Part 1

• Migrant Organizing and Institutional Belonging Beyond Legality in Malaysia Andika Ab. Wahab National University of Malaysia (UKM)

  Malaysian policy governing between three and five million migrant workers is weak, vague and chaotic often resulting in policy inconsistency but is also heavily influenced by rigid and highly bureaucratic security measures to curb the growing number of irregular employment and the perceived security threats. This eventually creates different classes of migrants who are more vulnerable than others, including being excluded from the formal institutional protection and justice system. The past few years saw a growing number of migrant communities established outside of the legal framework. While they are founded on various grounds such as migrants’ nationalities and ethnic groups, as well as faith- and ideology-based communities, they organize and mobilize to connect workers to the formal justice system and remedy. By focusing on several Indonesian and Nepali community organizing groups, this article attempts to further elucidate why they do what they do (i.e., motivations and interests), how community organizing can pave the way for workers’ access to formal justice system and remedy (i.e., functional capabilities and strategies), and what barriers exist. Generally, positive discourse on migrants’ belonging is often associated with particular social groups, collectivities and solidarities (e.g., creating a commonplace), but very little is known about their belonging to formal institutions. This article concerns migrants belonging to formal institutional protection and justice system, and this is made possible through migrant organizing beyond legality.

• Borderlands Citizenship: Displaceability and Recognition at the Thai-Myanmar Border Aung Ko Ko Elizabeth Rhoads Lund University

  Research on borderlands displacement in the Thai-Myanmar border has focused on populations from Karen, Karenni, and Shan States, with little disaggregation of religious diversity or discussion of displacement events outside of armed conflict, positioning the history of borderlands displacement often outside of wider movements of people in and from other parts of the country. Lack of disaggregation of ‘Myanmar migrants’ or ‘Myanmar refugees’ obfuscates the differentiated impacts of migration amongst Myanmar communities in Thailand and returnees at home. Drawing on collaborative fieldwork on the Thai-Myanmar border, archival research, and life story interviews, we explore the inter-generational experiences of Myanmar’s religious minority borderland communities. Through documenting cross-border histories of citizenship and displacement, we ask how the intergenerational production, trajectories, and experiences of statelessness and citizenship regimes impact everyday life in Myanmar’s borderlands? Viewed from the borderlands, ‘displaceability’ can be understood as inherited and layered with other processes of displacement and dispossession. Inherited displaceability signals that minorities experiencing limited physical and social mobility in Myanmar due to lack of citizenship documents may find increased recognition and social belonging in the multiple-status regime of borderlands citizenship.

• 1.5 Generation Migrants from Myanmar and their Belonging in Thailand: The Role of Education Thithimadee Arphattananon Mahidol University

  In the past three decades, Thailand has transitioned from a sending country to being among the top receiving countries of labor migrants in Southeast Asia. Currently, the estimated number of migrant workers—both registered and unregistered—in Thailand is around 4-5 million. Among these, Myanmar contributed the greatest number of migrant workers. As Thailand does not restrict the right to family reunion, many migrant workers brought their children with them. The influx of migrant children from Myanmar has consistently risen, especially since Myanmar’s coup in 2021, as numerous migrant families have relocated their children to Thailand to escape the political turmoil and repressive government. Migrant scholars refer to migrant children aged six to twelve who were born in their native countries and immigrated with their parents as the “1.5 generation”. After arriving in Thailand, 1.5 generation migrants followed several educational paths: some went to government schools, others attended migrant learning centers run by non-governmental organizations that use Myanmar’s curriculum and teaching materials, and some did not attend any schools at all. The 1.5 generation of migrants face numerous obstacles, such as discrimination, limited access to educational opportunities, and poor education that does not correspond with their cultural backgrounds, developmental phases, and needs. Using segmented assimilation as a lens, the research investigates the role of schooling in promoting a sense of belonging among Myanmar’s generation 1.5 migrant youth—how they negotiate cultural identity and discover their positions in Thai society via school experiences.

• Airport Dwelling: Filipino Migrant Workers and the Reclamation of Airport Spaces as Infrastructures of Belonging Juan Miguel Leandro Lim Quizon The Chinese University of Hong Kong

  Airports have always been spaces of anxiety, anticipation, and anonymity. For decades, millions of overseas Filipino workers (OFWs) have disembarked from planes and embarked on their journeys as migrant workers, playing a crucial role in the financial security not only of their individual households, but the nation’s economic stability as well. This accumulation of arrivals and departures from airports produced incalculable experiences inside these infrastructures of authority and surveillance. Even though majority of these narratives include harassment, exploitation, and vulnerability, I highlight how OFWs circumvent the inherent spatial cultures of airports and recover these locations as sites of solidarity, belonging, and community. In this paper, I explore the lived experiences of OFWs inside airports and how they reconfigure circumstances of marginalization into creating a culture of belonging within such contested sites. Through observation, informal interviews, and engagements with OFWs based in Hong Kong, paired with the analysis of airport spaces in Metro Manila, I trace the intricacies and complexities of their precarious aeromobility and how they appropriate these categories of ‘invisibility’ to ‘in visibility’. While their liminal and commodified economic bodies have endured suffering within the confines of airports and what these spaces represent, I argue that OFWs reclaim airport spaces through the concepts of bayan, bayani, and bayanihan (nation, heroism, and spirit of community), thus producing sites of solidarity that makes their survival possible. Ultimately, these collected and collective experiences reify airport spaces into locations that service and respect the role of migrant workers within the national consciousness.

Part 2

• Contextualising the Manhaj: New Approaches to Islamic Jurisprudence within Indonesian Salafism Chris Chaplin London School of Economics

  Few Islamic movements have arguably received as much academic and media attention as contemporary global Salafism (E.g., Wiktorowicz 2006, Meijer 2009). While ostensibly known for its rigid aspiration to emulate the first three generations of Muslims, recent scholasticism – often ethnographically driven – has shown the evolutionary nature of Salafism and dynamism involved within the creation of Salafi subjectivities (E.g., Inge 2016, Pall 2018, Bonnefoy 2011, Chaplin 2021). This paper builds upon this scholastic turn, exploring one specific transformation that has emerged amongst a prominent strand of Salafi scholars in Yogyakarta, Indonesia. Beginning at the end of the last decade, a new generation of young (and predominantly locally trained) intellectuals have adopted the Shafi’i madhhaab (school of Islamic jurisprudence). More akin to traditional Indonesian scholasticism than Salafism’s established ‘post-madhhab’ approach to Islam, the use of Shafi’i jurisprudence has proved relatively successful in expanding Salafi influence in the city. To explore the significance of this transformation, I take an ethnographic lens explore the local and global political pressures behind this shift, investigate the key scholars and institutions involved, and ultimately reflect on the implications Shafi’i jurisprudence has to broader appeals to Salafi cohesion and Islamic authority. As I conclude, the adoption of the Shafi’i madhaab attests to a broader intention to represent a particular local religious genealogical claim amongst young Salafis. Yet it also illuminates the articulative variation and temporal flexibility within contemporary Salafi scholasticism, and the problem of speaking about any universal religious disposition.

• People smugglers or good Samaritans (or both)? Legal dichotomies in the case of three Acehnese fishermen/lifesavers Daniel Peterson Queen Mary University of London

  On 14 June 2021, the Lhoksukon State Court sentenced three Acehnese fishermen - Faisal Afrizal, Abdul Aziz and Afrijal - to five years’ jail and fined them each IDR 500 million. Their crime? Ultimately ensuring the safe passage of 99 Rohingya boat people to Indonesian shores after their vessel sank around 105 miles off the coast of Aceh - or, as the court ruled, people smuggling. The three men, however, got off lightly. Indeed, article 120 of Indonesia’s Law No. 6 of 2011 on Immigration prescribes a minimum of five years and a maximum of 15 years’ imprisonment, as well as a fine of up to IDR 15 billion (US$960,000), for people smuggling. This presentation addresses the court’s formalist reasoning and the evolution of stricter penalties for people smuggling, both of which conspired to leave the three fishermen - all of whom are breadwinners for their young families - facing lengthy prison sentences.

• The Politics of Tom Yum Kung and the Story of Thai Diaspora Voters in Malaysia Daungyewa Utarasint New York University Abu Dhabi

  The greater majority of Thai migrant workers work in the restaurant industry. They are being
  referred as the Tom Yum Kung group. Up to date, there are roughly 200,000 Thai migrant workers in
  Malaysia Cross-border political participation affects domestic politics. There are challenges and
  ambiguities when it comes to understanding how migrant workers engage in a voting process when
  they are away from their home countries. This paper aims to understand Thai migrant workers’
  social conditions and voting rights. Comparing low-skilled migrant workers to the higher-skilled
  migrant workers, the low-skilled migrant workers not only have a poor understanding of their labor
  workers’ rights but also have less freedom and political rights when it comes to political participation
  in their home country. Using interpretivist approach, this paper seeks to examine voting patterns,
  political networking, collaboration between political parties and interest groups, and the external
  voting procedures that might vary by the constituencies these Thai migrant workers are from. I
  question how these migrant workers make their voting decision given that they are far away from all
  the election campaigning activities in their home country. In line with the research question, this
  paper will also examine what influences migrant voters to vote for which candidate. How much
  campaign information can they access? What are their voting rights? Are there any limitations or
  obstructions to their voting opportunities? Are there any conflicts among migrant workers in the
  host countries when it comes to disagreement on voting choices?

• The pursuit of belonging: heterogenous lived experiences of application for Thai citizenship among stateless people in northern Thailand Jin Hee Lim University of Oxford

  This paper examines the heterogenous lived experiences of applying for Thai citizenship amongst stateless people in northern Thailand. Thailand is home to approximately 500,000 stateless people, many of whom apply for Thai citizenship to overcome longstanding stigmatization and to access a wider set of rights. Based on ethnographic research in Chiang Mai and Chiang Rai provinces, this paper explores how experiences of citizenship application differ according to one’s additional identities that intersect with statelessness, not least because the state’s regulatory framework on citizenship application is inseparable from social-moral norms, local power relations and engagement with non-state actors. Pre-existing research has shown how factors outside the direct control of the state influence stateless people’s application for Thai citizenship. However, what remains underexplored is how such non-state factors and the state’s laws and regulations on citizenship mutually constitute one another, thereby breeding confusion and ambiguity which stateless people learn to navigate. This paper complements the pre-existing research through a twofold analysis. First, it examines the process of applying for Thai citizenship, an entanglement of state- and non-state factors, as a form of structural violence that exposes stateless people to everyday marginalization and exploitation. Second, this paper discusses how stateless people use what resources they have at hand to navigate such violence and marginalization, leading to heterogenous lived experiences of applying for Thai citizenship.

Abstract