Foreigners Everywhere, Nationals Nowhere: Exclusion, Irregularity, and Invisibility of Stateless Bajau Laut in Eastern Sabah, Malaysia

ABSTRACT

This article explores impacts of national and regional policies upon the Bajau Laut, who occupy the maritime border region shared by Malaysia, the Philippines, and Indonesia. It considers how maritime movements, ethnogenesis, visions for economic development and commercial interaction have evolved in the region. These processes, combined with contemporary nationalism, border securitization, and conservation render such populations both prominent as a target of governmental action and invisible in terms of provision of social services and implementation of conservation initiatives. These facets complicate issues of political belonging within the state of Sabah, the nation-state of Malaysia, and the wider ASEAN region.

KEYWORDS:

• Statelessness
• irregular migrants, transborder
• political belonging
• marine nomadism
• cultural citizenship
• securitization
• Bajau Laut

Funding and acknowledgments

We gratefully acknowledge funding from The University of Western Australia and the University of Queensland for support of this project. Research permission was granted by the Economic Planning Unit of Malaysia and the Sabah State Economic Planning Unit, greatly facilitated by Puan Munirah Abd Manan and Gwendolyn Vu. We owe special thanks to Sabah Parks, especially Dr. Maklarin Lakim, our local sponsor, and Elvin Michael Bavoh, our research counterpart. We would also like to express our gratitude to numerous readers of the paper for their comments assisting our revisions, especially Marie McAuliffe and Farida Fozdar, and to Akram Azimi for suggesting the applicability of paranoid nationalism to our case study.

All views expressed in this article remain those of the authors and do not in any way reflect those of the IFRC or any part of the International Red Cross Red Crescent Movement.

Notes

1. The International Organization for Migration defines an “irregular migrant” as “a person who, owing to unauthorized entry, breach of a condition of entry, or the expiry of his or her visa, lacks legal status in a transit or host country. The definition covers, inter alia, those persons who have entered a transit or host country lawfully but have stayed for a longer period than authorized or subsequently taken up unauthorized employment (also called clandestine/undocumented migrant or migrant in an irregular situation). The term “irregular” is preferable to “illegal” because the latter carries a criminal connotation and is seen as denying migrants' humanity (International Organization for Migration, n.d., https://www.iom.int/key-migration-terms).

2. A “stateless” person is generally defined as “a person not considered as a national by any state under the operation of its law,” according to Article 1(1) of the 1954 UN Convention Relating to the Status of Stateless Persons.

3. Among ASEAN member states, only the Philippines is a state party to the 1954 UN Convention Relating to the Status of Stateless Persons, and there are no state parties to the 1961 UN Convention Relating to the Reduction of Statelessness within the Southeast Asian region.