Border humanitarians: gendered order and insecurity on the Thai-Burmese frontier: by Adam P. Saltsman, Syracuse, USA, Syracuse University Press, Syracuse Studies in Geography series, 2022, 266 pp. $80.00 (hardcover), ISBN: 9780815637684; $34.95 (paperback), ISBN: 9780815637639; $34.95 (eBook), eISBN: 9780815655602

Adam P. Saltsman’s book Border Humanitarians: Gendered Order and Insecurity on the Thai-Burmese Frontier is an ethnographic study of the hundreds of thousands of migrants struggling for economic survival, human dignity, and personal/communitarian cultural self-determination on the Thai border with Myanmar. It is divided into seven chapters. This research investigates the mechanisms of international and local aid agencies toward the problem space of Mae Sot town’s urban-rural peripheries near the Burmese border, where communities of migrants belonging to diverse ethnic minorities are settled, creating (in)formal constellations. Order, violence, solidarity, politicization of spaces, and (lack of) mobility are the topics investigated by Saltsman through what he defines as collaborative, performative, and intersectional research. The writing aims to coordi- nate and balance plural positionalities, starting from his positionality as an NGO observer and researcher from the Global North. More than informants, the voices of Saltsman’s collaborators arise from the narrative, mutually constructing and informing the different spatial and social perspectives of public and private violence. Their experiences as migrants and survivors of violence are intertwined with the economic and power structures linked to the new roles they play in their community as NGO representatives, social workers, activists, and volunteers who face the everyday possibilities of injustice.