Hybrid Border Governance in Southeast Asia: Formalization, Securitization, and Everyday Governance in the West Kalimantan-Sarawak Borderland

Southeast Asia. Between frontiers: Nation and identity in a Southeast Asian borderland. By Noboru Ishikawa. Singapore: NUS Press and Copenhagen: NIAS Press, 2010. Pp. xvi, 268. Tables, Figures, Illustrations, Appendix, Bibliography, Index. - Volume 43 Issue 1

For the past two decades, China's multi‐ethnic Southeast Asian borderland has been experiencing transitions, characterised by the confluence of capital, people, items and technologies. This borderland has effectively been repositioned, with opportunities for investment and employment, regional integration and transnational linkages featuring multiple spatial interactions. Based on eight months of fieldwork in three ethnic villages in China's Southeast Asian borderland, this article examines how geo‐economic repositioning featuring multiple spatial interactions affects agrarian livelihoods. This study argues that local households have used spatial interactions in differentiated ways to transform the use of land and to improve livelihoods, while uneven development among ethnic minorities remains a concern. Land use has been changed to include the dominant commercialisation and marketisation of high‐value‐added crops. Livelihoods have been diversified, and many local villagers have become entrepreneurs, landowners and agricultural investors. Different ethnic groups have adopted different strategies in response to market‐oriented products and processes. The Han Chinese from both inside and outside the area now dominate the commercialised processes of cash crop expansion and diversification. This article contributes to the existing literature on changing agrarian livelihoods in multi‐ethnic borderlands in the context of opening‐up and economic globalisation, especially in East and Southeast Asia.

Centering the margin: agency and narrative in Southeast Asian borderlands – Edited by Alexander Horstmann & Reed L. Wadley

Book Review: Creating Laos: The Making of a Lao Space between Indochina and Siam, 1860–1945, the Revolt of Prince Nuku: Cross-Cultural Alliance-Making in Maluku, c. 1780–1810, Centering the Margin: Agency and Narrative in Southeast Asian Borderlands, Amazons of the Huk Rebellion: Gender, Sex, and Revolution in the Philippines, the Media and Political Change in Southeast Asia: Karaoke Culture and the

This study compares efforts to prevent human trafficking (TPPO) via maritime routes between Indonesia and the Philippines. TPPO is a transnational crime involving sexual exploitation, forced labor, and online fraud. This study employs a normative juridical approach, examining the implementation of the United Nations Convention against Transnational Organized Crime (UNTOC) and the ASEAN Plan of Action in both countries. This study is based on a qualitative literature study, utilizing secondary data from both primary and secondary legal sources. The findings indicate that Indonesia has implemented Law No. 21 of 2007 on the Eradication of Human Trafficking, while the Philippines uses the Anti-Trafficking in Persons Act of 2003 and Expanded Anti-Trafficking in Persons Act of 2012. Both nations have strengthened maritime patrols and inter-agency coordination, but the effectiveness of law enforcement still faces challenges, such as limited resources and insufficient training. Another issue is the need for enhanced cross-border cooperation. This study recommends strengthening regional collaboration, raising public awareness, and improving victim protection measures. These findings aim to contribute to better TPPO policies in Southeast Asia, especially in Indonesia and the Philippines.

This paper explores everyday expressions of identity by Lao villagers living in northeast Cambodia near the border with Laos, and uses this to reflect on trends in studies of identity in the remote borderlands of Southeast Asia. I argue that while ethnicity is certainly crucial, discipline-specific emphases – ethnic-based subordination or conflict for social studies and political studies, respectively – result in less attention to other important dynamics shaping identity. Furthermore, I suggest that low-profile case studies not strongly linked to ethnic-based subordination or conflict – such as the Lao in Cambodia – require study for a more comprehensive view of identity in the borderlands. The case study from northeast Cambodia identifies four key dynamics shaping identity: inter-state relations, ethno-national identities, cross-border livelihoods and social status. I show how minimal inter-state tensions and varied personal connections to Laos were important in facilitating villagers’ involvement in lucrative illegal cross-border logging in Laos, but the latter were never used to justify this practice. Instead in this everyday setting, villagers emphasised their sense of marginalisation within Cambodia and thus demonstrate their regular prioritisation of status.

Noboru Ishikawa. Between Frontiers: Nation and Identity in a Southeast Asian Borderland. Singapore: NUS Press, and Copenhagen: NIAS Press, 2010. In an age when transnationalism and globalisation ha...

Post-independence ethnic minorities inhabiting the Southeast Asian borderlands were willingly or unwillingly pulled into the macro politics of territoriality and state formation. The rugged and hilly borderlands delimiting the new nation-states became battlefronts of state-making and spaces of confrontation between divergent political ideologies. In the majority of the Southeast Asian borderlands, this implied violent disruption in the lives of local borderlanders that came to affect their relationship to their nation-state. A case in point is the ethnic Iban population living along the international border between the Indonesian province of West Kalimantan and the Malaysian state of Sarawak on the island of Borneo. Based on local narratives, the aim of this paper is to unravel the little known history of how the Iban segment of the border population in West Kalimantan became entangled in the highly militarized international disputes with neighbouring Malaysia in the early 1960s, and in subsequent military co-operative ‘anti-communist’ ‘counter-insurgency’ efforts by the two states in the late 1960–1970s. This paper brings together facets of national belonging and citizenship within a borderland context with the aim of understanding the historical incentives behind the often ambivalent, shifting and unruly relationship between marginal citizens like the Iban borderlanders and their nation-state.

Indigenous Spirits and Global Aspirations in a Southeast Asian Borderland

This research examines how the Tai Association (‘Association’) in Chiang Mai, Thailand, mediates multiple forms of citizenship for Tai migrants navigating the legal, social, and cultural complexities of the borderlands between China, Myanmar, and Thailand. Drawing on ethnographic data, it analyzes how the Association facilitates access to legal documentation, multilingual education, and social services, while further fostering ritual participation and cultural preservation. These practices enable migrants to inhabit forms of mediated citizenship that extend beyond legal recognition to include social integration and political reactivation across borders. Also, this research examines how the Association has evolved into a transnational faith-based hub, offering non-Tai participants, including Thai locals, Tibetan Buddhists, and Western spiritual seekers, a platform for mediated cultural citizenship through language learning, meditation, and ritual engagement. At the intersection of monastic networks, state regulation, and plural publics, the Association effectively reconfigures citizenship as a negotiated, embodied, and relational practice in the Southeast Asian borderlands.

This article analyzes two key frontlines during the Cold War, border areas in the provinces of Savannakhet (central Laos) and Nakhon Phanom (northeastern Thailand), adjacent to the Lao-Vietnamese and Thai-Lao borders, respectively. We investigate the distinct transformative experiences of war and revolution on members of the same ethnic minority – the Phutai – in both locations. The wartime trajectories of these populations diverged significantly, partly because their territories experienced very different pre-Cold War histories. As a consequence, Phutai in Thailand moved through homogeneous ethnic space between Thailand and Laos. In contrast, the Phutai in Laos, hemmed in by political, topographic, and ethnic boundaries, contributed to the building of a communist proto-state. The Phutai were confronted by different communist projects, which also shaped their distinct revolutionary experiences: the Communist Party of Thailand (CPT) boosted ethnic minorities’ resistance against the Thai state’s nationalist ideology, while the Lao revolutionary movement facilitated ethnic minorities’ social mobility within the Pathet Lao apparatus. Whether through confrontation in Thailand or accommodation in Laos, Phutai in both locations played active roles in the multi-layered history of the region.

Book Review: Between Frontiers: Nation and Identity in a Southeast Asian Borderland

Over the past 40 years, life in Timor-Leste has changed radically. Before 1975 most of the population lived in highland villages, spoke local languages, and rarely used money. Today many have moved to peri-urban lowland settlements, and even those whose lives remain dominated by customary ways understand that those of their children will not. For the Atoni Pah Meto of Timor-Leste’s remote Oecussi Enclave, the world was neatly divided into two distinct categories: the meto (indigenous), and the kase (foreign). Now matters are less clear; the good things of the globalised world are pursued not through rejecting the meto ways of the village, or collapsing them into the kase, but through continual crossing between them. In this way, the people of Oecussi are able to identify in the struggles of lowland life, the comforting and often decisive presence of familiar highland spirits.

Over the past 40 years, life in Timor-Leste has changed radically. Before 1975 most of the population lived in highland villages, spoke local languages, and rarely used money. Today many have moved to peri-urban lowland settlements, and even those whose lives remain dominated by customary ways understand that those of their children will not. For the Atoni Pah Meto of Timor-Leste's remote Oecussi Enclave, the world was neatly divided into two distinct categories: the meto (indigenous), and the kase (foreign). Now matters are less clear; the good things of the globalised world are pursued not through rejecting the meto ways of the village, or collapsing them into the kase, but through continual crossing between them. In this way, the people of Oecussi are able to identify in the struggles of lowland life, the comforting and often decisive presence of familiar highland spirits.

Between Frontiers: Nation and Identity in a Southeast Asian Borderland