Graves beyond the waves: enforced strandedness and the impossibility of place-making in the Andaman Sea

ABSTRACT

Since 2017, more than one million Rohingya have been forcibly displaced from their country of birth, Myanmar. While most of the displaced Rohingya are currently living in refugee camps along the Myanmar–Bangladesh border, thousands have continued their journeys in search of safety across the Andaman Sea, especially to Malaysia, but also Thailand and Indonesia. During these journeys, many endured prolonged stays at sea. Smugglers who organised these passages tried to extort higher payments from their clients’ families before proceeding with the passage. More importantly, governments of potential destination countries prevented the boats from disembarking leading to prolonged periods of strandedness at sea. While land transit situations have received substantial academic attention, interest in maritime transit settings has lagged behind. This article relates progressive ideas of place-making found in the refugees studies literature to scenarios of prolonged and forced stuckedness at sea and puts forward the argument that those Rohingya kept on boats inhabit a ‘non-place’, a space that denies them the opportunity to live in and maintain any sort of organic community. This article shows how Southeast Asian transit and destination countries have exploited the sea for its anti-place-making potential for maritime refugees such as the Rohingya and created carceral seascapes for the boats they travel on. This recent development entails dangerous precedents that can be exploited in exercising (extra-territorial) exclusions.

KEYWORDS:

• Rohingya
• maritime movements
• non-place
• policies of non-assistance
• necropolitics

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 To protect their identities, the names of all our refugee interlocutors have been changed.

2 Hage's empirical sample were largely white lower- and middle-class Australians feeling stuck in their everyday lives and larger imaginary of a national community in Australia. He proposed the term ‘stuckedness’ to capture ‘the sentiment and the state of being of experiencing oneself as existentially ‘stuck’’ (Hage 2015, 36).

3 At least 1800 Rohingya are believed to have died from abuse and deprivation during the maritime journeys between 2012 and 2015, and another 200 in 2020 (UNHCR 2017; UNHCR 2021).

4 The notion of the sea as site for strandedness may also be transferrable to desert environments, such as the desert environment along the US–Mexico border.

5 Augé (1995, 77–78) views a non-place as ‘a space which cannot be defined as relational, or historical, or concerned with identity’. He further clarifies the distinction: ‘clearly the word ‘non-place’ designates two complementary but distinct realities: spaces formed in relation to certain ends (transport, transit, commerce, leisure), and the relations that individuals have with these spaces. Although the two sets of relations overlap to a large extent, and in any case officially (individuals travel, make purchases, relax), they are still not confused with one another; for non-places mediate a whole mass of relations, with the self and with others, which are only indirectly connected with their purposes. As anthropological places create the organically social, so non-places create solitary contractuality’ (Augé 1995, 94).

6 Unlike for landlocked people, who rarely interact with the sea and therefore perceive it as a hostile place preferably to be avoided altogether, for some people in Southeast Asia the sea is life. It is their natural habitat to which some have become perfectly adjusted to, such as the Bajau Laut – seafaring nomads roaming the sea between the Riau and the Sulu archipelago (Stacey and Allison 2019). Although maritime Southeast Asians might also capsize, drown and lose their lives at sea, they tend to perceive the sea as lifeline and means of communication and exchange rather than as an impenetrable boundary or a dangerous border zone.

7 Hugo Grotius formulated the principle of Mare Liberum (Freedom of the Seas) at the beginning of the 17th century and argued that the sea was international territory which all nations were free to use for seafaring and trade. His ideas did not go unchallenged; Serafim de Freitas soon published an argument for Mare Clausum (Closed Sea), proposing that the sea should be under the jurisdiction of a state or inaccessible to other states.

8 We focus directly on the role of the littoral states and how enforcement of their policies creates the structural basis for deaths and hardship at sea, as in the Arizona desert where ‘The [US] federal government has knowingly created a border security infrastructure that puts people in harm's way’ (De Leon and Wells 2015, 84).

9 To understand the duties of states concerning the rescue of passengers at distress at sea, their disembarkation, and the rights of refugees stranded at sea in particular, it is necessary to consider the interplay between international maritime law, human rights law and refugee law, which together form a rather patchy framework. The code of conduct for rescue operations is enshrined in several international conventions, for example, 1974 Safety of Life At Sea Convention (SOLAS), the 1979 International Maritime Search and Rescue Convention (IMSAR) and the 1982 United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS). According to the SOLAS Convention, ships’ captains should provide swift aid to a vessel in distress and, if they fail to do so, they should record the reasons for not doing so. The IMSAR Convention makes it obligatory for coastal states to coordinate rescue operations. The UNCLOS Convention stipulates that help must be given to those in distress (Chatterjee 2016). For this purpose, search and rescue (SAR) zones have been established across the high seas, delimiting the geographic areas within which particular states have a legal responsibility to coordinate SAR operations. Because of multiple state and non-state actors responsible for rescues, as well as the overlapping juridical responsibilities for SAR zones, questions often arise about who should be held responsible for the failure to rescue people at risk at sea. Finally, the UNHCR has adopted several regulations that reiterate these conventions, warning states about resorting to refoulement (returning refugees to places where they face death, torture or persecution), which is prohibited under international customary law, even for those states who have not ratified the 1951 Refugee Convention.