Transnational Flows and Permissive Polities Transnational Flows and Permissive Polities Ethnographies of Human Mobilities in Asia Edited by Barak Kalir and Malini Sur › Barak Kalir Malini and (eds.) Sur amsterdam university press Transnational Flows and Permissive Polities Publications Series General Editor Paul van der Velde Publications Officer Martina van den Haak Editorial Board Prasenjit Duara (Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore) / Carol Gluck (Columbia University) / Christophe Jaffrelot (Centre d’Études et de Recherches Internationales-Sciences-po) / Victor T. King (University of Leeds) / Yuri Sadoi (Meijo University) / A.B. Shamsul (Institute of Occidental Studies / Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia) / Henk Schulte Nordholt (Royal Netherlands Institute of Southeast Asian and Caribbean Studies) / Wim Boot (Leiden University) The IIAS Publications Series consists of Monographs and Edited Volumes. The Series publishes results of research projects conducted at the International Institute for Asian Studies. Furthermore, the aim of the Series is to promote interdisciplinary studies on Asia and comparative research on Asia and Europe. The International Institute for Asian Studies (IIAS) is a postdoctoral research centre based in Leiden and Amsterdam, the Netherlands. Its objective is to encourage the interdisciplinary and comparative study of Asia and to promote national and international cooperation. The institute focuses on the humanities and social sciences and, where relevant, on their interaction with other sciences. It stimulates scholarship on Asia and is instrumental in forging research networks among Asia scholars worldwide. IIAS acts as an international mediator, bringing various parties together, working as a clearinghouse of knowledge and information. This entails activities such as providing information services, hosting academic organisations dealing with Asia, constructing international networks, and setting up international cooperative projects and research programmes. In this way, IIAS functions as a window on Europe for non-European scholars and contributes to the cultural rapprochement between Asia and Europe. For further information, please visit www.iias.nl. Transnational Flows and Permissive Polities Ethnographies of Human Mobilities in Asia Edited by Barak Kalir and Malini Sur Publications Series Edited Volumes 7 Cover illustration: Traffic passing a movable border checkpost at the Thailand-Malaysia border, 2007. Photographer: Willem van Schendel Cover design: Maedium, Utrecht Layout: The DocWorkers, Almere ISBN 978 90 8964 408 4 e-ISBN 978 90 4851 587 5 (pdf) e-ISBN 978 90 4851 588 2 (ePub) NUR 761 / 906 © IIAS / Amsterdam University Press, Amsterdam 2012 All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright re- served above, no part of this book may be reproduced, stored in or in- troduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the written permission of both the copyright owners and the author of the book. Table of Contents List of Tables, Maps, Figures and Photographs 7 Acknowledgements 9 Introduction 11 Mobile Practices and Regimes of Permissiveness Barak Kalir, Malini Sur and Willem van Schendel 1 Illegality Rules 27 Chinese Migrant Workers Caught Up in the Illegal but Licit Operations of Labour Migration Regimes Barak Kalir 2 Contesting the State of Exception in the Afghan-Pakistani Marchlands 55 Oskar Verkaaik, Sarfraz Khan and Samina Rehman 3 ‘Looking for a Life’ 75 Rohingya Refugee Migration in the Post-Imperial Age Diana Wong and Tan Pok Suan 4 Smuggling Cultures in the Indonesia-Singapore Borderlands 91 Michele Ford and Lenore Lyons 5 Trade, Transnationalism and Ethnic Infighting 109 Borders of Authority in Northeast Borneo Laurens Bakker and Jay Crain 6 Bamboo Baskets and Barricades 127 Gendered Landscapes at the India-Bangladesh border Malini Sur 6 TRANSNATIONAL FLOWS AND PERMISSIVE POLITIES 7 Moving between Kerala and Dubai 151 Women Domestic Workers, State Actors and the Misrecognition of Problems Bindhulakshmi Pattadath and Annelies Moors 8 Emigration of Female Domestic Workers from Kerala 169 Gender, State Policy and the Politics of Movement Praveena Kodoth and V.J. Varghese 9 Mainland Chinese Migrants in Taiwan, 1895-1945 189 The Drawbacks of Being Legal Leo Douw 10 ‘Playing Edge Ball’ 207 Transnational Migration Brokerage in China Li Minghuan Epilogue 229 Irregular Mobilities and Disjunctive Moralities Hastings Donnan About the Editors and Contributors 241 Bibliography 247 Index 261 List of Tables, Maps, Figures and Photographs Tables Table 1.1 Table of spaces of competing authorities 47 Table 1.2 Table of legitimacy of state executive power 48 Table 10.1 Table of self-given reasons of becoming indentured workers abroad 226 Maps Map 4.1 Map of Riau Islands 93 Map 6.1 Map of Northeast India and Bangladesh 130 Map 6.2 Map of India and Pakistan 1947 135 Map 6.3 Map of India and Bangladesh 1971 135 Map 6.4 Map of Northeast India 136 Figures Figure 1.1 Number of Chinese migrant workers reaching Israel (in thousands) 29 Figure 1.2 Deported undocumented migrants, 1995-2001 41 Photographs Photo 6.1 The India-Bangladesh border: A Garo trader crossing the river boundary 139 Photo 6.2 Garo traders at a border market 139 Photo 6.3 Products displayed at a border market 140 Photo 6.4 The border market: Domachi 140 Acknowledgements This volume is one of the outcomes of a research programme entitled ‘Illegal But Licit: Transnational Flows and Permissive Polities in Asia’. We gratefully acknowledge that the programme – initiated by the University of Xiamen (China) and the University of Amsterdam (the Netherlands) – was financed by the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO). Many other institutions facilitated the pro- gramme, including the Amsterdam Institute for Social Science Research; the Centre for Development Studies in Thiruvananthapuram, India; the Institute for Social and Environmental Transition in Kathmandu, Nepal; and the University of Peshawar in Pakistan. In addition to the contributors to this volume, we would also like to take this opportunity to thank our many colleagues in China, Bangladesh, India, Pakistan, Nepal, United Arab Emirates, Israel, Australia, the United States and the Netherlands for their stimulating involvement at various stages and in various events of the ‘Illegal But Licit’ programme. We acknowledge the International Institute for Asian Studies (IIAS) for their support, and especially thank Paul van der Velde and Martina van der Haak. Barak Kalir and Malini Sur Amsterdam, April 2012 Introduction Mobile Practices and Regimes of Permissiveness Barak Kalir, Malini Sur and Willem van Schendel This is a book about transnational mobile practices. The contributors share a common concern: to push social analysis beyond received no- tions of legality and illegality and to think outside the box of state authority versus criminal behaviour. In doing so, we join a growing group of social scientists searching for new ways to understand the rela- tionship between human behaviour and multiple authorities. For us, simple dichotomies will not do; instead, we seek a more finely grained framework of interpretion. The chapters that follow contain new ideas, based on close empirical observation in various societies across the vast continent of Asia. Thinking Mobile Two critical points of departure shape our approach. First, we consider mobility to be an integral part of social life rather than its exception (Urry 2007). Second, we acknowledge that the existence of mobile com- munities preceded the formation of states (Ludden 2003). Thus, we think of the state as a political organisation keen to regulate existing or emergent patterns of mobility. States are of interest to us because they exert themselves in controlling and moulding mobilities within and across their national borders. Our contributions empirically explore the effects of such exertions. How do they affect, contain, increase, deflect or bypass mobile practices? From this perspective, the state often appears as reactive rather than proactive: it has to run after the facts. In doing so, it is never a neatly coordinated machine with all its agents acting in unison. The real-life states that we have studied bear little resemblance to the ‘model state’ used in much social theory. Looked at from the vantage point of people participating in (illegal) transnational flows, these states turn out to be far less tightly structured and much less governed by uniform, imperso- nal rules. Our studies demonstrate that these states suffer from a 12 BARAK KALIR, MALINI SUR AND WILLEM VAN SCHENDEL persistent ‘implementation deficiency’–an inability to put their policies into practice. There are two dimensions to this. On the one hand, poli- cies are often overambitious and the state lacks the manpower and legitimacy to push them through. On the other hand, officials may ac- tively obstruct policies handed down from higher levels within the state. There are many reasons why they may do so: they may disagree with the policies (a lack of ‘political will’ within the state), they may feel the policies run counter to their personal interests or career prospects, or they may be out to divert state resources to their own coffers. Our stu- dies show that despite elaborate performances of sovereignty, states are not able to imprint a unified normative project onto every subject, in- cluding those manning