This paper argues that the Indonesia-Malaysia-Singapore Growth Triangle makes manifest the complex geographies of power that subvert efforts to read cross-border regionalization as a straightforward geographical corollary of 'globalization'. As such, the region needs to be examined not simply as a complementary transborder assemblage of land, labour and capital, but rather as a palimpsest in which the imagined geographies of cross-border development and the economic geographies of their uneven spatial fixing on the ground are mediated by complex cultural and political geographies. We seek to unpack these by triangulating how the geographies of capital (including its uneven development and its links to the geo-economics of intra-regional competition), land (including post-colonial relations across the region, the geopolitics of land reclamation and the enclaved landscapes of tourism) and labour (including the divergent itineraries of migrant workers) overlay and complicate one another in the region. By charting these complex triangulations of space and place, we seek to problematize narratives of the Growth Triangle as an exemplary embodiment of the 'borderless world'. key words Indonesia-Malaysia-Singapore Growth Triangle borders geoeconomics globalization uneven development
This paper looks at aspects of the detention of irregular migrants in Australia, Malaysia, and Thailand. The principle intention of the paper is to study detention of irregular migrants as a means of understanding politics and how notions of political participation and of sovereignty are affected by the detention of certain sorts of individual. What does the identification of certain "forms of life" to be detained say about the political norms of different societies? The conduit for this examination will be the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben's concept of homo sacer. Homo sacer is a term Agamben extrapolates from "ancient Roman law". It denotes a naked or bare life that is depoliticized. Homo sacer is the excess of processes of political constitution that create a governable form of life. Homo sacer is thus exempt or excluded from the normal limits of the state. At the same time, however, homo sacer is not simply cast out but is held in particular relation to the norm: it is through the exclusion of the depoliticized form of life that the politicized norm exists. This essay seeks to contextualize aspects of Agamben's argument by looking at detention as a form of exclusion in three different contexts.
Singapore-Indonesian investment cooperation in the Riau islands forms the key part of an initiative in cross-border cooperation including Indonesia, Malaysia and Singapore. Four flagship projects - Batamindo Industrial Park, Bintan Industrial Estate, Bintan Beach International Resort, and the Karimun marine and industrial complex - are a key test of the effectiveness of a development strategy that seeks to 'fast track' development by creating enclaves of investment, protected from the diseconomies and constraints of their surrounding environment. This paper evaluates the progress of the flagship investments and their interaction with their surrounding communities. It shows the constraints on securing enclaves of investment opportunity in the midst of poverty and high population growth. Lessons from the development experience are linked to the political processes affecting cross-border cooperation in Southeast Asia. This discussion reveals the retention of interstate processes predicated on the continued existence of strong nation-states, rather than trans-state processes which permit the weakening of national sovereignty. The negotiating pitfalls and development dilemmas emerging in this political context are identified. Copyright Joint Editors and Blackwell Publishers Ltd 1999.
First, central to our analysis is the argument that human movement within and across borders fundamentally challenges the view of geopolitics based upon fixed territorial states, inter-state relations, national identities and citizenship; indeed the whole idea of "national geographic".Using the examples of the Karen and Shan peoples, we explore the processes and patterns of forced relocation, displacement and migration in the border regions of Myanmar and Thailand. Our main concern is with forced displacement as a result of political and ethnic conflict; specifically, how the Burmese military regime's desire for "national unity" within Myanmar's "national space" has influenced the militarily inspired displacements of hundreds of thousands of villagers and civilians within the border zones inhabited mostly by so-called "national minorities". We examine the particular problems of the so-called "internally displaced persons" within "national" boundaries compared with the "refugees" and "undocumented migrants" who make it across "international" space into Thailand. We illustrate the ways displaced people are represented by state agencies and the media as "threats" and "transgressors". We consider some of the "long term" aspects of the displacement problem along the Myanmar-Thai border and the vital contribution geographers can make to the study of displacement.
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