AbstractWhile the history of human migration in Asia stretches over many centuries, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) is of more recent vintage. Since its inception in 1967, ASEAN has seen considerable migration within, across, and beyond the borders of its member states. To date, efforts to regulate such migration have reflected the predominance of domestic law and ad hoc measures by concerned member states. As this brief overview shows, however, Southeast Asian migrations in the era of ASEAN have also prompted a search for bilateral, multilateral, and regional frameworks of regulation.

The devastation of the tsunami and reconstruction in its aftermath, in Aceh and Sri Lanka, resulted in a divergence of political trajectories with Aceh moving towards a cessation of war and Sri Lanka heading towards a resumption of war. These different political outcomes frame this volume's compelling arguments about aid, activism and reconstruction. The contributors, hailing from a diversity of disciplines offer critical analyses of many key categories mobilised in humanitarian discourses and practices while providing ethnographic accounts and case studies of an array of institutions and individuals. Importantly, this volume interrogates the frequent disconnect between research and policy and explores ways this divide can be bridged. A must read for donors and policy makers as well as researchers and activists.

This article directs attention to dynamics of refuge and governmentality in a region of the ‘global South’, South-East Asia, and brings into focus the major recipients of (forced) migrants, Malaysia and Thailand, neither of which is a signatory to the 1951 Refugee Convention, or the 1967 Protocol. Against the backdrop of the illuminating contrast offered by the Thai case, this article argues that, in the case of Malaysia, the mobilization of ‘volunteers of the nation’ in campaigns against ‘illegal migrants’ serves as a performative (re)enactment of ethnic identity and national citizenship in the making of Malays and Malaysians in this postcolonial ‘plural society’. The article explores the wider consequences of the (re)production of (il)legality and identity as a social reality experienced not merely by (forced) migrants, and not only at the border, but also by government officials and national citizens actively mobilized in high-profile campaigns to flush out ‘illegal migrants’ from markets, construction and plantation sites, as well as dwellings in kampong neighbourhoods, city blocks and jungle sites across Malaysia.

The year 2005 witnessed much argument and effort—to enact tax reforms, impeach the president, combat terrorism, amend the Constitution, and end long-standing armed insurgencies—and little real change. The outcome of these specific initiatives is likely to remain largely unresolved in 2006, as is the broader issue of the stability and substance of democracy in the Philippines, a question that loomed large throughout 2005.

This essay explores a revisionist argument about the nature and direction of conflict and refugee movements in Southeast Asia during the Cold War and thereafter. By focusing more systematic attention on processes of national integration in post-colonial state and society, this essay provides an important corrective to perspectives that privilege Cold War geopolitics and ideology. Similarly, a comparative investigation into processes of (re)democratization and (re)centralization reveals critical dynamics not easily captured from the point of view of less methodologically rigorous approaches to understanding ‘new wars’ and communalism in the post-Cold War era. Against the dominant paradigm of a marked shift in the patterns of conflict and displacement ‘before’ and ‘after’ 1989, this essay instead argues for a more careful, comparative consideration of the reordering of state power and its powerful effects through processes of national integration, (re)democratization and (re)centralization upon the mobilization of large-scale violence and refugee movements in post-colonial Southeast Asia.

This paper seeks to explore the origins of the populist appeal of President Joseph Ejercito Estrada, and to recapture some of its peculiar workings in the broader context of Philippine post-colonial politics and society. To that end, the paper provides a brief glimpse of the rapidly changing urban landscape which first saw the rise of Estrada as the superstar of the moviescreen and the mayor of San Juan municipality in Metropolitan Manila during the 1960s. In the following section of the paper, key developments in the Philippine film industry are identified, and an attempt is made to demonstrate the emerging possibility of a new kind of social imaginary, or mass consciousness, reflective of cinema's power to reveal to an audience entirely new structural formations of the subject. Here, the notion of Tagalog movies as a ‘visualized lingua franca’ – unburdened by tradition, hierarchy, and easily accessible to a wide spectrum of the population – suggests one possible link between the expanding cinema audience at lower-class theatres and the new forms of recognition implied by the rise of artista politicians in Manila in the 1960s. Finally, a closer look at narrative and character in some Estrada films from the peak years of his movie stardom in the 1960s and 1970s points to the kind of familiarity and appropriation Estrada may inspire among his fans and followers. The paper was completed as (former) President Estrada faced, first, an unprecedented impeachment trial in the Philippine Senate and, eventually, an unceremonious end to his presidency in the parliament of the streets (ie ‘People Power’ at ‘EDSA’).

This article first appeared in a Special Issue on 'The Clandestine Cold War in Asia, 1946-65' of Intelligence and National Security 14/4 (Winter 1999) published by Frank Cass (ISSN 0268-4527).

This paper examines the organization, activities, and degree of success of the National Movement for Free Elections (NAMFREL) in the Philippine presidential elections of 1986 in six provincial cities — Bacolod, Cagayan de Oro, Cebu, Davao, Iloilo, and Zamboanga. Important in mobilizing support for local NAMFREL chapters were the Catholic Church, institutions of tertiary education, and, of particular concern in this paper, local business and professional and civic associations. Indeed, the paper argues that, in any locality, business and professional backing typically made a decisive difference to the effectiveness of the NAMFREL chapter, by providing leadership and other crucial mobilization resources. Thus in Zamboanga, for example, where the local economy and politics remained heavily militarized, support from local business was minimal and largely covert. By contrast, the Cebu City NAMFREL chapter tapped into local business corporations and professional associations to very considerable effect. In other words, the mobilization of support for NAMFREL in these six provincial Philippine cities was in decisive ways shaped by the nature of local political economies and existing networks.