Gerhard Hoffstaedter

Place-making: Chin refugees, citizenship and the state in Malaysia

Southeast Asia is a transit point as well as a point of destination for thousands of migrants and refugees. This is not new, as people movements in and through the region have a long and diverse history. However, the spaces for movement have been severely restricted by modern national borders and border protection enforcement. A significant part of the migration flows are made up of refugees. This is particularly so in Malaysia, which is currently home to approximately 200,000 refugees. The Malaysian government continues to resist outside and internal pressures to face up to and remedy the refugee crisis it increasingly finds itself in. As a result, refugees live in a liminal and extra-legal place in Malaysia, which makes any real engagement with the Malaysian body politic and Malaysians problematic. This paper traces the attempts at place-making by Chin refugees in Malaysia and their attempts to evade, confront and circumvent Malaysian authorities.

Secular state, religious lives: Islam and the state in Malaysia

Debates on secularism in Malaysia often revolve around the legal, especially the constitutional, framework. To this end several NGOs organised a road show in 2006 to debate issues surrounding freedom of religion. Not only were these events mobbed by angry crowds, but also the state intervened and shut down these and future discussions on the topic of religion, deeming such debates sensitive. This article addresses the particularities of secularism in Malaysia vis-à-vis Olivier Roys thesis in ‘Secularism Confronts Islam’ that sees religious space and secular space as discernable yet not antithetical and Charles Taylors thesis in the ‘Secular Age’, where he points to a new definition of secularism as a pluralist and transcendent notion of belief. In Malaysia both variants are present, with the state playing a dangerous game situating itself between reactionary Muslim forces and a moderate majority.

Contested spaces: Globalization, the arts and the state in Malaysia

The arts community in Malaysia has been affected in many ways by the state’s desire to homogenize and essentialize ethnicity internally, whilst displaying pluralist ideals externally. There are two levels to the debate, one which is orientated towards the global, where the state employs a multicultural tourism imagery, whilst the other is a localized debate mainly informed by reactionary conservatism and state institutions. Concurrently, the arts community employs, uses and deploys global institutions and regional activism to counteract, validate or co-opt state mechanisms of control. Art forms such as mak yong have been pulled into a political tussle over ownership and power to demarcate what is or should be Islamic, Malay or Malaysian. As a result, practitioners and activists collide with the state’s apparatus and its agents.

Urban refugees: challenges in protection, services and policy

Introduction: Between a rock and a hard place: Urban refugees in a global context Gerhard Hoffstaedter 1. Demonstrable needs: Protest, politics and refugees in Cairo Nora Danielson 2. Casamance refugees in urban locations of The Gambia Gail Hopkins 3. The politics of mistrust: Congolese refugees and the institutions providing refugee protection in Kampala, Uganda Eveliina Lyytinen 4. Increasing urban refugee protection in Nairobi: Political will or additional resources? Elizabeth Campbell 5. Practices of reception and integration of urban refugees: The case of Ravenna, Italy Barbara Sorgoni 6. Surviving the city: Refugees from Burma in New Delhi Linda Bartolomei 7. Life in limbo: Unregistered urban refugees on the Thai-Burma Border Eileen Pittaway 8. Urban refugees and the UNHCR in Kuala Lumpur: Dependency, assistance and survival Gerhard Hoffstaedter 9. The Japanese pilot resettlement programme: Identifying constraints to domestic integration of refugees from Burma Saburo Takizawa10. Coping as an asylum seeker in Japan: Burmese in Shinjuku, Tokyo Koichi Koizumi 11. Postscript: Gerhard Hoffstaedter

‘All the world's a stage’: structure, agency and accountability in international aid

This paper explores recent critiques of aid and responses to them, with a particular focus on attempts to address accountability concerns. It describes, with particular reference to Africa and Melanesia, some of the assumptions that underpin these responses. Using the allegory of theatre, we suggest that much of the formal process of interaction between aid agencies and local actors can be seen as a ‘performance’, and what goes on behind the scenes is often, and sometimes deliberately, ignored. We review why this ‘theatre’ is constructed and how it is maintained, as well as why attempts to dismantle it, or at least change the way it functions, have not met with much success. As a result, we propose alternative ways of addressing issues of accountability, as it relates to International Aid and Cooperation, based on some rather different assumptions about states, civil society, citizens and change than those upon which many of the current attempts to address accountability are based.

Refugees, Islam, and the State: The Role of Religion in Providing Sanctuary in Malaysia

ABSTRACT Malaysia has a mixed track record in providing Muslims with refuge, yet it increasingly lays claim to being an Islamic country. This article charts a history of the refugee engagement Malaysia has had based mainly on a shared regional and/or shared religious affiliation (Sunni Islam). I argue that the recent Malaysian history of refugee treatment presents a case for Muslim solidarity, but one tempered by a prevalent racism in Malaysia against people from the Indian subcontinent. Nonetheless, Islam provides an alternative history for providing protection to people in need. The UNHCR has pursued this approach in Muslim majority countries that are not signatories to the refugee convention in the hope of carving out a complementary protection space based on Islamic law and practice. This article traces these attempts and situates them within the Malaysian sociopolitical terrain, drawing out the possibilities and limits to such an approach.

Student Activism in Malaysia: Crucible, Mirror, Sideshow.

into liberating or oppressive forces. But in an age in which conservative Muslims from PAS (Pan-Malaysia Islamic Party) and PKR (People’s Justice Party) are emerging as the staunchest champions of Malaysian democracy, reducing the growing socio-political profile of Islam to Malay ‘‘politicide’’ (pp. 190–223) would appear somewhat one-sided. PAS, it is well known, has long called into question the racialised assumptions of the New Economic Policy and of Malaysia’s wider political system, but that goes unmentioned as well. This is curious, given that the author deplores racial discrimination on religious grounds. While Hoffstaedter’s discussion of Malay world cosmopolitanism is theoretically well informed and a highly readable, insightful complement to the work of Joel Kahn, I would argue that Modern Muslim Identities’ emphasis on the break with the past, occurring as a result of the ‘‘freezing’’ of ethnic identities in 1957 (and, of course, the colonial encounter before that), may be somewhat overstated, as is the book’s geography of culture that divides what is considered ‘‘Malay’’ from what is ‘‘Arab’’ in the discussion of ‘‘Arabisation’’. On the whole, Hoffstaedter’s new book is a welcome contribution to Asian studies that will enable meaningful comparisons with similar patterns in other Muslimmajority settings around the world. It provides the reader with an excellent introduction to some of the many facets of Islam in contemporary Malay-Muslim society. The fact that it reflects fresh and up-to-date insights from recent periods of fieldwork makes it even more appealing to anyone interested in understanding better some of the recent, worrying developments in Malaysia.

Barak Kalir and Malini Sur (Ed), Transnational flows and permissive polities: ethnographies of human mobilities in Asia

and Unwin, 2008. Makley, Charlene. The Violence of Liberation: Gender and Tibetan Buddhist Revival in Post-Mao China. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007. Rack, Mary. Ethnic Distinctions, Local Meanings: Negotiating Cultural Identities in China. London: Pluto Press, 2005. Roche, Gerald. ‘‘Unencumbered by Abstraction or Systemization.’’ Introduction to Life and Marriage in Skya rgya a Tibetan Village, xxi–xxviii. New York: YBK, 2008.

Faisal S. Hazis, Domination and contestation: Muslim bumiputera politics in Sarawak

[ Review of ] Laura Jarnagin (ed.), The making of the Luso-Asian world : Intricacies of engagement (Portuguese and Luso-Asian legacies in Southeast Asia, 1511-2011, Volume 1)