The “Spring Revolution” beyond borders: Transnational education and political activism among CDM students in Mae Sot

Abstract

This article examines the political, educational, and everyday practices of Myanmar Civil Disobedience Movement (CDM) students who relocated to Mae Sot, Thailand, after the 2021 military coup. While existing scholarship has focused on professional CDM actors or formal organisations, this study centres on student activists whose contributions have often been marginalised. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork and interviews in Mae Sot, the article shows that students’ political engagements did not end with displacement but were reconfigured across borders. The article argues that CDM students emerge as active political actors engaged in protest participation, medical support, financial redistribution, educational labour, and bureaucratic work within exile political structures. Through cases such as Amelia, Kinlay, and Pho Cho Lay, it illustrates how students navigate overlapping roles as resistance members, educators, caregivers, workers, and aspiring international students. These practices reveal exile not as political suspension but as a site of continuous mobilisation. A central contribution lies in rethinking partial citizenship in Mae Sot. Rather than treating it as a fixed legal status defined by documents such as pink cards, the article shows how partial citizenship is actively constituted through everyday political, educational, and care-based practices. By teaching, providing medical support, redistributing resources, and participating in exile governance, CDM students transform legal precarity into a basis for transnational political practice.