well-being, there were obvious limitations to how the school and students alike could affect meaningful change. For example, the same day of my visit I spoke to Ma Ni, who is one of the students at Myanmar Migrant School. She had left her employer due to underpayment, she told me, but as Thai law required the employer’s written consent to let her change jobs, it had put her in an impossible limbo regarding her migration status. Other students faced the same problem in spatial form: students possessing “pink cards” — a semi-formal work permit that is commonplace in the Thai labour economy — were technically in breach of their visa condition when crossing provincial boundaries. Ironically, although the school was part of a safe migration programme, some students exposed themselves to risk when attending training sessions on safety as their place of employment and residence were located elsewhere. U Ba Sein told me on a later occasion that he had several cases over the years where students had been arrested due to these legal arrangements.

Yet, it was precisely document status and labour rights empowerment where donors wanted to see more work done. But, this was problematic for the school. Pushing students can backfire, U Ba Sein alleged, pointing to how other migrant groups had encouraged pseudo-union activism amongst migrants which only resulted in the migrants getting in trouble with the authorities. As one of the teachers told me, the main value of the school for the students was how it helped them indirectly with changing employers which allowed better pay and conditions, despite the aforementioned implications this had for legal status. Rather than training on labour rights, it was the mere fact of obtaining better language skills that was meaningful for students, the teacher alleged.

The tension between the school and its international funder reflected different perspectives on how safe migration is achieved. Whereas the school favoured language training, the international agency held mixed views. From the point of view of an aid evaluation, language training under the auspices of a safe migration intervention can be both applauded and critiqued. Teaching Thai (and English) made sense as it constituted a proactive form of assistance: language skills empower migrants to avoid exploitation in the first place. As such, it produces “safety.” Indeed, unpublished studies pointed to the fact that students ended up with better paid jobs after attending the school, which was echoed in my own interviews with several students.

Yet, such results may just as well reflect students social disposition acquired over time in Thailand. As one expatriate aid official familiar with the project pointed out to me: “language is not really the point.” From an aid programme’s perspective, how can you attribute causational linkage between improved language skills and better labour outcomes? These concerns make good sense within an aid monitoring and evaluation habitus. As mentioned above, language training had limited direct effect on the various structural problems’ students faced relating to work permits and visa status. Furthermore, most students had already been in Thailand for several years before enrolment and could hardly be considered representative of inexperienced, vulnerable labour migrants. In this sense, the school arguably manufactured “success” as the students are pre-dispositioned to succeed given their accumulated migration experience (a phenomenon that we will return to throughout the book, see also Huijsmans 2012a).

Still, my ethnographic sensibilities made me curious why some aid officials questioned language training as a “successful” safe migration initiative. To my knowledge, the school was the only activity under the auspices of safe migration where beneficiaries paid — through tuition fees — to access the service. The simple fact that poor labour migrants, by their own volition, chose to spend the only day they have time off to attend a language school indicated that — at least from the point of view of the students — the school certainly had value for them. With enrolments fluctuating between 800 and 1200 students, and the school being in its 10" year of operation it seemed curious how the intervention received less attention from the safe migration sector. In contrast, some safe migration programmes lauded other MRCs that worked directly on compensation claims for migrants as a “success” (ILO 2012), despite the fact that practitioners were well aware that a court-ruling did by no means guarantee enforcement of a compensation claim. Hence, the school foreshadows the importance of ethnographic attention to how safe migration outcomes are both contested and mobilised along different scales of aid delivery, a theme that will be examined throughout the chapters.

The book’s ethnographic focus also means adopting a sideway glance (Hannerz 2003), that is, embracing an astute interest in the wider context of the social milieu one observes. What falls outside an aid programme’s vision and formal practice becomes crucial. During fieldwork, important side effects of the school’s operation became apparent which was to my knowledge invisible in aid reports and possibly to several aid workers within the safe migration aid sector in Thailand. The awareness raising which took place in the classroom produced its own counter-intentional effects. U Ba Sein was quite open with me that awareness raising on legal and safe migration “also provides opportunities for brokering practices.” Several students took on the role as informal brokers due to their newfound knowledge on visa processing, Thai labour law and other handy tips for labour migrants. “Work permits,” U Ba Sein said, “brokers can eat from that one!” Althougha central tenet of safe migration discourse proclaims that informing migrants on legal migration pathways contributes to eradicating migrant brokers, the school’s safe migration activities had multiplex effects: while the awareness raising benefitted students in navigating their migration, the school was at the same time — even according to their own director — a broker-incubator. This may seem both self-defeating and tragicomic yet point to a broader claim this book makes: what appears as mutually exclusive oppositional principles, practices, and actors within formal safe migration aid delivery are intertwined and co-dependent in practice. Assistance and harm, safety and risk, the legal and extra-legal, and eradication and production are not opposites but part of the same configuration.

As our introductory ethnographic vignette demonstrates, the school is riddled with paradoxes where opposites are brought together: the school’s simultaneous overt and covertness (despite operating publicly with a license and school uniforms, many students nonetheless must tacitly navigate precarious migration status to access the school); the local and immediate versus the distant and abstract (how programme implementation appropriates its own local style in contrast with the aid discourse which funds it); frictions between formal assistance and informal needs and values (what is valuable for recipients is questioned within a monitoring and evaluation aid framework); and, finally, how safe migration interventions end up producing one of the very phenomena it seeks to eliminate: brokers. Hence, this book is an ethnography of how safe migration comes into being through various practices by governments, United Nations (UN) agencies, non-governmental organisations (NGOs), and local community-based initiatives — such as the

Myanmar Migrant School. The book traces the emergence of safe migration, why certain aid actors gravitate towards the concept, as well as how the concept moves from the discursive and abstract (how it is verbalised) to the social and material (how it is practiced). More specifically, the book argues that:

1 Despite a nominal adherence to procedural rule-bound migration governance, safe migration instrumentalisation depends on, and produces informal practices. Just as the school’s formal safe migration interventions piggybacks on localised Myanmar-specific idioms of national identity, formal awareness raising produce (as opposed to eliminate) informal brokers — a phenomenon which official safe migration discourse wishes to eliminate.

2 Yet, such informal practices are not extrinsic to governmental structures but constitutive of them. Hence, safe migration brings together oppositional actors into a range of forms of co-dependency, either through patron-client relationships or brokering practices. Government bodies, NGOs, brokers and other safe migration actors co-opt and become co-opted through these relations.

3 Just as actors are both oppositional and co-dependent, safe migration interventions furnish divergent outcomes where assistance, help, exploitation, and abuse are co-produced. As following chapters will show, although safe migration assistance in the form of migrant hotlines, pre-departure training to formal documentation of workers is tremendously useful for migrants, they are also central to creating new forms of social control, either through deportations, or forms of bondage. Rather than safety, freedom, empowerment, exploitation, and abuse being opposites, they are co-produced.

Hence, safe migration in the Mekong region, the book argues, is best understood as brokered safety. Furthermore, the ways in which formal safe migration interventions depend on oppositional yet co-dependent informal practices cannot be understood without careful attention to their temporal and spatial significance. Safe migration interventions relativise social space and connectivity: informal practices, despite being highly localised, have larger spatial reach compared with “high tech” abstracted approaches (such as donor-driven mobile phone apps). At the same time, safe migration interventions produce spatial and temporal reversals. As coming chapters will delineate, safe migration outcomes often precede intervention, or are premised on spatial “U-turns” (e.g. pre-departure training taking place subsequent to arrival in the destination country). Throughout the book, the theoretical implications of this dimension of spatio-temporal governance will be fleshed out.

The Mekong region is an ideal place to investigate safe migration, not only due to its enormous labour migration pool but also how safety and risk are central to the region’s migration and development trajectories and rationales:

The ethos of entrepreneurialism relies on people taking a chance, on people taking risks. This premise is fundamental to the sensibilities sweeping through the region. Yet at the same time, millions of development dollars go into supposedly mitigating unwanted consequences, based on a pre-emptive logic of “measure, avoid and/or compensate.” There is a very basic tension here. On the one hand, people are encouraged to try their hand in market engagement in freeform ways one cannot anticipate and, on the other hand, we work with a logic that suggests we can anticipate and take care of undesired consequences before they happen despite the fact that aspirational endeavours are premised on their unpredictability.

As such, a belief in socially engineered safety goes to the heart of policy thinking relating to both labour migration and development in the region. To be clear, the book’s central concern is not what aid organisations and policy officials intuitively ask (does safe migration work?) but rather how it works (see Mosse 2005b). Within UN agencies and NGOs, their internal institutional logic shapes knowledge production. They see the social milieu in which they operate through the eyes of their prescribed objectives and mandates that are geared towards orchestrated change. This predisposes aid actors to easily confuse prescription (how things ought to be) with description (Neumann 2017). As such, aid documents and evaluation reports tell us more about the implementers and less about the social reality they seek to transform. In order to appreciate how the policy concept safe migration mobilises institutional practices, it is necessary to move beyond the formal self-definition of policy. As will become evident throughout this book, social practices that operate beneath the surface of formal policy implementation are central in order to grasp how safe migration comes into being, hence the need for an ethnographic approach. Before expanding on the book’s methodological approaches, it is necessary to introduce the concept itself.

Safe migration: The concept

“What is safe migration?” Nick, a senior expatriate aid official within a large aid organisation, repeats to himself the question I just asked. “Well, it is migration that is safe.” Throughout my research, I would often hear responses like this. The concept seems so simple yet ends up as a tautology which renders it devoid of meaning. As later chapters will show, aid officials who work for safe migration programmes often struggle immensely with even explaining the concept to themselves. Yet, when pressed, practitioners will commonly allude to four central characteristics which can be summarised as follows.

First, safe migration includes programmes and policies which seek to legalise labour migration. Enabling migrant workers to obtain passport, necessary visas, work permits, and associated formalised entitlements (such as health insurance) are considered a central pillar within safe migration. As such, safe migration is nothing new, given several decades of various guest worker and circular migrations schemes worldwide (Feldman 20lla; Skeldon 2012). Yet, as many practitioners are quick to point out, legal migration status does not necessarily equate with safety for migrants as employers may subjugate migrant workers by withholding their passports or subject them to other abusive practices (de Genova 2007; Suravoranon et al. 2017). Furthermore, it is notable that despite a seeming state-centrism given its focus on legal documents, safe migration has had considerable input from humanitarian and development actors with a “pro-migration” philosophy. Hence, safe migration embraces and critiques legal migration.

Second, safe migration includes what may be referred to as progressive awareness raising. Whereas early anti-trafficking programmes (to be explored in the next chapter) could at times take on a strong anti-immigration tone where “staying where you are” (Thatun and Marshall 2005, 46—63) became an extended form of border control and migration prevention, safe migration turns this on its head. I witnessed this change myself when I worked on anti-trafficking programmes for the UN in the early 2000s where the UN theme group on human trafficking in Laos gradually moved from a focus on “don’t’ go” to “go safely.” Hence, realising that villagers will migrate no matter what governments and UN agencies may say or do, it is more feasible to support this process.

Beyond focusing on travel documents, implementers of safe migration awareness raising commonly emphasise the kinds of relationships that are central for migration outcomes, exemplified in safe migration training manuals:

Do you know anyone who lives in the town to which you are going? Do you have that person’s phone number?.. Are you travelling with friends?... Do you know anyone who has been hired through this person or a recruiter before?... Do you know an organisation or person to contact in the other town/country — if something goes wrong and you need help and safety?

Such questions come to the fore within pre-migration interventions, which in effect expands migration facilitation beyond the legal material (travel documents and work permits) to the social: interrelations become the key to migration safety. Hence, in addition to legal documents and awareness raising, calibrating the right kind of social capital is a third important element in safe migration discourse.

Finally, safe migration also takes the shape of a counter network: as migrants move through space, a range of support services within source communities, during transit and in destination points, are meant to act as focal points where migrants can seek assistance. As later chapters will show, this may take the form of hotlines, outreach services, social media or — as alluded to at the beginning — in the form of MRCs.

All these elements are usually framed in terms of vague notions of a well-regulated migration system, which is why safe migration is commonly mentioned alongside kin phrases, such as “well-managed,” “ordered,” or “regular” migration. As will be delineated in the next chapter, despite less media attention compared with global anxieties relating to human trafficking and modern slavery, safe migration has emerged as a central migration governance discourse in recent years. As foreshadowed by the epigraph at the beginning of this chapter, the UN accentuates safety as a central policy focus through its Global Compact for Safe, Orderly and Regular Migration (GCM) (United Nations 2018). Relatedly, the UN underscores the importance of safe migration through its Sustainable Development Goals which includes “[facilitating] orderly, safe, regular, and responsible migration and mobility of people, including through the implementation of planned and well- managed migration policies.” (United Nations 2015, 27)

As alluded to above, important temporal (progressive awareness raising before departure) and spatial connotations (assisting migrants as they move through space) are central to safe migration governance. The theoretical significance of them is worth spelling out.

Safe migration: Theoretical deliberations

At first glance, safe migration is grounded in migrants’ lifeworlds. However, the term’s main impetus is rather different. Safe migration emanates from NGOs and UN agencies, many of them being anti-trafficking programmes, which work on migration assistance. Hence, safe migration points to instrumentalisation. Just as humanitarianism constitutes a discourse of how one may act upon human suffering (as opposed to human suffering in itself, see Fassin 2011a), a starting point for any exposition of safe migration must recognise it as a discourse of orchestrated change. The concern is not in what ways “safe migration” may reflect migrant practices as such; rather, how a range of agencies may operationalise safe migration through programmes and practices. Hence, the concept primarily exists as a technocratic discourse within aid agencies that work with migrant labourers. Theoretically, this takes us to a broader question regarding the relationship between epistemology (how knowledge is produced) and governance (strategies and techniques for subjection and objectification). Two theoretical strands have particular relevance in this regard: the mobilities turn and post-panopticism, which both have important spatio-temporal implications for how we understand safe migration interventions.

In recent years, social scientists have given increasing attention to mobility. Although a range of mobile phenomena, such as migration, are not new, there are important changes in the way mobility is theorised. One of the most prominent scholars in this field is John Urry. In his book Mobilities (Urry 2007), he argues that not only is there empirical evidence of increasing mobility in the world (such as the intensity of travel); mobility is also about epistemological and ontological change. Traditional social science, Urry argues, is premised on “container models,” where social phenomena are construed as taking part within territorial units. This has resulted in mobility being treated as a “black box” (Urry 2007, 12) and thereby received less analytical attention. Moving beyond static and sedentary modes of theorising, the mobilities turn takes mobility as a point of departure for academic inquiry. As such, mobility is not merely an empirical object which ought to be given more attention, it transforms the social sciences. Mobility invites us to revisit epistemological foundations of knowledge production.

Bærenholdt usefully extends this line of inquiry by considering how mobility is linked to governmentality. Whereas Urry invites us to consider mobility as subject — and not merely object — of knowledge, Bærenholdt argues that mobility in today’s world extends beyond being an object to become an instrument of governance. In other words, “government and governmentality do not only deal and cope with mobility; they work through mobility.” (Berenholdt 2013, 27). Travel documents (such as passports) are prime examples of this governing principle, neatly recapitulated by Keshavarz:

Another factor that makes passports special compared to other material techniques of border control is their actual mobility due to their configuration. Compared to the majority of border techniques, which are technically fixed and bound to the geographical location of the border, passports are conceived to be mobile, to be carried. (2011, 7)

In short, mobilities enable us to think about mobility and migration as subject of politics and knowledge. In this context, is it useful to consider another theoretical line of inquiry: post-panopticism.

Post-panopticism stems from Foucault’s influential work on disciplinary power. This body of work has been explicated ad nauseum and does not need to be repeated here. Panopticism applicability to contemporaneous societies has been subject to considerable debate amongst several scholars (Boyne 2000; Gane 2012; Lyon et al. 2012). Contemporary societies, some argue, are not premised on a disciplinary power as discussed in Foucault’s seminal Discipline and Punish (1977). Ranging from the works of Zygmund Bauman on Liguid Modernity (Bauman 2000) to Deleuze and Guattari exposition of assemblages (Deleuze and Guattari 1988), governance, they argue (in different ways), is not premised on hierarchical, diagrammatic modes of surveillance (as implied by the panoptical model) but polymorphous networks, or seduction rather than discipline. We have, it is argued, entered an era of post-panopticism.

Post-panopticism has taken several different lines of inquiry. However, there are two inter-related areas of analysis that are of particular relevance to this book. First, post-panopticism implies a critique of static, sedentary ways of both theorising and governing, pointing to a territorial understanding of power where discipline becomes a function of demarcated configuration of space. Similarly, to mobilities scholarship, post-panopticism attempts to break away from social theorising premising on “container models.” Second, post-panopticism denotes a move away from discipline to control and security. In A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari (1988) point to how government resembles rhizomatic, de-territorialised networks. Rather than social control of bodies through discipline, mass media and information technology become the basis for modulation. Deleuze explicates the distinction thus: