Forced Migration in Southeast Asia: International Politics and the Reordering of State Power

Abstract

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.