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Waiting for the Neak Leung ferry to cross the mighty Mekong River from Kandal over to Prey Veng province took us quite a while—almost eight hours, in fact. This was Saturday 27 July 2013, the day before the most competitive election in Cambodia’s recent history, and tens of thousands of people were trying to get back from Phnom Penh to their home villages. Most of them were intent on casting their votes for the opposition Cambodia National Rescue Party (CNRP), led by Sam Rainsy and Kem Sokha. Sam Rainsy had staged a triumphal return to Cambodia from France a few days earlier, electrifying his supporters in the capital, and galvanising them to exercise their franchise. The long wait for the ferry gave me an opportunity to conduct some impromptu fieldwork at the roadside, chatting to groups of garment workers who had clubbed together to rent vans for journey home.

Drinking three-in-one instant coffee and snacking on papaya at improvised stalls near the ferry, I found myself in the company of people familiar to me from my research in Thailand: urbanised villagers (Naruemon & McCargo, 2011). They were all of working age—mainly in their twenties and thirties—and were employed in and around Phnom Penh, in the industrial and service sectors. Most had lived in the city for a decade or more, in cheap dormitories or with relatives, but their legal residence remained in their home villages in Prey Veng. In the capital, they were viewed as provincials, people from the countryside. In the countryside, they appeared as sophisticates, better off financially than their families and neighbours but also with better access to education and information. Several informants told me that they were going home to tell their families and friends how popular the CNRP was in Phnom Penh, and especially to share clips they had made on their phones, showing Sam Rainsy’s rapturous reception at the airport and since.

These Cambodian workers were neither truly urban nor truly rural. Rather, they occupied a hybrid identity, moving between the city and the countryside, and were not completely at home in either space. Their employment was often precarious and insecure: few were unionised, and their factories could close down or relocate at short notice. They were a driving force behind Cambodia’s rapid socio-economic transformation, which had dramatically raised living standards in recent decades, but had also fuelled severe inequalities and provided disproportionate benefit to foreign investors—notably Chinese, Korean, and Taiwanese companies—and local elites with good connections to the long-ruling Cambodian People’s Party (CPP). Highly mobile and precarious workers had benefitted greatly from Cambodia’s rapid economic growth but they were also extremely aware of the structural inequality that now blighted that growth. In other words, they were ripe for mobilisation by opposition politicians to challenge the CPP’s dominance.

Curiously, however, neither the CPP nor the CNRP appeared fully to understand the political salience of Cambodia’s migrant labour force (McCargo, 2014).Footnote 1 Seventy per cent of the Cambodian population was under 30, but CPP election posters urged voters to feel gratitude towards the party for having saved the country from the clutches of the Khmer Rouge in 1979, and for having ‘developed the nation’ over subsequent decades. Despite a longstanding opposition association with garment workers (Norén-Nilsson, 2016a: 141), the CNRP did not focus its campaign energies on key swing provinces such as Prey Veng, although ironically it performed well in many of these areas. Both main parties had an essentially patronising view of rural voters, failing to recognise that millions of them were de facto urban dwellers. In the end, the CNRP won 55 seats compared with the 68 seats secured by the CPP: the difference in the popular vote between the two parties was less than 300,000. This was a remarkable turnaround from the previous, 2008 election, which the CPP had won hands-down. The 2013 election was followed by a growing opposition presence in rural areas (Loughlin & Norén-Nilsson, 2021: 228). But 2013 proved to be the last time the CNRP was permitted to contest a Cambodian general election. The CPP learned important lessons from the 2013 election and later made ‘unusual policy concessions’ to increase the party’s appeal to garment workers (Ou, 2020: 590). Following a strong opposition showing in the 2017 commune council elections, the CNRP was dissolved by the courts later that year on trumped-up charges.

What I experienced during the 2013 Cambodian election reflected a broader set of shifts across Southeast Asia and beyond: the rise of the urbanised villager, and the collapse of existing categories for understanding populations.Footnote 2 Influenced by the assumptions of mainstream political development literature from the 1960s onwards, the politics of many Southeast Asian states is often viewed through the lens of ‘two countries’: rural versus urban, capital city versus the provinces. Several nations—notably Thailand, Indonesia, and the Philippines—feature dominant primate capitals that are considerably larger than any rival urban centre, and which attract the lion’s share of investment and economic activity. The ‘two countries’ perspective maps onto socio-economic divides, questions of social class, and issues of identity, sometimes including ethnicity. These dualities are at the core of the political transitions and changes that have affected these countries during recent decades. Simply put, the people of the provinces are more numerous than their urban counterparts, and in a more open political order, are well-placed to outvote them. And once provincial voters understand themselves as a potent electoral force, they can play an active part in overturning existing power-holders and upending the nature of national politics. Very often, that new self-awareness is discovered first by urbanised villagers, who have one foot in the countryside and another in the city. From this hybridity stems new insights, inspirations, and possibilities. But first, urbanised villagers need to understand themselves as active players in an emerging political order.

This chapter explores the politics of centre-periphery conflict in Thailand and elsewhere in Southeast Asia, with a particular emphasis on the blurring of the distinctions between the urban and the rural. The chapter argues that as capital cities have seen growing influxes of migrants from rural areas, simplistic distinctions between the urban and rural have broken down—a process further exacerbated by the rapid urbanisation of many provincial towns and cities. New groups of voters with a hybridised urban-rural identity are playing an important role in politics across the region, seizing new opportunities while also creating new electoral threats to existing elites. Once mobilised, these voters have demonstrated an impressive capacity to shift political agendas and resources in new directions.

Thailand and the ‘Two Country’ Thesis

The idea of a profound difference between the urban and the rural in the developing world was a fundamental tenet of social science, especially during the 1960s. For mainstream Western development theorists during the Cold War, education and culture, knowledge and power, and modernity and progress, were all located primarily in the urban centres. The rural periphery was a site of traditional thinking and backwardness, resistant to much-needed change, but also dangerously susceptible to the twin allures of communism and ethnic mobilisation. One solution to the problem, recommended by the World Bank in the Thai case, was to promote agri-business and industrialisation, to build satellite cities in the regions, and to create infrastructure that gave urban elites ready access to the rural hinterland (International Bank for Reconstruction & Development, 1959).

But as socio-economic development proceeded apace in Southeast Asia, accompanied by a growing emphasis on elections and a more enfranchised population, a new problem emerged: rural and urban voters understood representative politics rather differently. In an English chapter that summarises an argument he made in more detail in an influential Thai book, Anek Laothamatas described this as a problem of ‘reconciling two aspirations’ concerning democracy:

For the rural electorate, democracy is not valued as an ideal, but as a mechanism to draw greater benefits from the political elite to themselves and their communities… To the educated middle class, elections are a means of recruiting honest and capable persons to serve as lawmakers and political executives, rather than a process through which voters get parochial and personal benefits. (Anek, 1996: 221)

In other words, Anek portrays rural Thai voters as having an essentially transactional understanding of democracy, while urban voters have a more transformational view of the electoral process: in effect, people in the countryside are bad democrats, while people in the city are good democrats. Similarly, interpretations of Cambodian politics in the 1990s and during the first decade of the new millennium placed considerable emphasis on the existence of an urban-rural divide: parties approached these two populations very differently when electioneering (Ou, 2020: 585–586). Following Anek’s logic—widely shared among the Thai elite—it follows that urban voters needed to prevent rural voters from gaining the upper hand through the electoral process.

As Samuel Huntington had argued much earlier, such conditions could easily presage a ‘green uprising’ that could come about through ‘the inauguration of the rural masses into national politics’ (Huntington, 1968: 74). As he summarises:

In a competitive party system, the Green Uprising often takes the form of one segment of the urban elite developing an appeal to or making an alliance with the crucial rural voters and mobilising them into politics so as to overwhelm at the polls the more narrowly urban-based parties’. (Huntington, 1968: 75)

Huntington’s formulation—which includes the emergence of a larger, more conservative urban middle class that struggles to regain and then retain dominance of the political system—predicted much of the electoral change experienced by Thailand in the opening decades of the twenty-first century. Following the promulgation of the 1997 Constitution, which was intended to strengthen elected institutions and politicians, billionaire police-officer-turned-telecoms-tycoon Thaksin Shinawatra established his Thai Rak Thai (Thais Love Thais) Party to contest the 2001 general election. Thai Rak Thai presenting itself as a challenger party is dedicated to modernising Thailand and overcoming bureaucratic inertia and mediocrity (McCargo & Pathmanand, 2005). As a result, Thaksin and his family subsequently dominated Thailand’s politics for a decade and a half, despite his being ousted from the premiership in a 2006 military coup and eventually going into self-imposed exile in Dubai. Parties aligned with Thaksin secured the largest number of parliamentary seats in every subsequent Thai election until 2023, though they were not always able to form a government.Footnote 3

Many accounts of Thai politics have characterised the Thaksin electoral phenomenon as essentially provincial in nature, but the reality is more nuanced. Thai Rak Thai won big in Bangkok in both the 2001 and 2005 elections, reflecting the fact that Thaksin was initially popular with many sections of the elite and urban middle class—though many of those who supported him at the time no longer wish to acknowledge this. In other words, the idea that the rise of Thaksin polarised Thailand’s politics along urban-rural lines is a retrospective interpretation. A second problem with the urban-rural argument is that pro-Thaksin parties made only limited headway in a number of regions and provinces where the agricultural sector looms large, notably in the Central Plains and the Upper South. Some rural areas proved much more fertile ground for Thaksin’s famous ‘populist policies—notably the 30 baht healthcare scheme, village development funds, and a moratorium on farmers’ debt—than others.

In the 2001 and (especially) the 2005 elections, supporting Thaksin had been a mainstream political stance that crossed regional and class divides. Following the rise of the anti-Thaksin ‘yellowshirt’ People’s Alliance for Democracy (PAD) movement and the military coup of 2006, pro-Thaksin parties continued to win elections but now relied heavily on a core vote (than siang) that was disproportionately concentrated in the North and Northeast. The main opposition Democrat Party, by contrast, was dominant in the Upper South and in Bangkok. In order to push back against the ‘yellow’ anti-Thaksin movement, Thaksin supporters created the ‘redshirt’ mass movement which staged huge protests during the period of Democrat leader Abhisit Vejjajiva’s premiership (Montesano et al., 2012). Between March and May 2010, more than 90 people were killed in anti-government protests on the streets of Bangkok. Most of them were unarmed civilian members of the redshirt movement, shot dead by uniformed soldiers.

Who exactly were the redshirts who thronged the centre of Bangkok in 2010? Naruemon Thabchumpon and Duncan McCargo set out to answer this question in a 2011 article (Naruemon & McCargo, 2011). Interviews with 57 redshirt leaders and protestors, along with 400 survey questionnaires, were revealing about redshirt backgrounds, origins, and socio-economic circumstances. Leading social critic Prawase Wasi argued that there were five types of redshirts (Prawase, 2010), the largest category of which he identified as ‘the poor’, and their sympathisers. While Prawase himself was careful to note that lower-income redshirt supporters came from both urban and rural areas, much domestic and international commentary subsumed them all under the lumpen category of ‘poor farmers’ from the provinces. These redshirts were often depicted in the media as motivated by economic and class grievances. Many middle-class Bangkokians viewed the redshirt movement as the latest incarnation of the frequent street protests organised throughout the 1990s by the ‘Assembly of the Poor’, an alliance of people’s organisations campaigning on livelihood and environmental issues. On one level, the redshirts did emulate the Assembly of the Poor by valorising their own underdog status—proudly referring to themselves as ‘prai’, or serfs, in contrast with the ‘amat’, or aristocrats. But our interviews revealed that, despite this rhetorical positioning, most redshirts did not see themselves primarily as victims, and nor were they opposed to mainstream capitalist development.

Typical redshirt protests we interviewed were local-level activists and organisers, who often engaged in some seasonal agricultural activities such as commercial lotus production. On average, they owned around 6 acres of land (15 rai)—they were not landless peasants by any means—but despite commonly referring to themselves as ‘farmers’, this self-description failed accurately to capture their real occupations or their main sources of income. Most of them also ran businesses, served as elected local politicians, or hosted shows on community radio stations. Their businesses had generally received start-up loans from Thaksin-era initiatives, including the Small and Medium-Sized Enterprise (SME) or Village Development Funds. Some also had pensions after long periods of employment as low-ranking government officials in the clerical or ancillary sectors of the bureaucracy. Other sources of income included stints employed overseas as migrant labourers, or remittances from relatives who were working abroad or in Bangkok. Overall, most of our informants had middle-class lifestyles—symbolised by having swapped their motorbikes for pickup trucks—but their income was somewhat precarious and contingent, and they were generally in debt. The majority of the participants we surveyed—and around a quarter of those we interviewed—were registered to vote in the provinces, but spent most of their year working in and around Bangkok. Most of our interviewees lived in peri-urban provincial areas, outside the official boundaries of municipalities, but in districts that were no longer truly rural.

In short, many of the 2010 redshirt activists were poor farmers who were not poor and not farmers. Many had seen their social standing and economic status increase throughout the 2001 to 2006 Thaksin premierships, and then decline since the September 2006 military coup. ‘These were not poor people, largely excluded from the system: they were an emerging class of stakeholders whose aspirations had been thwarted by changes since the end of the Thaksin period’ (Naruemon & McCargo, 2011: 1004). While they typically engaged in some agricultural work, their primary incomes came from the industrial and service sectors. Indeed, many redshirts employed other people—often illegal migrants from Cambodia or Myanmar—to take care of their own small farms and rice-fields while they themselves worked away. There were many similarities with pro-CNRP demonstrators in Cambodia: Astrid Norén-Nilsson found that a typical protestor she interviewed in 2013 was a land-owning middle-aged self-described farmer, who considered themselves not to be poor but of average economic standing. About a third of them supplemented their income with other activities (Norén-Nilsson, 2015), and saw themselves not as supplicants but as rights-holding citizens who formed an emerging class of stakeholders (Norén-Nilsson, 2016b).

Ideologically, the protestors had little affinity with previous generations of livelihood-oriented NGO activists who valorised and romanticised rural life and were opposed to mainstream development and consumerism. They had no interest in a ‘sufficiency economy’ of the kind famously advocated by the late King Bhumibol Adulyadej in the wake of the 1997 Asian financial crisis. They lived predominantly in lowland areas and had access to roads, water, and electricity: they did not view themselves as marginal or peripheral. Rather, they saw Thaksin Shinawatra as having invited them to share the benefits of Thailand’s rapid economic development, including full participation in an emerging consumer society. They formed part of Thailand’s new, politically active lower middle class.

Despite recognising many of these developments, some studies failed fully to grasp the significance of these changes. For example, Anek Laothamatas conducted a large-scale survey of 5318 informants in 2010 on the politics of Thailand’s population change, a study that generated a much more nuanced picture than that offered by his earlier town-versus-country dichotomy (Anek, 2010). Nevertheless, he relied on a couple of troublesome distinctions. The first of these was classifying people as ‘urban’ or ‘rural’ dwellers, depending on whether or not they resided in a municipality. The problem here was that most urban areas spill far beyond the boundaries of formal municipalities: rather than expand existing towns, the Thai authorities had simply turned adjoining areas into additional ‘municipal sub-districts’. Between 2008 and 2012, 627 of Thailand’s 5300 sub-districts were upgraded in this way, while the Ministry of Interior has proposed new legislation to transform all existing sub-districts into municipal sub-districts: in other words, to convert the whole of Thailand into little towns. All villagers are in the process of being urbanised, whether they like it or not. The Thai countryside is literally being cancelled.

Another issue was that up to 20 million Thais (out of a total population of 70 million) do not actually live where they are registered to vote. According to their ID cards, these millions of Thais live in the provinces—mainly the Northeast or the North—but in practice are mainly to be found working in greater Bangkok, which includes the adjoining provinces of Samut Prakan, Nakhon Pathom, Nonthaburi, Pathum Thani, and Samut Sakhon. In Thailand, it is perfectly possible to live for decades in Bangkok, send your kids to school there, and get treated in hospital there, all without transferring your household registration (tabian ban) and hence your legal residence to the capital.Footnote 4 Whereas in other Asian countries—such as China, Myanmar, or Vietnam—people are forced to register as migrants when they migrate to a big city, Thais can move around freely from one province to another. As a result, numerous Thai statistics are completely unreliable, since there is no proper data about who lives where.

Officially, there were 5.6 million people registered as residents in Bangkok in 2011—in contrast with 2010 census figures giving Bangkok’s population as 8.3 million. Add together the five surrounding provinces and the 2010 census put the population of Greater Bangkok at 14.6 million. The census, which supposedly counts people where they actually live, counted an extra 50% (2.7 million) on top of the capital’s official population—but even these figures omit many shorter and long-term migrants, as well as non-Thai citizens. It is very probable that the real population of Greater Bangkok prior to the 2020 Covid lockdowns was at least 18 million.

A further difficulty concerns occupational classification: Anek distinguished between informants who were ‘farmers and labourers’ (21.9%), and others he calls ‘self-employed and private sector employees’ (31.6%), despite the fact that many Thais derive income from both categories of occupation. These problems with Anek’s survey illustrated the challenge of capturing hybrid, fluid, and ambiguous identities through conventional classifications. Just over 50% of Anek’s informants described themselves as ‘poor’—but poor in what sense?

As I have previously argued:

the much-vaunted distinction between the city and countryside in Thailand does not exist.Footnote 5 Or to be more precise, it does not exist in the ways in which it is typically described and imagined. What actually exist are multiple blurrings of the distinction between urban and rural, and the emergence of a hybridised population that operates in a hinterland between the two realms. The instability that now characterises Thai politics does not reflect a clash between urban and rural, but the precarious identity of a substantial—and decisive—portion of Thailand’s electorate. The resolution to this problem therefore lies neither in the demonisation nor the valorisation of the rural, but in measures that would acknowledge and stabilise the actually-existing identities of those who live a hybridised urban-rural life. (2017: 367)

What Is the Hybridity Problem?

The problem of identifying and addressing urban-rural hybridity in the Thai case has two major components. One component concerns the unreliability of house registration documents as an indication of where people actually live. A second component concerns the unreliability of self-identification as a robust basis for classifying the occupational categories of informants.

In 2015, an improbably high 32% of Thais identified themselves as ‘farmers’, compared with just 12% in nearby Malaysia. A Thailand Development Research Institute (TDRI) study conducted during the 2020 first wave Covid-19 pandemic revealed some remarkably interesting data, focused mainly on communities in the North and Northeast. Even self-described ‘agricultural households’ only received between 26 and 35% of their income from agriculture, compared with 65% from non-agricultural employment and 12% from remittances (Nipon & Urairat, 2020). When employment in urban areas declined sharply following the pandemic-related downturns in the industrial and service sectors, between 3 and 5 million workers returned ‘home’, and were left struggling to live on residual household incomes from farming. Overall, 75% of these ‘farming’ households included family members who were unemployed or had reduced working hours, with an average of 1.5 unemployed members per household.

The Covid-19 pandemic that began in 2020 had numerous parallels with the 1997 Asian financial crisis, which had seen major retrenchment in the Thai economy and huge numbers of people returning to their home villages from urban areas. But back in 1997, agricultural households did receive an average of around 50% of their income from farming: there was a much stronger agricultural base to fall back on. During the subsequent 23 years, the dependency of rural areas in the North and Northeast on remittances provided by family members working in other sectors and in urban areas increased sharply, illustrating a further hybridisation: for many of those who self-identified as farmers, farming was not even a safety net, let alone a primary source of household income.

Urbanised villagers are a problem. They distort budgets and resources, helping government agencies and politicians to underfund the areas where people actually live, and to channel pork-barrel projects to underpopulated regions. Because they don’t really belong anywhere, urbanised villagers have fickle loyalties, are swayed by short-term valence issues, and are susceptible to populist electoral promises. It might be expected that governments in Thailand, Cambodia, and elsewhere would be trying to reduce the incentives for hybridity, and encouraging people to register to vote in the places where they actually live. In practice, however, there is little evidence that this is happening.

In Thailand’s polarised political order, conservative voters are concentrated in two regions: Greater Bangkok and the Upper South. Oppositional voters aligned with parties associated with former Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra are concentrated in the North and Northeast. Huge numbers of Thaksin voters are urbanised villagers who live and work in Bangkok but officially reside in the provinces. Conservative political parties (currently including Palang Pracharat and the Democrats) have little incentive to encourage the millions of Thaksin sympathisers in the capital to register as voters there, since this would directly their own core electoral base, and might result in them losing seats in and around Bangkok. Despite overseeing the bureaucratic apparatus between 2019 and 2023, ministers from these parties did not  take any steps to regularise the voter registration system. At the same time, opposition parties hardly want to see their millions of supporters in the provinces shift their household registrations to the capital, which could ultimately lead to a major reapportionment of parliamentary seats (and indeed government budgets) away from the North and Northeast). Ironically, it is possible to argue that the de facto fabrication of population figures that conceal the rise of urbanised villagers is on balance a good thing: it underpins a redistribution of resources from Bangkok to the provinces and thereby forms part of an implicit social contract that helps reduce the capital’s identity as an overweening primate city (London, 1977).

Just as politicians have no desire to rock the boat by reassigning household registrations en masse, so factory owners in the metropolis typically do not allow their workers to use company dormitories as their legal homes, as part of a practice of contractual disempowerment and enforced precarity. The same applies to Bangok’s extensive slum districts, as well as to areas of informal housing, for example on construction sites. Finally, urbanised villagers themselves continue to prefer the ambiguity of the status quo. An informant originally from the Northeast told me that he formerly worked for the Bangkok Metropolitan Authority for 15 years, in the office responsible for household registrations—yet throughout this period, he never changed his own household registration to the capital city, because of his continuing sense of identification with his birth province.Footnote 6

The net result: everybody benefits from the existing situation, and nobody has any incentive to regularise the population’s whereabouts and reduce the hybrid voting problem. On one level, it is in Thailand’s collective interests to preserve the convenient fiction that urban areas are full of middle-class people, while rural areas are populated by poor farmers. On the other hand, internal migrants experience discrimination in the big cities, where they are often referred to in derogatory terms as a ‘prachakorn faeng’ or ‘hidden population’. This discrimination forms part of a larger sub-ethnic discrimination against minorities such as the Isan population from the Northeast, the majority of whom are of Lao descent. Many Isan people try to ‘pass’ as Thai, not using their first language in public urban settings even when they encounter other Northeasterners (McCargo & Krisadawan, 2004; Saowanee & McCargo, 2014). Although migrants from the Northeast are usually able to increase their incomes by working in Bangkok, they typically worked longer hours and lived in inferior housing (Piyawat, 2015).

An Asian Development Bank study from 2012 suggested that migrant labour in Bangkok rarely offered Northeasterners opportunities for social mobility: only 2% of those surveyed were earning more than 20 dollars a day: 70% earned less than 8 dollars a day, and 20% were earning below minimum wage (Mulubrhan & et al., 2012: 2). The resulting socio-economic grievances allowed pro-Thaksin forces to make coded appeals to localist ethnic sentiment, including the creation of a ‘redshirt village’ movement that was ultimately embraced by the majority of communities in the North and Northeast, fuelling secessionist fears among Thailand’s conservative elite, and helping create the fraught political conditions that led to the May 2014 military coup (Khajornsak, 2017).

Hybridity and socio-economic dislocation undoubtedly contribute to ongoing political polarisation and instability (McCargo, 2017). Drawing on studies of both China (Wallace, 2016) and Africa, Jeremy Wallace has argued that rapid urbanisation, especially ‘induced concentration’ around a single capital city, can pose problems for the survival of a regime: certain kinds of excessive urbanisation may result in long-term destabilisation of the political system. Large numbers of farmers moving into a primate city may ‘represent more kindling for potential urban explosions in the future’ (Wallace, 2014: 67). If Greater Bangkok contains 18 million people, that amounts to roughly a quarter of Thailand’s total 2023 population of just under 72 million: an exceptional degree of urban concentration, and one which is largely occluded in official population figures. Perhaps these numbers help explain why since the end of absolute monarchy in 1932, Thailand has experienced more military coups and passed more new constitutions than any other country in the world.

Despite these structural problems, Thailand—and indeed Cambodia—persist with a curiously liberal household registration system that allows people to get away with living away from their supposed home villages for decades. By contrast, the Chinese hukou and the Vietnamese ho khau systems (World Bank and VASS, 2010) are precisely designed to prevent rural residents from working in major cities: while neither system works perfectly, they reflect the priorities of more authoritarian regimes with a core focus on preventing political instability.

Conclusion

The ‘two countries’ thesis—in which rural people and urban dwellers inhabit different and competing realms—is well past its sell-by date in Thailand and beyond. Any close scrutiny of realities on the ground soon reveals that the discrepancy between the town and the country is honoured mainly in the breach. Southeast Asia contains millions of people who hold a hybrid identity, often legally resident in ‘home’ villages where they have not lived for years, or even decades. And just as Southeast Asia’s cities are full of people from the countryside, so provincial areas across the region have experienced rapid urban transformation, rendering them post-agricultural, peri-urban zones, rather than spaces essentially dedicated to farming. With these twin transformations have come the inexorable rise of the urbanised villager. Millions of urbanised villagers straddle the city and the country, making a nonsense of official—and social science—categories, boundaries, and borders. Wave after wave of urbanised villagers force us to rethink our most basic assumptions about how societies and politics function in Southeast Asia.

While the prevalence of large numbers of urbanised villagers in countries such as Thailand may bring certain benefits—opening up social and political space for entrepreneurial and creative individuals, and bringing much-needed remittance income to the provinces, for example—the structural problems created by this long-term hybridity contribute to political polarisation and instability, inhibiting the emergence of secure, settled and sustainable societies in either urban or rural areas.

Urbanised villagers are both a source of energy and a source of simmering tensions and conflicts. But in order to resolve these issues, academics, policy-makers, and governments first need to name the problem for what it is: the collapse of the distinction between urban and rural, a category error of enormous magnitude.