Crisis and Opportunity: Women, Youth and Ethnic Minorities’ Citizenship Practices During Refugee Transit in Indonesia

Abstract

Expulsion from the state is approached as a crisis within both human rights and refugee studies, with Hannah Arendt proposing that the ‘loss of national rights was identical with the loss of human rights’ (Arendt 1976, p. 292). This analysis conceptualises the state as a protective structure and seeks to rehabilitate the refugee into the state system, whether within a reformed natal state (through return) or into a new state (through local integration or resettlement), ultimately restoring the refugee as ‘citizen’. This model is rooted in what Nira Yuval-Davis (1997, p. 119) terms ‘the “fraternal” enlightenment project’ and is both western centric and has a male, purportedly universal-imagined citizen at its heart. Postcolonial feminist scholars have articulated the many ways in which third world/non-western women’s relationships to the state are more commonly either distant or repressive. Expulsion from the state may not, for those who have held only notional or marginal citizenship, entail the ‘radical crisis’ of human rights (Agamben 1998, p. 126) that refugee studies and human rights that theories conceive. Moments of rupture and crisis that disrupt powerful sociocultural norms and break the alliance between constraining state and civil society structures (patriarchal ethnic and religious institutions) can also be moments of social transformation and opportunity. This paper explores the social practices and testimonies of refugees in transit in Indonesia to examine the assumptions underpinning citizenship and to question whether the social good that citizenship aims to deliver needs to be tied to the state.