Precarious Inclusion and the Machinery of Exhaustion; The Biopolitics of Legal Liminality in the Post 2021 Myanmar Thailand Corridor

The 2024 Military Service Law in Myanmar has effectively weaponized the fallout of the 2021 coup, slamming shut the remaining exits for a youth displaced class now caught in a terminal Resource Loss Spiral. I interrogate this cataclysmic collapse of ontological security through the lived disclosures of twenty participants navigating the Bangkok, Chiang Mai, and Pai corridor; this inquiry utilizes Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA) to unpack a violent cycle of transboundary harm. By synthesizing Conservation of Resources (COR) theory and the Allostatic Load framework, the study evaluates how legal liminality is strategically converted into a machinery of exhaustion. My findings unearth a predatory labor legality nexus where host country structural violence turns precarious inclusion into a fuel for predatory efficiency. This generates a cruel Invisibility Paradox; to avoid deportation, the migrant must systematically vanish from the social sphere, a tactical occlusion that simultaneously severs access to life saving healthcare and somatic support. While participants reclaim Internal Sovereignty through Somatic Agency, these internal governance structures are failing under the weight of managed insecurity. Ultimately, this study contends that migrant mental health is a structural byproduct of regional political architecture; it argues that we must move beyond clinical tropes to recognize that, in this crisis, the policy is the primary prescription.

2021 Myanmar Coup; Allostatic Load; Invisibility Paradox; Machinery of Exhaustion; Precarious Inclusion; Somatic Agency; Transboundary Trap.

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