Southeast Asian Trajectories of Labour Mobility: Precarity, Translocality, and Resilience

Abstract

Within and across Southeast Asian national borders, there has been a growing circulation of labour, capital, people, and goods. Meanwhile, urbanisation, agrarian changes, and liberal economic restructuring have been drawing a large section of the rural population into mobile economies and trade networks. This special issue explores the linkage between mobility and the growing precaritisation of labour resulting from neoliberalised development policies, nationalist citizenship regimes, and discourses, and arbitrary state power. Arguably, the consequent insecurity and uncertainty have profound implications for the social and economic life of migrant labourers. Although these conditions engender dangers and risks, they also hold possibilities for crafting translocal livelihoods and social relations. In this introduction, we investigate the diverse trajectories of labour migration in Southeast Asia through a critical discussion on the concept of ‘precarity’ that underscores the resilience of labour migrants despite the precarious conditions of their lives. The special issue suggests that, while precarious labour has long been part of regimes of control and exploitation in the region, precarity today is shaped by the blurry boundaries between the legal and the illegal, between local and global lives, and between different worlds of belonging.

Identifying the Static and Dynamic Relationships Between Rural Population and Settlements in Jiangsu Province, China

“…Global urbanization has absorbed a large number of rural laborers and brings regional prosperity (Davis, 2016;Tappe and Nguyen, 2019). However, global urbanization also causes widespread rural decline, and a large area of rural land has been converted into urban land (Huang et al, 2015;Liu, 2018), the population density of rural areas is generally lower than before (Yang et al, 2016), which has led to an increase in idle rural settlements and a serious shortage of high-quality rural labor resources (Pribadi and Pauleit, 2015;Zhao and Zou, 2017).…”

Rural modernization and the remaking of the rural citizen in China: Village redevelopment, migration and precarity

“…Moreover, these transformative processes are not equally experienced as evidenced by the considerable scholarship on precarity and what it means for migrants, those who are the left behind and their villages. Researchers have identified positive migration–development linkages and the increased salience of attachment to place (for those that stay as well as those that must go) that counter‐balance precarity whilst also emphasizing contradictory strains on social and emotional ties caused by chronic absences and rural depopulation (Porst & Sakdapolrak, 2018; Tappe & Nguyen, 2019).…”

“…The fact that continuous (re)migration is induced by institutional barriers to permanent migration has led some analysts refer to this situation as one of ‘incomplete migration’ (such as Gao et al, 2017) or ‘incomplete proletarianization’ (Chan & Selden, 2014). However, rather than seeing the increasing trend towards translocal householding (Jacka, 2018) as problematic, it may be more useful to ask what the relationship is between translocality and precarity for particular people in particular places (Tappe & Nguyen, 2019; Wilson et al, 2018)? This is salient because, although stretching is a household response to manage poverty and insecurity, straddling the rural and the urban can also prove to be a source of further precarity.…”

A Conceptual Model of Adaptive Protective Factors for Migrant Workers

“…Access to mobility is a differentiating factor of migration (Rizvi et al, 2011). In many studies studying resilience in urban cities, transport facilities were found as an influential indicator (Panda & Mishra, 2018; Porst & Sakdapolrak, 2018; Tappe & Nguyen, 2019) while the study on adaptive social protective factors has taken mobilisation, livelihood diversification, risk sharing and informal entrepreneurship as dimensions (Santha et al, 2015). During the development of the theory for resilience, some researchers pointed out that structural adaptation is an important element of protective factors; physical and emotional comfortability and life support facilities such as free hospitals, schools and getting ration cards are some indicators (Michael et al, 2019; Porst & Sakdapolrak, 2018).…”