Wednesday, March 31st, 2010 Betwixt and Between International Humanitarian Spirit and National Body Politic: Irregular Migrants and Other ‘Others’ in Malaysia’s Plural Civil Society

Description

Malaysia presents a notably curious mixture of celebratory and censorious preoccupations with its refugees, or ‘illegal migrants’, as they are termed under the country’s Immigration Act. On the one hand, UNHCR and its local partners in Malaysia have celebrated World Refugee Day with a number of ‘awareness-raising’ activities and festive events each year, starting in 2005 (Hedman 2009). On the other hand, the Malaysian authorities have pursued a range of increasingly punitive measures targeting ‘illegal migrants’ during this period, including the frequent deployment of the Immigration Department’s notorious auxiliary enforcement unit, Rela (Ikatan Relawan Rakyat, or People’s Volunteer Corps) whose powers were considerably expanded by government decree in 2005 (Hedman 2008).

Somewhere betwixt and between this strange brew of international humanitarian and national government campaigns, a motley crew of local non-governmental organisations have come to focus their comparatively low profile and low budget efforts on refugees and other (illegal) migrants in Malaysia. By contrast with the marked emphasis upon the celebratory and the censorious, respectively, in the high-profile campaigns surrounding the figure of the refugee in Malaysia, the activities of these NGOs have remained primarily concerned with practical interventions in the day-to-day lives of refugees and other non-citizens. While such activities span a wide spectrum – health and livelihood, children and education, human rights and due process – they reflect a deeper underlying concern with improving the lives of refugees and other (illegal) migrants in Malaysia.

This paper explores the social space and political dynamics that shape this third kind of intervention in the lives of refugees and other Others in contemporary Malaysia. To that end, the paper also reflects upon the nature and direction of (some of) the NGOs involved, and the significance of their own ‘Otherness’ in contemporary Malaysian politics and society, a phenomenon also noted elsewhere. Finally, the paper points to the emergence with the figure of the refugee a humanitarian space of sorts for certain NGOs to occupy on the otherwise largely inhospitable terrain of civil society in Malaysia.

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Dr Eva-Lotta E. Hedman (Ph.D. Cornell University) is Research Fellow in the Southeast Asia International Affairs Programme at LSE IDEAS, and Research Associate at the Refugee Studies Centre at the University of Oxford. She has previously held appointments at the University of Oxford, and the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. Dr Hedman has also been a visiting scholar at Cornell University’s Southeast Asia Program, U.C.L.A.’s Center for Southeast Asia Studies, and the Centre for International Studies at Universiti Sains Malaysia (USM). Her recent scholarly publications include In the Name of Civil Society: From Free Election Movements to People Power in the Philippines (University of Hawai’i Press, 2006); Conflict, Violence and Displacement in Indonesia (editor) (Cornell University Southeast Asia Publications, 2008); and Tsunami in a Time of War: Aid, Activism & Reconstruction in Sri Lanka and Aceh (editor, with M de Alwis) (ICES, 2009).