From Rights to Capabilities

Education for Forcibly Displaced Learners amid Thailand’s Right-to-Work Transition

Subin Sarah Yeo, Assistant Professor, Linton Global School, Hannam University, South Korea

For over four decades, refugee camps along the Thai-Myanmar border have been designated by the Thai government as temporary shelters. While they remain temporary in legal and administrative language, they have become enduring spaces of protracted displacement. According to The Border Consortium’s December 2025 figures, the nine shelters along the border currently host approximately 98,895 refugees. These institutions of prolonged uncertainty sit in temporal and spatial liminality, increasingly shaped by global refugee-governance discourses of self-reliance (Omata, 2023; Yeo, 2025). In these spaces, futures commonly framed as durable solutions, return, resettlement, and local integration, remain unresolved, while waiting, or immobility rather than mobility, has become a defining condition of everyday life.

In this context, Thailand’s recent right-to-work labor scheme for refugees granted in August 2025 and implemented in October 2025 represents a significant policy opening. The possibility of legal work is not merely an administrative adjustment; it signals a shift in how refugees are imagined: not only as recipients of assistance within a humanitarian apparatus, but also as social actors capable of contributing to the society around them. This shift matters especially now, when humanitarian aid, including food and health assistance, has been sharply reduced and camp-based livelihoods have long been constrained by the logic of temporality. Yet the policy’s significance lies not only in whether refugees are formally allowed to work. It lies in whether this right translates into meaningful opportunities in everyday life. The more fundamental question, therefore, is under what conditions the right to work becomes a substantive opportunity rather than a formal entitlement.

Amartya Sen’s Development as Freedom (1999) offers a useful conceptual framework for this question. Sen’s capability approach reminds us that development cannot be measured merely by employment or formal entitlements. Instead, it must be assessed through substantive capabilities, or what people are actually able to be and do in pursuit of lives they have reason to value. From this perspective, legal permission to work may open a door, but whether people can walk through it depends on the enabling conditions surrounding them. This distinction is crucial in protracted refugee situations, including in Thailand. A refugee may be legally permitted to work but still lack state-recognized credentials. A refugee youth may have completed years of camp-based schooling, yet find that their certificates do not travel beyond the camp. A teacher may have extensive classroom experience and community leadership, yet the formal labor market reads them only as an unskilled worker. In such situations, refugees may become legally employable while remaining socially and institutionally unrecognized. Labor rights without valid recognition can therefore produce a constrained form of inclusion: economically active yet institutionally invisible; formally included yet substantively limited.

Education in protracted refugee contexts must therefore be central to the discussion of the right-to-work transition. It is often presented as a natural bridge between displacement and self-reliance: a way to prepare forcibly displaced learners for future employment, support their integration into host societies, and strengthen their resilience. Yet the repeated framing of education as a remedy for displacement can obscure more fundamental questions. What kind of education is being assumed? What forms of recognition, resourcing, and institutional support does such education require? If education is expected to translate labor rights into meaningful opportunities and capabilities, can it fulfill this role while remaining community-led yet weakly recognized by national systems, and fragmented into short-term, project-based forms of assistance?

Education in conflict-affected and protracted refugee contexts is often treated as a collection of useful interventions: training, language classes, psychosocial support, livelihood preparation, or short-term skills development. These interventions may all be valuable. Yet they also risk narrowing education to adaptation, preparing learners to fit into whatever limited opportunities are made available to them. Paulo Freire’s critique of ‘banking education’ also remains useful, not because refugee education should be romanticized as liberation in itself, but because it reminds us that education is never simply the neutral transfer of skills or information. It is also a process through which learners interpret their conditions, develop critical consciousness, and participate in shaping their social futures (Freire, 1970). If education is to help translate the right to work into meaningful opportunities, it must be understood not merely as service delivery, but as a sustained pedagogical and institutional process through which learners build knowledge, gain recognition, and carry their learning into uncertain futures. This is not an argument against the support provided by NGOs, international agencies, faith-based organizations, or humanitarian actors. Together with refugee communities, these actors have often kept education alive where formal systems have been absent, limited, or politically constrained. Along the Thai-Myanmar border, education has long depended on these layered forms of support. To move beyond a ‘for them’ paradigm that understands education primarily as assistance delivered (Yeo, 2022), we should ask: what kinds of educational pathways become possible under existing arrangements?

This question becomes pressing when education is sustained mainly through short project cycles, changing donor priorities, and fragmented forms of assistance. A skills training course designed to support labor market entry may be useful. A Thai-language program may address immediate needs related to job-seeking and social participation. A livelihood project may help some young people access legal income-generating opportunities. Yet these activities, however valuable, do not in themselves constitute an educational pathway. They may be responsive but temporary, visible in donor reports but fragile in learners’ lives. The question, then, is not whether projects are useful. The question is whether project-based assistance can substitute for public and collective educational responsibility. If labor rights are to become capabilities, education must not remain a patchwork of externally funded activities. It must become an institutional pathway for accumulating, recognizing, transferring, and connecting learning to future possibilities.

The global discourse of refugee self-reliance makes this question more urgent. Across the international refugee regime, self-reliance, resilience, and economic inclusion have become dominant policy vocabularies. These terms appear to affirm refugee agency and move beyond the older image of refugees as passive recipients of aid. Yet, as Omata (2023) argues, developmental ‘buzzwords’ can also reorganize responsibility by shifting burdens from international systems onto refugees and host communities themselves. Easton-Calabria and Omata (2018) similarly caution that self-reliance can become a ‘panacea’ discourse when promoted without the structural conditions required for meaningful livelihood. The concern, then, is not self-reliance itself. Nor is it the aspiration that refugees should be able to work, contribute, and participate more fully in the societies around them. The concern is self-reliance without recognition, livelihood without protection, and education without institutional pathways. Thailand’s right-to-work scheme should be read through the lens of this broader dilemma. On one level, the policy opens an important legal and economic possibility. On another level, it highlights the institutional conditions that must surround such a policy for it to become meaningful in everyday life.

For forcibly displaced learners, work is not only a labor-market issue. It depends on whether their prior learning is recognized and whether education leads to dignified work rather than precarious survival. These are not secondary educational concerns, but they are central to whether a formal right can become a substantive capability. For this reason, education for forcibly displaced learners must be supported as a public, collective institution rather than as a series of fragmented interventions. It means that education should be planned, recognized, and sustained through coordinated responsibility among refugee communities, host-state institutions, international organizations, civil society actors, and educational authorities. Camp-based learning needs recognition so that learners’ educational histories do not remain invisible. Accreditation pathways are needed so that learning can travel beyond the immediate site of displacement. Education must connect to dignified labor pathways so work does not become another form of precarious survival.

The right-to-work labor scheme opens an important horizon, but a horizon alone does not guarantee a pathway toward it. Its significance lies not only in whether refugees are formally granted access to work, but in whether this formal right can be converted into substantive opportunities and capabilities. In this sense, the policy functions as a litmus test for the institutional foundations of refugee inclusion. If education is expected to transform labor rights into meaningful futures, then education itself must be recognized, resourced, and connected to pathways that let learning, credentials, and experience travel beyond the camp. The current moment should therefore not be reduced to a question of whether Thailand’s policy succeeds or fails. Read it instead as an opening to reconceptualize refugee education within the broader global turn toward economic inclusion and self-reliance: not as residual assistance, but as a central condition for making rights meaningful.

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