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Place-making: Chin refugees,

citizenship and the state in Malaysia
a

Gerhard Hoffstaedter
a

School of Social Science, University of Queensland, Queensland,

Australia
Published online: 18 Nov 2014.

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To cite this article: Gerhard Hoffstaedter (2014) Place-making: Chin refugees, citizenship and the
state in Malaysia, Citizenship Studies, 18:8, 871-884, DOI: 10.1080/13621025.2014.964549
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Citizenship Studies, 2014

Vol. 18, No. 8, 871884, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13621025.2014.964549

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

Gerhard Hoffstaedter*

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School of Social Science, University of Queensland, Queensland, Australia

(Received 3 March 2013; final version received 27 July 2013)
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 placemaking by Chin refugees in Malaysia and their attempts to evade, confront and
circumvent Malaysian authorities.
Keywords: multiculturalism; refugees; existential security; nationalism; otherness

Refugee life
Riding the monorail high above the streets of Kuala Lumpur, Kawi,1 a Chin refugee from
Myanmar,2 looks around him and at every stop starts biting his lip. At any of these stops
the police, immigration officers or RELA (Ikatan Relawan Rakyat Malaysia a large
Malaysian volunteers corps) could pick him up and detain him. RELA has become
synonymous with danger for refugees, who fear the arbitrariness and sheer force of the
organisation.3 These organisations patrol the streets and conduct occasional raids in areas
in which they suspect irregular immigrants live and work. He said:
Sometimes they wait at the bottom of the stairs of the station. That way we cannot escape.
They ask for identification and money, sometimes the mobile phone. They just take it and
often let us go, less paper work for them.

Kawis experience is common to that of the thousands of refugees living and many
working illegally in Malaysia.4 Stories such as Kawis demonstrate how Malaysias
refugees dwell in a state of liminality.
This paper traces experiences of the everyday life of Chin asylum seekers and refugees
in Malaysia. In the absence of legal protection and broader social recognition, refugees
experience Malaysia as a site of liminality. Nevertheless, Chin refugees still attempt and
succeed in making viable lives (Jackson 2005, xxviii) for themselves in Malaysia. Chins
from Myanmar represent the largest group of United Nations High Commissioner for
Refugees (UNHCR)-registered refugees in Malaysia.5 They are a predominately Christian
minority from western Myanmar, where they largely live in Chin state, a mountainous
region with little development and heavily policed by the Myanmar army. The Chins flee

*Email: g.hoffstaedter@uq.edu.au
q 2014 Taylor & Francis

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from the human rights abuses, violence and discrimination by the Myanmar government
and army that has beset their communities since the army coup in 1962 (Human Rights
Watch and Alexander 2009). Many flee to neighbouring India and on to Malaysia in search
of protection, recognition as refugees and a livelihood.
The United Nations and the UNHCR use the definition from the 1951 Convention,
broadened by the 1967 Protocol, in which a refugee is defined as a person who,
owing to well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality,
membership of a particular social group or political opinion, is outside the country of his
nationality and is unable or, owing to such fear, is unwilling to avail himself of the protection
of that country; or who, not having a nationality and being outside the country of his former
habitual residence as a result of such events, is unable or, owing to such fear, is unwilling to
return to it. (UNHCR 2010)

Malaysia is neither a signatory to the 1951 Convention on the Status of Refugees nor the
1967 Protocol and therefore does not formally recognise refugees. As such, the Malaysian
government regards refugees like Kawi as undocumented immigrants who are neither
allowed to work nor receive any financial help from the government. Despite the absence in
Malaysia of any official recognition of the refugee problem (largely a political issue) or
indeed the legal category refugee (a matter of international law), the UNHCR maintains a
busy office in Kuala Lumpur where they process the claims of asylum seekers and decide on
their refugee status. For the UNHCR, asylum seekers are those people who have left their
homelands for a number of reasons that may not be covered by the above definition or have
not had their claims for refugee status evaluated and recognised by a relevant authority, such
as the UNHCR or a national government. Most asylum seekers in Malaysia eventually
become registered by the UNHCR as refugees, but there are often long waiting periods and
delays in the process. Refugees are reliant on the UNHCR and other local service providers
for assistance to access to services, such as health care and education. They often piece
together a living in the vast and frequently unscrupulous world of undocumented work in
restaurants and factories and on building sites. Police intimidation, immigration raids and,
in some cases, detention are common even for those under UNHCR protection.6 The
working conditions often amount to bonded labour, as many refugees do not speak Malay or
English and are dependent on their employers for food and lodging.
Many refugees become ensnared in the politics of the cheap and exploitable labour of
undocumented workers, which has helped to drive Malaysias economy. They are tolerated
when they are most needed, and expelled and mistreated when the economy slows down.
The recent global financial crisis in 2007 has exacerbated the challenges refugees face in
seeking out employment opportunities (Abella and Ducanes 2009). Unlike the many
undocumented labourers from the region, however, refugees have nowhere to return when
the economy faces such a downturn. They simply lose their job and subsequently their
housing and their ability to secure food.
Hniang, like most Chin refugees, is awaiting a UNHCR resettlement decision likely
to be to the USA or Australia. Most refugees wait for a few years before they are resettled,
depending on UNHCRs capacity for registering and receiving countries quotas to accept
refugees. Hniangs experience of this process was marred by a constant anxiety about the
process and a lack of knowledge of what was going to happen next, and when. She told me
that she always carried her mobile phone with her, waiting for the UNHCR to call with
instructions for interview dates, for example. There are plenty of stories of asylum seekers
who had lost their phones, had them stolen or simply had not been able to afford network
access, which caused them to miss a crucial phone call relating to their application. This
can result in lengthy delays.

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Unlike many other refugee groups, Chins have enjoyed relatively high resettlement
ratios and relatively low waiting periods in Malaysia.7 This has meant that they are not
amongst the many who seek to bypass the UNHCR resettlement system and venture to
Australia or elsewhere by boat as irregular migrants. Yet, many Chins have already been
boat people when they arrive in Malaysia, as many travel from Myanmar to Bangladesh
or India, and onwards by boat to Thailand, from where an overland trek takes them to
Malaysia. The journey to Malaysia demands a heavy investment from family and friends
and precludes most from moving further. This also means that the demographics of the
refugee population is made up largely of young men and women.
While friends and families may finance their initial journey, most Chin refugees find
some form of employment in Malaysia which allows them to survive, and in some cases
remit money back to Myanmar. One such person is Lian, who works at an auto mechanic
shop in suburban Shah Alam, in the Klang Valley. The Klang Valley stretches east to west
from Kuala Lumpur to the port city of Klang, and is home to the vast majority of
Malaysias refugee population. There they can cluster together and connect with migrant
and refugee networks in the anonymity of the city and find work in the informal sector.
Lian works long shifts, six days a week. He lives with his wife and child upstairs from the
shop where he works. The family shares this flat with several other workers and their
families, most of whom are refugees from Myanmar. The pay of 700 RM (approximately
225 USD) a month is enough to subsist on, but not enough to care for a child; so they
depend on occasional handouts from a local church group, which provides basic supplies
like rice and cooking oil as well as nappies and baby food. Sometimes this local church
group also helps with medical bills, a major source of anxiety for refugees who are
working, especially in high-risk jobs like construction. As they are employed illegally,
they have no insurance or legal recourse in case of injury. On a visit to a convalescence
home on the outskirts of Kuala Lumpur, the vulnerable situation of refugees employed
illegally became all too clear, as I witnessed multiple workplace injuries that have scarred
and disabled people for life. One patient had been severely burnt in a workplace accident
and was hospitalised in Malaysia, while his family was resettled to a third country.
He remains in a vegetative state, unable to eat or communicate, oblivious to the fate of his
family or himself.
What becomes clear from the stories of Kawi, Hniang and Lian is that refugees in
Malaysia face anxiety from multiple sources, sometimes waiting indefinitely for
resettlement and being painfully dependent on each other as well as on the charity and
goodwill of the NGOs and religious organisations helping them. Meanwhile, the numbers
of refugees continue to rise as more and more people flee Myanmar, as well as from other
international conflict areas.
Refugees as the other within
In Australia, a heated immigration debate focuses on the so-called boat people, i.e. those
asylum seekers who have made the perilous journey to Australia via boat from Indonesia
and Sri Lanka. Malaysia is often a first transit point for people embarking on these
journeys. The fact that people do not stay in Malaysia and prefer to move on is linked to
the conditions refugees face in Malaysia.
Refugees dwell in a multiplicity of what Khoo (in the introduction) calls ethnoscapes,
following Appadurai, who defined them as the landscape of persons who constitute the
shifting world in which we live (1996, 33). Global, regional and local flows of people in
and through the Malay archipelago have a long history. Malaysias strategic location along

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the Straits of Malacca will ensure that it continues to function as a nexus of cosmopolitan
identities and histories as well as particularistic or exclusivist movements that define
Malaysia and compete for its national narrative (Hoffstaedter 2011). For those persons
who embody the flows and movements, this requires the ability to shift registers between
and amongst ethnoscapes in short to fit in with the dominant narratives or make a place
for themselves within it. Immigration debates are at the heart of questions of national
identity and belonging, i.e. who is allowed to belong and who is not. Refugees are, at best,
seen as sojourners in Malaysia, and Malaysians are often not aware of their presence in
Malaysia and around them in their daily lives. In many interactions with my Malaysian
interlocutors they would be surprised by my work in Kuala Lumpur with refugees,
believing them to live in refugee camps or outside of the city. Others would have had short
encounters with refugees at a coffee shop or car wash, but exchanged little more than
pleasantries. It is easy to pass by and not register the invisible yet ubiquitous group of
people who work in restaurants, car washes, markets and many other places. Many
Malaysians interact with them on a daily basis, yet never really acknowledge them, apart
from when they are invoked as a frightening menace by the media and politicians and
here there is a classificatory issue. This paper deals with refugees, but in Malaysia refugees
do not receive legal or formal protection from the state and are part of the large pool
of undocumented migrant workers, other sojourners and people who have remained
undocumented for historical reasons or because of systematic marginalisation, such as
Indian plantation workers who did not have the births of their children registered and some
indigenous people in the interior of East Malaysia (Paulsen 2012; Ramalo 2011; The Star/
Asia News Network 2010).
There are around 171,500 refugees and asylum seekers in Malaysia (United States
Committee for Refugees and Immigrants 2009), with a significantly lower number
registered by the UNHCR in Kuala Lumpur (99,800 by June 2012). The largest group is
made up of ethnic minorities from Myanmar, mostly Chins (Christian and animist) and
Rohingya (Muslim), and also Arakan, Kachin, Karen, Karenni, Mon, Shan and others.
Malaysia has also hosted around 72,000 Filipino refugees since the 1970s, mostly in
Sabah, East Malaysia. These Filipino refugees had fled violence and hardship in the
southern Philippines and have been residing in Malaysia on special temporary visas that
allow many of them to work and reside legally. In early 2013, in the wake of national
elections, a debate was sparked by revelations that some of these people had allegedly
been given national identity cards. It is clear that the Malaysian state allows some chosen
groups to become part of the nation, particularly with a view to vote a certain way at
general elections. Others are stuck outside the national narrative and trapped in a limbo
where they are unable to move backwards, forwards or sideways.
Chin refugees belong to the latter as they represent an other based on a range of
differences. Chin refugees are predominantly Christian and thus represent part of an internal
other to the dominant Muslims. They reside in Malaysia as illegal immigrants, a further
other to the Malaysian citizen. Their racial profile is close to that of Indians, who again form
a racial other to the dominant Malay. Thus, Chin refugees represent a radical other within the
Malaysian body politic. These essentialised differences are based on systematic and
systemic processes of othering. All humans go through processes of othering as part of
creating a self; indeed, as Soguk shows, this othering process can also be deployed to create a
mainstream identity (1999, 75). However, as Bhabha (1994) and Said (1978), amongst
others, have shown, on a cultural and civilisational scale this process has served to normalise
the Wests dominance and devalue others, their cultures, identities and history. Although
much of the literature focuses on colonialism, especially Western colonialism, the process

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of othering through the attribution of binaries such as good and bad, legal and illegal persists
in most societies to differentiate marginalised, subalterns and others from the mainstream.
Chin refugees are marginalised and have little protection through political or social
channels. The people who speak for them are mostly found in civil society groups and are
fighting an uphill battle to have their own voices heard, let alone speak for refugees. These
religious groups, NGOs and community organisations help refugees in often desperate
situations; however, unless the government formally recognises refugees, their position
remains liminal and temporary at best. As the radical other, they stand above the daily
politicised squabbles, confrontations and sometimes battles in an increasingly ethnicised
Malaysian politics; they stand outside this discourse in a state of exception (Agamben
1998). The main political and economic competition remains ensnared in the ethnicised
national politics (see Chee, Lu and Yeoh 2014). As such, immigrants and refugees who
stand outside of this political discourse can be discriminated against without repercussions
to the wider body politic. Thus, they may function as scapegoats for society as a whole
(Girard 1986). The ruling coalition maintains that communal violence hangs over
Malaysian inter-ethnic relations like a Damocles sword, about to fall at any moment. The
government uses reference to communal violence to create fear of another 1969,
referring to the riots in 1969 following a general election in which hundreds, some claim
thousands, lost their lives in mainly Chinese Malay street fighting.
Resilience in Malaysia
Refugees embody and live in constant liminality in Malaysia, a legal non-place or liminal,
temporary and extra-legal state that makes any real engagement with the Malaysian body
politic and Malaysians at large problematic. There is no legal recognition from the state
and this
juridical gap gives room to and justifies the social production of spaces of difference and
indifference. That what is beyond the self-defined differentiating border of comfort
(difference) is socially made legitimate to be neglected (indifference). (Van Houtum and Van
Naerssen 2002, 129)

The spaces of difference refugees inhabit are often in marginal places, literally at roadsides
or out of town. Previously, many lived in makeshift jungle camps or squatter dwellings on
Kuala Lumpurs fringes. In recent years, many of the jungle and fringe camps have been
cleared by authorities and most of the refugees have moved into the anonymity of the big
cities. There they seek to disappear amongst the crowds. Indeed, to the casual visitor, a
predominantly refugee suburb in a city like Kuala Lumpur is not immediately apparent as
such. These enclaves have sprung up across town where separate ethnic refugee groups
congregate, build up community organisations and establish their own schools and health
clinics. Often apartment buildings and neighbourhoods that offer rental accommodation to
refugees, i.e. on a cash basis and without background checks, become places where refugees
congregate. For instance, in Bukit Bintang, the heart of central Kuala Lumpur, Chin
refugees occupy several buildings in a run-down part just off the tourist trail. There Chins
run a coffee shop that sells their own food, betel nut ready to chew and favourite drinks.
Refugees make these spaces for themselves, often with substantial help from sympathetic
locals and sometimes despite the rent-seeking of people interested in making money from
the plight of others (see Azis 2014; also see Nah 2010, on space and urban refugees in
Malaysia). The community resilience is variable, depending on the refugee community,
each occupying a distinct and often quite separate ethnoscape. The Chin community groups,
for instance, are very active and work closely with international and local organisations and

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law enforcement agencies to minimise incursions into their communities and to ensure a
speedy processing and resettlement programme. Chin refugees have organised themselves
into sub-ethnic and language groups, replicating the geography of their homeland, the Chin
state in Myanmar. Thus, a village and/or kin group will have their own refugee community
organisation and Christian fellowships hold services in separate community languages.
Even within the Chin refugee community (CRC), then, there is a multiplicity of spaces,
(ethno/religio)scapes and groupings that people are a part of, constituent of or subject to.
Isin notes that space is a fundamental strategic property by which groups, nations,
societies, federations, empires and kingdoms are constituted in the real world, and through
this constitution, structured as objective realities (2002, 49). However, refugee realities
in Malaysia are not permitted to be constituted through space as refugees remain in the
shadows of the city, rather than assert their presence. Thus, they seldom engage in the
dialogical encounters required to create and maintain a space of and for their own
lifeworlds that would allow them to make claims towards a stake in the Malaysian body
politic, let alone citizenship (cf. 50).
Barred from these processes, I argue, refugees occupy what Auge calls a non-place.
The non-place is the opposite of utopia or in this case what refugees seek: it exists, but it
does not contain any organic society or community (Auge 1995, 111 112).8 It is a space
we traverse but do not engage, or are able to be in dialogical engagement with (see above).
In Auges examples these are airport lounges, motorways and supermarkets, but are also
refugee camps (78, 119). Their sameness is devoid of community and is a product of our
time, what Auge calls supermodernity. Important for the case of refugees in Malaysia is
that many see their lives in Malaysia as being lived in a non-place, with their real life
going on elsewhere, and their existence there a mere stepping stone to something else and
somewhere else. Even though they may inhabit a space, work every day surrounded by
others and seek each others company in the evenings or weekends, they do not feel like
they are living a life worthwhile in Malaysia. Often Chin friends would complain about the
lack of freedom to move, both physically and metaphorically (socially and economic).
They reminisced about their homeland long lost and the uncertain but hopeful relocation to
the West and a new, real life. One family I visited in a suburban housing block in the Klang
Valley was consumed by the UNHCR process and the endless waiting they had endured.
When I asked them about life in Malaysia and how they felt about living there, they
seemed bewildered by my question: Malaysia is not good. Life here is hard, we are
waiting, waiting for our lives to begin. Malaysia was a necessary stop on the way to their
new lives, but not a destination in itself. Auges non-place captures the sense of transit and
transition in the minds of refugees, who see their life in Malaysia as a temporary anomaly.
However, as Malkki (1995) has explained for refugees in the African Great Lakes
region, refugees are not just out of place, they also remake places and thus have agency
in the creation of new places, such as refugee camps, and their experiences there can
shape, engage and remake place, give them a sense of belonging as both in the here and
now and the translocal ancestral home. In Malaysia, this place-making and
reterritorialization (Brun 2001) is severely curtailed as they inhabit ready-made spaces
in low-rent urban settlements and the city fringes. Nevertheless, many refugees, mostly
ethnic minorities from Myanmar represented by the Coalition of Burma Ethnics Malaysia,
have managed to come together and form community organisations on which they can
rely, which look after them and afford them some semblance of a normal life, such as
cultural, religious and social events and groups, people to talk to and even some
institutions such as schools and (informal) employment services. The CRC is one such
organisation that provides vital services to its members. They help run schools with the

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Chin Students Organisation, liaise with employers, police and others to intervene on their
members behalf and work with the UNHCR to further the interests of their members.
There are many challenges in this work where efforts are stymied by bureaucracy,
ineptitude and corruption, but in its first published comprehensive annual report published
this year (2013), CRC tells the story of how this organisation seeks to provide support to
Chin refugees to make life in Malaysia better. They attempt to recreate home through
heritage celebrations, football tournaments and other community festivals as well as
regular church services. Indeed, the church fellowships play a crucial role in providing
spiritual glue to the community in hard times. At one church service I attended new
arrivals were welcomed, a regular Sunday occurrence, and thus became incorporated into
the community. This incorporation into familiar social structures aims to make refugees
feel included in a community they recognise from their homeland. However, what
refugees crave more than this inclusion into the familiar is a sense of hope for the future for
themselves and their children.
Thus, what these refugees seek, above all, is the societal hope (Hage 2003) social
opportunities that circulate and are distributed within a given society to its members that
their own societies have denied them and that Malaysia denies them, too. Australia, like
the USA and Europe, looms large in their imagination as a land of plentiful societal hope
that will offer them basic human security as well as possibilities for their children and
themselves. The role of educational possibilities was particularly important to Chin
asylum seekers and refugees with children. Students at local refugee schools also
reiterated their desires for longer school days, more teachers and greater opportunities to
learn, all of which they associated with a successful resettlement in the West. Many of the
imageries of what school and university education abroad might be like came from friends
and family who had already been resettled. These resettled refugees communicated stories
about their new lives via social media and email to those left behind in Malaysia. These
stories allowed many students and their parents to project beyond the present into a better
and more fulfilling future, where their lives would have (more) meaning and purpose
beyond survival in a place they happened to be in for now.
Malaysia as a whole may be described as a liminal non-place for refugees, as it is a space
for them that can be defined as neither relational, or historical, or concerned with [their]
identity (Auge 1995, 7778). Refugees simply traverse Malaysia and they leave very little
lasting mark on and in it. This also means that little resistance and contestation is possible
there. This is an important point, as refugees in Malaysia do not have the privilege of making
the place they inhabit theirs, they cannot inscribe it with their logic, nor can they make it
legible for themselves; it remains a foreign land, one that does not accept them. One of the
paradoxes is how refugees dwell, live and make sense of their existence in such an inhospitable
environment. They cannot contest the space they inhabit, and as a result there is little room for
change or a transformation of their place in society; what they can do, is to reclaim the
everyday and make their small homes into refuges for dreams of an uncertain future.
Between dwelling and domestication
Place relates to being-in-the-world or the existential reality of the relationship people have
with their environment (Heidegger 1962). This relationship in turn provides people with
ontic security a sense of being that is recognised and valued in society or, in this case,
a severe case of ontic insecurity, where ones very existence is continuously placed under
strain. Thus, refugees find it very difficult to even dwell in Malaysia. Dwelling, according
to Ingold, following Heidegger, is

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not the occupation of a world already built but the very process of inhabiting the earth. Life, in
this sense, is lived in the open, rather than being contained within the structures of the built
environment. Hence, too, the room of lebensraum is not an enclosure but an opening, one
that affords scope for growth and movement. (2009, 31)

This description makes dwelling a part of becoming, a place of multiplicity and movement
towards something else that is new and different. It captures the agency of people and
openness of space. This also applies to sites of refugee life and has been shown in the case
of African refugee camps (Malkki 1995). There is also a degree of subversiveness in the
refugee living in ordinary places, the urban squatter and urban high rise that is designed
to house those most domesticated and most controlled of all, the urban worker. The urban
workforce itself is buttressed by illegal and irregular immigrants (which includes
refugees), who not only provide cheap and unregulated labour for the economy but also
provide convenient scapegoats for the government in times of crisis. As such, they endow
the excluded with functionality, which only expands the reach and power of the state and
finance capital in this context. This domesticating assemblage of state and capital thus acts
in shifting modes, at once receding and expanding, in different spaces at differing times.
Domestication is a specific modality of being-in-the-world (of being at-home-in-theworld) and modalities of not-being-at-home-in-the-world ought to be outsidedomestication (Hage 1996). There are multiple forms of domination and domestication,
some that create techniques that may also be their undoing, thus creating a mess of
overlapping and interspliced modalities and techniques of control. One such example is
that of good corruption. Some refugee organisations have established strong links with
Malaysian law enforcement. This allows them to intercede in arrests, possible detention
and other instances when their members are in police custody. There is a small window of
opportunity where local police have jurisdiction, before refugees enter the immigration
detention apparatus. There are agreed prices (bribes) for the release of refugees from some
local police custody. Once a refugee is in immigration detention it becomes impossible to
get him or her out without UNHCR help. Thus, while in local police custody, the (corrupt)
Malaysian state machinery acts as a strategic resource for refugees to buy their (physical)
freedom back. Of course, this strategy can also be used to exact more bribes by corrupt
police, who often conduct random checks at train stations and in suburbs that are known
refugee domiciles, as was the case for Kawi above. Nonetheless, this strategy provides a
window into alternative interactions with the state and its domesticating logic; it is
mediated by individuals and their own agendas, greed and in some (rare) cases compassion
when no bribe is required (see Azis 2014).
Wherever one looks, there is an interplay between modes of domestication and modes
seemingly outside it, even if only for a moment. Farms established by refugee groups
outside Kuala Lumpur with some help from the UNHCR and local activists demonstrate
this complex interplay. On these farms, refugees toil the land, make it arable and plant,
harvest and live off it. I stayed with a young family on such a farm near Kuala Lumpur.
The husband was busy establishing this new and overgrown plot of land, clearing debris
from the land and making it arable with hours of hard work every day. He told me that he
had experience with farming as both his wife and he had come from farming families in
Myanmar. Thus, they were adept at the techniques and work required to make a success of
this farm. Both had fled Myanmar for Thailand, where they met, fell in love and married.
They were unaware of the UNHCR and heard about opportunities to register in Malaysia
and with the help of a trafficker made their way to Kuala Lumpur. Initially, they lived in
the suburban sprawl of the city and felt very alienated in a place that seemed foreign and
full of danger and unknowns. They both found work, she as a dishwasher and he doing odd

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jobs, but their pay barely met the high costs of living in the city. When a refugee
organisation advertised a farming project requiring a hard-working couple, they applied
and were accepted to establish the farm. Both relished the opportunity and challenge and
had made friends with neighbours and farm owner, who occasionally dropped by to see the
impressive progress. On the farm they were more in control of their fortune, and ultimately
their lives. The house on the plot of land was basic, but with the help of a local NGO and
their tireless director, it was progressively being furnished and expanded. The land itself is
leased from a local farmer by a Malaysian citizen as refugees cannot rent or lease property
themselves. The refugee organisation running the farm project also has plans to extend the
house to accommodate ill, unemployed and vulnerable members away from the city and in
a peaceful and secure place.
For the refugee family working on the farm, the lives they are making for themselves
are reminiscent of their previous lives in Myanmar, before the army came and took away
their land. This makes the farm work more rewarding and meaningful than work they
carried out in the city to survive. They both agreed that they were able to move much more
freely around the village and would embark on weekly shopping trips to the weekend
market and visit friends they had made on neighbouring plots, some of whom were guest
workers from Myanmar and others who were asylum seekers like them. On the farm, these
refugees were able to create a direct link with the land, making a place for themselves in a
country that does not allow for this sort of visceral engagement with land. Indeed, this sort
of place-making challenges the logic of the nation and the place of the refugee within it.
On the farm, refugees attempt to create a domus, however mythical, of their own, a place
of safety and dwelling. I employ domus here, following Heideggers conception that it
relates to the use of land and soil and the connection between the person, a building and the
land in short the mythical home (Heimat) of most peasants. In the Malay world it is
interesting to note that this link is less evident, as houses, like populations, were
traditionally mobile. This heritage of mobility has largely been erased by the advent of
Western colonialism and changes in land tenure agreements that followed in its wake.
Nonetheless, the link between land and people continues to exact great mythical and
political power over the Malaysian nation and body politic (Cheah Boon Kheng 2002;
Noor 2009). In Malaysia the bumiputera (literally, sons of the soil), which includes Malays
and a number of ethnic groups from East Malaysia, enjoy affirmative action policies.
In particular, Malays have access to Malay reserve land in West Malaysia and receive
support to purchase property. These policies cement the link between their collective
identity and the land they inhabit under the spectre of nativism. However, this sort of
dwelling on the farms described above is only afforded to a select few refugees. The
majority of refugees remain in urban settings where they must share rooms, frightened of
venturing outside of their communities for fear of being detained.
Refugees continue to be locked away from societys consciousness, some quite
literally in detention camps, in one of which Malaysian NGO Tenaganita (which translates
as Womens Force) uncovered torture, death in custody and other widespread human
rights abuses dating back to 1995 (Tenaganita 1995). These camps are a run-down version
of Guantanamo: all the same state[s] of exception (Agamben 2005; Aradau 2007), but
without any of the high-tech and at least sanitary facilities. Those refugees who live in the
community may not be imprisoned, but many live a life in fear of being arrested and
detained a prison of another sort, largely created in their minds in the way they view
Malaysia and their place within it. Some refugees, as a result, do not leave their dwellings,
others restrict their movements to a minimum. Men often go in search of odd jobs and in
some cases do not return, without any information as to what has happened to them. Many

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live in squatter dwellings under bypasses, away from the gaze of the Malaysians travelling
overhead in their cars and on motorbikes. Their existence is barely visible, they are truly
hanging on to a bare life (Agamben 1998).9 Agambens Homo Sacer is deprived of all
rights, as are refugees. They are largely undocumented and thus there exists no paper trail,
no governmental evidence of their existence. This paper trail is vitally important in that it
constitutes us as subjects of the nation state and with this, affords us the commensurable
right or freedom of movement in our daily lives and to cross borders.
As invisible outsiders, both immigrants and refugees face constant mistrust and
suspicion from both the state and many of its citizens. While most Western states make a
distinction between the immigrants and refugees based on international law, Malaysia does
not. Nah (2007) has turned her gaze on the issue of the (il)legality of the refugee in Malaysia
and the position many of them occupy as temporary guest workers who may be tolerated for
their labour, but not as citizens or guests in a cosmopolitan sense. Most interaction between
the state and immigrants and refugees is when the state wants to punish and discipline the
illegal and irregular immigrant (or when officers of the state demand bribes). However, the
Malaysian government has allowed some groups of refugees, such as the Acehnese and
Bosnians to stay for limited periods of time and even provided them with work visas
(Bunnell and Nah 2005; Nagata 1984). These actions were not based on any humanitarian
policy on the part of the government, but rather selective charity and compassion for fellow
Muslims (Nair 1997, 255). In these cases, the Malaysian government and Muslim NGOs
provided support and assistance to Acehnese refugees after the tsunami, Bosnian refugees
during the Yugoslav conflict and Cham refugees during the Vietnam War.
This compassion is highly problematic (Fassin 2005, 2012), precisely because it is
dependent on factors beyond the control of the refugee, in this case their ethnicity and
religion, making compassion mutable and inconsistent. This form of compassion can be
seen as similar to the problem of contemporary Western multiculturalism (Hage 1996,
1998). There, tolerance, like compassion, operates to maintain the existing power relations
while presenting a fac ade of equality and acceptance of the other, in this case a select
group of Muslim refugees. One or the other does not mean that they are allowed to dwell in
the body politic as the equals of citizens. There is no permanent recognition of the other,
although there are occasionally reports of Muslim illegal and legal immigrants being
granted citizenship in exchange for voting for the current government (To 2011).
Precarious existence in the liminality of the state
The liminality and judicial uncertainty and insecurity of the refugee unsettles the a priori
status of the nation, i.e. the bordered national space (Nah 2007, 36). Indeed, the refugee
must be considered for what he is: nothing less than a limit concept that radically calls into
question the fundamental categories of the nation state, from the birth-nation to the mancitizen link (Agamben 1998, 78). This limit concept can become, for some, a limit
situation Grenzsituation a moment that shatters the existential frame and makes
visible and possible a transcendence of ones state of mind and social attachments (Jaspers
1967). For Jaspers this was the momentary glimpse encounter with ones finitude. For
many refugees it is the continual liminality and the existential threat of being found out
and arrested, in some cases even deported and sent across the border to Thailand to face
further misery. However, as a limit concept, refugees themselves unsettle ideas about the
Malaysian body politic. Malaysia, as a plural and diverse country, is prone to a series of
contested meanings of its national identity and thus all the more protective over the
dominant governmental version thereof. Refugees are often in Malaysia and beyond

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seen as illegal immigrants in the national discourse, and subsequently as transgressors of

borders. Thus, there exists a strong focus on border protection, but this is largely symbolic
and aims to maintain the symbolic and constructed nature of national borders (Doty 1996).
Most illegal immigrants are visa overstayers who have entered via borders legally and then
overstayed their visas and disappeared into the informal sector to work. To apprehend
these individuals, the border has to be erected everywhere but this challenges the idea of
the nation state and its policing of its borders suddenly all national subjects become
suspects. Malaysia has gone far beyond this already, for instance, through the large-scale
privatisation of security operations such as RELA (Chin 2008). Thus, a collapsed border
heightens the perceived threat of the (now internal) other and requires more policing to
allay fears of a loss of control over border protection and national cohesion.
Conclusion
Through a range of enforcement practices, the Malaysian state attempts to contain and
police those it cannot and does not wish to discipline into a category of state, i.e. a legal
identity. Thus, the state of exception governs asylum seekers and refugees in Malaysia, as
no legal framework fully captures them or allows them to represent themselves. Asylum
seekers and refugees rarely feature in popular discourse, or in state discourse. Thus, they
are part of a series of Malaysian narratives of silence, invisibility and denial that include
homosexuality in Malaysia or Malays who transgress Islamic orthodoxy and become
apostates. The unsettling presence of these stories and people may be tolerated as long as
this presence does not impinge on mainstream everyday life or the national narrative.
However, they also haunt the nation as an uncanny reminder of the limitations of state
control of borders, be they physical walls or fences or in peoples minds, dividing
normative behaviours, beliefs or status.
For Chin refugees, place-making in Malaysia remains a difficult endeavour and also a
low priority as they conceive of a life beyond Malaysia, beyond the liminal existence and
within a society that affords them societal hope for a life worth living, for themselves and
their children. Thus, a third country of resettlement, usually the USA and Australia, is the
place they imagine as their new home, first imagined and hopefully finally in reality.
Acknowledgements
I thank the many refugees, NGO workers and others who shared their stories. I thank the Chin
Refugee Committee, especially Simon, for generously hosting me and allowing me to witness their
everyday lives. I also acknowledge the support of the Institute for Human Security at La Trobe
University, the School of Social Science at the University of Queensland and the Japanese Ministry
for Education for funding and support. Clive Wake, Henrik Vigh, Gillian Tan, Nicole Lamb, Michael
Jackson, Ghassan Hage, John Cash, the anonymous reviewers and the editors provided critical and
helpful feedback; any shortcomings remain my own.

Notes
1.
2.
3.

In order to protect the confidentiality of the people I worked with, I have anonymised names of
interviewees.
I use the countrys current official name without prejudice or political motivation. Many news
outlets and some governments continue to call the country Burma, although many have shifted
to Myanmar recently.
This Malaysian volunteer corps has been expanded by the home minister since 2009 from about
500,000 members to three million and has its origins in the Emergency period of the 1950s and
1960s, when ordinary Malaysians were urged to enter this state-sponsored militia in the fight

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4.
5.
6.

7.
8.

9.

G. Hoffstaedter
against Communism. Since then it has grown into a department under the Home Ministry and in
2005 gained considerable police powers, such as the right to bear arms, arrest and enter premises
without warrant and detain suspects (Malaysia 2005). RELA was also in command of security
arrangements in some immigration detention centres. The major issue with this volunteer force
is that they are undertrained; but for the Malaysian state, they offer a cheap alternative to police
or immigration officials. RELA volunteers earn 4 6 RM an hour (1 2 USD) and are often
motivated by 90 RM (30 USD) bonuses for every illegal immigrant arrested. The overreach in
enforcement practices and reported violations as well as criminal activities of RELA personnel
(SUARAM 2009, 134 135) took its toll on the Malaysian government and in 2012 they
introduced a new law curtailing some of RELAs powers, most notably the right to bear arms,
and tied RELA activities closer to other law enforcement agencies (Malaysia 2012).
The data for this paper were collected between 2010 and 2013 during three 2-month research
trips to peninsular Malaysia. I interviewed around 30 refugees and conducted participant
observation in several refugee communities and lived with Chin refugees for about seven weeks.
At the end of December 2012, there were some 101,080 refugees and asylum seekers registered
with UNHCR in Malaysia, of which the vast majority (92,560) came from Myanmar, with Chins
representing the largest group with 32,900 people (UNHCR 2012).
The UNHCR issues a UNHCR card to registered refugees, which serves as identification and
provides limited protection from Malaysian authorities. When authorities conduct immigration
raids, for instance, refugees with a UNHCR card are usually set free on the spot or if they are
detained can be released upon UNHCR intervention.
This is compared to the Rohingya who have barely been resettled and other refugee groups that
are not prioritised by resettlement countries. Chins have a strong diaspora, especially in the
USA, with links to US church groups which have facilitated resettlement.
Much literature on refugees has invoked Foucaults (1967) concept of the heterotopia in this
context, especially heterotopias of deviation, as a space that contains those outside of the norm
or mainstream of society. This may fit into discussions of refugee camps as ordered spaces, but I
believe is not as useful in describing the situation of urban refugees.
The refugee experience is multiple and varied, of course, depending on factors such as class and
educational background. For instance, amongst the Chin refugees, those who had a tertiary
education would be better placed to take on leadership roles and serve in the CRC administration
or as translators for the UNHCR and other refugee service providers, which provide them with
greater access and opportunities. However, the majority of refugees have to live a life in the
shadows.

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