This article examines how Thai NGOs discursively produce female migrants as “victims” and “survivors” within South–South migration governance after Thailand's 2020 pro-democracy mobilization. Drawing on postcolonial feminist critiques and a poststructural discourse-analytic approach, it analyzes twelve semi-structured Zoom interviews with seventeen NGO and civil-society practitioners. “Victim” and “survivor” are treated as floating signifiers sutured—through translation and selective articulation—to liberal nodal points such as universal human rights, women's empowerment, and appeals to “the international.” NGOs operate as complicity brokers: while forcefully condemning militarized authoritarianism, they mobilize liberal repertoires that render critique institutionally legible and fundable, yet also organize gendered and racialized temporal–spatial hierarchies within the South. In these accounts, origin states are positioned as “the past,” Thailand as “not-yet,” and “the international” as the horizon of a liberal future. This civilizational ordering enables anti-authoritarian critique while narrowing the terms of migrant politics. Migration-as-empowerment discourse amplifies interventions oriented toward protection and individualized rights-claiming, while making vocabularies of labor organizing, critiques of securitized governance, and the gendered and racialized structures of global supply chains less legible or more politically risky. Empirically, the article shows that progressive advocacy during democratization can reinscribe regional hierarchies within the South even as it seeks reform. Conceptually, it specifies mechanisms of discursive brokerage that illuminate how liberal developmentalism travels and takes authority in South–South contexts.
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