Contested worldmaking from ‘above’ and ‘below’: Bordered spaces and bordered subjects in search of asylum

Abstract

Based on extensive field research with forced migrants who are living precarious lives in Indonesia while their refugee claims are assessed by UNHCR, the following article considers both the political construction and maintenance of so-called asylum-seeker ‘transit’ countries and the everyday experiences of forced migrants immobilised within them. In doing so, the article draws attention to the worldmaking power of borders and bordering practices that operate from both above, within, and below the state, sustaining transit migration as a global phenomenon. It is argued that transit states like Indonesia are co-constituted through both domestic bordering arrangements and the exclusionary migration agenda pursued by the Global North, focused on the diversion of potential asylum-seekers before they reach the sovereign border. The lack of formal reception policies, societal protections, and durable solutions in these transit spaces to which they are diverted further marginalises already vulnerable populations creating worlds defined by differentiated subjectivities and neglect. Yet worldmaking is not solely conceptualized as a tool wielded by powerful actors implemented from the top-down, rather it is understood as a multidirectional process. Drawing on Troeung's concept of refugee worldmaking, which she defines as ‘the reparative acts of creativity that refugees deploy to remake themselves and their worlds’ (2021:53), the article also considers some of the ways forced migrants contest their exclusion in Indonesia, developing emancipatory strategies capable of reshaping the everyday experiences of displacement and thus calling attention to the contested nature of these spaces.