The Everyday Political Economy of Southeast Asia
University of Warwick, July 26, S2.77 (Social Studies Building)
On July 26th, 2012 the Griffith Asia Institute (GAI), Griffith University, Australia in
conjunction with the Department of Politics and International Studies, University of
Warwick are organising a one-day workshop on The Everyday Political Economy of
Southeast Asia. The workshop will take place at the University of Warwick. For
further information, please find the workshop programme attached.
This month, it has been fifteen years since Thailand floated the baht, an event
commonly held to have marked the onset of the Asian financial crisis. The crisis itself
led to a massive consolidation of the political economy literature on Southeast Asia
and has provided a fertile ground for advancing political economy scholarship on the
region ever since. However, much of the literature is very much focused on elites,
especially the tensions that emerged between different groupings of state elites in the
aftermath of the crisis.
By contrast, this workshop will adopt an 'everyday IPE' perspective looking at how
the emergence of more neoliberal forms of economic policymaking are sustained,
reproduced and challenged through everyday practices - for example in terms of the
rise of new commodity trading regimes (e.g. around palm oil or halal products), the
expanding of markets for migrant domestic work, or the alliances formed between
civil society groups and states/donor agencies that further extend the reach of the
market into the lives of ordinary people across this economically, culturally and
politically diverse region.
The workshop will bring together scholars working on various aspects of Southeast
Asia’s contemporary political economy including consumption, finance, gender,
environment, trade and work and from a range of disciplines such as anthropology,
business studies, geography, law and political science/international relations.
Workshop attendance is free, but please register by sending an email to
L.Rethel@warwick.ac.uk for catering purposes. Please note that if you register but
don’t attend, food might have to be thrown away.
Kind regards,
Juanita Elias, GAI, Griffith University
Lena Rethel, PAIS, University of Warwick
Workshop Programme
09.00-10.45 The Everyday Politics of Poverty, Ethnicity and Inequality
• Who are the poor in Indonesia and why are they poor? – Anne Booth (SOAS)
• From formal employment to street vending: Malaysian women’s long-term
labor force participation under conditions of export-orientation - Anja Franck
(Gothenborg)
• Malaysia: Political liberalism in an ethnic economy? – Graham K. Brown
(Bath)
• Everyday economies of cross-border health care - Meghann Ormond
(Wageningen)
10.45-11.00 Tea/Coffee
11.00-12.45 States and Markets: everyday perspectives & the endurance of elite
projects
• Malayan Independence and British Imperialism – Alex Sutton (Warwick)
• Islamic Finance in Malaysia: elite project or everyday political economy? –
Lena Rethel (Warwick)
• Transnational Retail In Developing Economies: Regulating The
Transformation Of Retail Markets - Alexandra Buckland-Wright (Manchester)
• The IPE of Post-Crisis Recovery in Malaysia: Continuity and Change in StateSociety Relations - Christopher Wylde (York)
12.45-13.45 Lunch in the PAIS Common Room
13.45-15.30 The Everyday Politics of Migration and Human Rights
• Foreign Policy and the Domestic Worker: The Malaysia-Indonesia Domestic
Worker Dispute - Juanita Elias (Griffith)
• Globalisation, Sovereignty, and Immigration Control: The Hierarchy of Rights
for Migrant Workers in Malaysia - Alice Nah (York)
• Domestic workers' narratives on violence, rights and legal process - Carol Tan
(SOAS)
• Daily Encounters with Defamation Regimes in Southeast Asia - Adam Tyson
(Leeds)
15.30-15.45 Tea/Coffee
15.45-17.30 The Everyday Politics of Resources and Utilities
• Framing and Contesting Neoliberalism: The practice and politics of resistance
in mining governance in the Philippines - Jojo T. Nem Singh (Sheffield)
• Palm Oil, Ethical Consumption and the Commodification of Sustainability Ben Richardson (Warwick)
• Power Sector Policy Changes in Malaysia: The Developmental State and Neoliberalism – Michael Keating (Richmond)
• Private sector hydropower investment and the role of new donors in building
up energy capacity in the Mekong River Basin – Oliver Hensengerth
(Northumbria)
17.30-18.00 Final Reflections and Future Plans
ABSTRACTS
Who are the poor in Indonesia and why are they poor? – Anne Booth (SOAS)
Although the Indonesian economy has recovered its growth momentum under
President Yudhoyono, recent comparative data published by the World Bank show
that around half the population is still living on less than two dollars a day. According
to WB estimates, this is a higher percentage than in the Philippines, Vietnam and
China and much higher than in Malaysia or Thailand. In my presentation, I will try to
get behind the aggregate figures and explore where the poor are located, and suggest
some reasons why they are poor. I will look particularly at problems of access to land
and other forms of employment in rural areas in Java, and also the special problems of
those living in remote rural areas in Eastern Indonesia. My presentation will also try
to offer some explanations as to why Indonesia has had less success in dealing with
poverty than many of its Asian neighbours.
Malaysia: Political liberalism in an ethnic economy? – Graham K. Brown (Bath)
For more than a decade, scholars of Malaysia have been arguing that ‘ethnicity’ as the
dominant trope for Malaysian politics has been replaced by a notion of
‘developmentalism’ associated particularly with the tenure of Mahathir Mohamad.
Anthropological and sociological studies have identified the emergence of what we
might call a ‘post-ethnic’ society, particularly in the highly developed states on the
west coast of the peninsula. Recent events such as the Bersih rallies in Kuala Lumpur
suggest that the largely transethnic configuration of civil society is beginning to
accord with a wider section of the broader society than previously. Yet when, in
2010, prime minister Najib Tun Razak sought to retrench most of the affirmative
action policies that have undergirded the country’s political economy for four
decades, he was met with a vociferous backlash and the changes were not
implemented. This paper proffers a tentative explanation of these trends, suggesting
that while Malaysian society as a whole is moving towards a broadly political
liberalism, the ethnic configuration of the economic system remains deeply
embedded. The language of economic liberalism and global competitiveness that now
pervades government policy, I suggest, is not one that resonates with the majority of
people in the country. Ironically enough, no small part of the blame for this might lie
in Malaysia’s experience of the Asian Financial Crisis itself, where Mahathir’s
decidedly heterodox but ultimately successful economic response validated a
particularistic account of Malaysia’s economic success, even as it played a major role
in the opening-up of the political sphere through the reformasi movement.
Transnational Retail In Developing Economies: Regulating The Transformation
Of Retail Markets - Alexandra Buckland-Wright (Manchester)
The internationalisation of retailing since the early 1990s increasingly altered the
activities of, and relationships between, retail firms and non-firm actors in host
economies across the world. Thailand and Malaysia have both experienced a rapid
transformation and modernisation in their retail markets following the entry and
expansion of transnational retailers. Two distinct systems of retailing have emerged
and a wide range of actors are involved from foreign and domestic retail firms, to
retail associations and consumer groups. The aim of this study is to examine how
different national retail systems are shaped by the regulation that arises from diverse
political and institutional environments and the constant interplay between retail firm
and non-firm actors. Regulation refers to the range of legislative and policy based
controls which are introduced by governments in host economies. The Global
Production Network (GPN) approach in conjunction with comparative institutional
analysis provides a conceptual framework through which to understand and examine
the on-going changes and processes occurring in these transitional retail markets.
Foreign Policy and the Domestic Worker: The Malaysia-Indonesia Domestic
Worker Dispute – Juanita Elias (Griffith)
Migrant labour – and migrant domestic labour in particular- plays a contradictory role
in processes of capitalist development. Migrant women constitute a cheap pool of
workers able to support the expansion of middle class women’s labour market roles,
and yet, although this group of feminized migrants are needed economically, their
presence is barely tolerated and bound under the immigration policies and
exclusionary citizenship practices of host. In Malaysia, the ready availability of low
cost female workers from Indonesia combined with the increased presence of women
in the workplace has led to a situation in which domestic workers are ubiquitous in
upper middle class households. However, in 2009, responding to domestic outrage
over the treatment of Indonesian migrant domestic workers, the Indonesian
government placed an embargo on its citizens taking up employment as domestic
workers in Malaysia (a similar embargo was subsequently imposed on Saudi Arabia
following the execution of an Indonesian domestic worker in 2011). At the time of
writing, the issues between Malaysia and Indonesia have only partially been resolved
and domestic workers are still not arriving to work in Malaysia through formal
recruitment channels. From the perspective of feminist International Relations
scholarship, the emergence of migrant domestic work as a major foreign policy
concern between these two states is rather significant– exposing as it does the
relationship between foreign policy making/diplomatic practice and the webs of
transnationalized social relations of reproduction that underpin the development
prospects of middle to low income states. Thus, in this paper I utilize the example of
the Malaysia-Indonesia domestic labour dispute in order to develop some tentative
suggestions concerning the possibility of more thoroughly integrating an analysis of
transnational social relations of reproduction into understandings of foreign policy.
From formal employment to street vending: Malaysian women’s long-term labor
force participation under conditions of export-orientation – Anja Franck
(Gothenburg)
Despite rapid economic development, increased educational attainment of women and
decreasing fertility rates Malaysia exhibits the lowest female labor force participation
rates in the entire Southeast Asian region. An important explanation for these low
rates is the strong one-peaked pattern of female labor force participation - where
women tend to permanently leave the formal labor force at a relatively young age.
The study presented here is based upon interviews conducted with 80 women workers
in the state of Penang in northern Malaysia between 2009 and 2011. While the women
interviewed constitute a diverse group they share the common feature that they
currently make their living in the informal economy – but the majority used to work
as machine operators in factories or in low-skilled jobs in the tourism industry.
Through focusing upon the factors that made these women leave formal jobs and then,
at a later stage in life, opt for informal work the study hopes to contribute knowledge
around Malaysian women’s participation and room to maneuver in the labor market
under the conditions of an export-oriented economy.
Private sector hydropower investment and the role of new donors in building up
energy capacity in the Mekong River Basin – Oliver Hensengerth (Northumbria)
The presentation examines the role of new donors and investors in building up
hydropower capacity in the countries along the Lower Mekong River. In the past
decade, public investment in hydropower dams in the region by traditional
multilateral and bilateral donors has been largely replaced by private investment from
regional countries (particularly China, Thailand, Vietnam and Malaysia). The
presentation looks at the interplay of these investors with government agencies and
examines the social and environmental impact of this investment. The focus will be
on hydropower investment in Cambodia.
Power Sector Policy Changes in Malaysia: The Developmental State and Neoliberalism – Michael Keating (Richmond)
This paper explains the history, rationales and consequences of the managed power
sector policies that the Malaysian state had pursued since the 1990s. In essence, neoliberal policies such as privatisation were co-opted, and served to reinforce the
developmental state rather than promote any neo-liberal convergence. The paper then
examines the extent of recent policy changes, in the context of the large price
increases in 2007, as well as broader economic problems Malaysia faces. Finally, the
consequences of policy changes (particularly regarding the reduction of energy
subsidies) are addressed, so that the everyday political economy of power sector
policy in Malaysia can be revealed, including rising inequality, increased
environmental problems, and electoral backlashes.
Globalisation, Sovereignty, and Immigration Control: The Hierarchy of Rights
for Migrant Workers in Malaysia - Alice M Nah (York)
Social theorists examining the impact of globalisation on state power argue that
sovereignty is being respatialised and rescaled and that it is no longer adequate to
understand state sovereignty as operating evenly on a national scale over a population
within a bounded territory. Nevertheless, ASEAN states continue to adopt such a
national framing of people and place, particularly in the construction of immigration
control regimes. I argue that in order to understand the localised and spatialised
exercise of graduated sovereignty and the selective introduction of neoliberal
practices, it is necessary to recognise the significance of the immigration status of
individuals and examine how the dividing practices of immigration control regimes
permit the selective allocation of rights to non-citizens. This paper examines
Malaysia’s approach to international labour migration, noting that it makes different
biopolitical investments in different types of non-citizens on the basis of a calculation
of their potential contribution to the ‘nation’. Malaysia creates a hierarchy of rights,
giving greater rights to skilled workers while restricting those of ‘unskilled’ workers.
Malaysia punishes those who breach immigration laws severely. However, Malaysia’s
modernist approach to immigration control fails to achieve intended results and I
highlight a number of reasons why.
Everyday economies of cross-border health care – Meghann Ormond
(Wageningen)
There is a disjuncture between Malaysia’s growing desire for foreign patientconsumers from high-income countries and the corresponding governmental and
private sector investments in spectacular medical tourism infrastructure, on the one
hand, and the essential yet relatively invisible role that everyday intra-regional
medical travellers from nearby lower-income countries – who comprise the bulk of
medical travellers to Malaysia – actually play in constituting and sustaining the
country’s principal medical travel destinations, on the other. Seeking to bring
attention to the relevance and realities of these more everyday medically-motivated
mobilities, this paper draws on recent fieldwork that explores transborder microeconomies developing around the pursuit of health care in the Malaysian city of
Kuching, where private hospitals actively court and receive high numbers of patientconsumers from neighbouring Indonesian Kalimantan. The paper argues for greater
consideration of the political, economic and social ties fostered by these everyday
medical mobilities and their potential for fostering regional development at the microlevel.
Islamic Finance in Malaysia: elite project or everyday political economy? – Lena
Rethel (Warwick)
The last two decades have seen the rapid expansion of Islamic finance in Malaysia.
With a majority Muslim population, a dual financial system has evolved where
Islamic banks operate alongside conventional financial intermediaries. At first glance,
Islamic finance could thus be taken as the fulcrum of the cultural (and social)
situatedness of economic activity, a core focus of the emerging fields of cultural
political economy/everyday political economy. At the same time, however, the
emergence of Islamic capital markets has been discursively enmeshed with the
country’s endeavours to position itself as an international financial centre. Malaysia
has launched the ‘Malaysia International Islamic Financial Centre Initiative’ in 2006
and identifies Islamic finance as a strategic economic growth sector. How can these
two narratives be reconciled? Is Islamic finance truly a reflection of the possibility of
taking an alternative path in an age of increased financial globalisation or is it just
another instance of business as usual while paying lip-service to the needs of a
culturally diverse political economy? In this paper, I argue that the recent history of
Islamic finance in Malaysia contains elements of both. Particular attention will be
given to the role of the state in the construction of Islamic finance as a natural and
legitimate, if not imperative, field of economic activity and how this impacts upon the
everyday lives of Malaysian citizens.
Palm Oil, Ethical Consumption and the Commodification of Sustainability - Ben
Richardson (Warwick)
The Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO) was launched in 2004 by
corporations and civil society organizations like Unilever, the Malaysian Palm Oil
Association and the WWF. Its aim was to better govern the production of palm oil
through the creation of a sustainability standard and its effective enforcement through
third-party audits and traceable supply chains. With the final product duly certified or
‘eco-labelled’, it was hoped that ethically minded consumers would then drive
demand for the product and provide the commercial incentive for more companies to
join the scheme. To this end, the RSPO can be considered a success. It now covers
11% of global production through the certification of 135 mills based mainly in South
East Asia – the centre of the international palm oil trade. This is an important
initiative since the creation of palm oil plantations has been linked to environmental
degradation in the form of deforestation, biodiversity loss and increased greenhouse
gas emissions, as well as social conflict via forced land acquisition and the subsequent
displacement of local communities. For some, then, the RSPO is a means of raising
the bar of business practices and of re-embedding an exploitative commodity trade in
society and putting it under some form of (non-state) democratic control.
Theoretically, it also points to the importance of routine consumption habits as places
where reform of the trade system might be located; an everyday act of political
agency by consumer-activists. However the RSPO, and the method of ‘non-state
market-driven’ governance it relies on, has not been without its critics. Issues have
been raised with limitations in the sustainability standard, the ability of the scheme to
enforce it and the extent to which it marginalises small producers. In other words,
certified sustainability is put at the service of dominant firms in the industry and the
very industry itself legitimised in the eyes of those Western publics which ultimately
underpin its consumption. These are all valid critiques, but ones which focus on the
(non)effects of the scheme on the ground. My interest here lies in the way the RSPO
is transforming the exchange of palm oil and with it the very idea of ethical
consumption. This is happening through its use of certificate trading.
Framing and Contesting Neoliberalism: The Practice and politics of resistance in
mining governance in the Philippines - Jojo T. Nem Singh (Sheffield)
Although we would like to think neoliberalism as a coherent intellectual project, there
exist varying practices of the free market project across countries and sectors. Whilst
some elements of neoliberalism have been embedded in institutional and political
arrangements, others have been contested from below by social groups and organised
movements. The task of this paper is to unpack the gulf between this perceived
coherence and practices of resistance of political actors by way of exploring the
different institutional logics as well as the varying meanings of resistance around
neoliberalism. It takes the case of the neoliberalization of mineral governance in the
Philippines as an exemplary of tensions within the neoliberal paradigm, and the extent
to which political actors negotiate these tensions to sustain a development paradigm
that is not wholly neoliberal but retains its main characteristics. On one hand, national
elites envisage ‘political possibilities’ of economic growth through large-scale
mining. In the context of an export bonanza, political discourses draw upon economic
imperatives – competitiveness and foreign investment – as justifications for attempts
by the Philippine government at market building. Neoliberal logics have been
reinforced by discourses of transparency, accountability, and anti-corruption
emanating from the state and international financial institutions as a way of ensuring
good governance of natural resources. On the other hand, narratives of development
are challenged by competing articulations of the potential impacts of mining to the
Philippines. Some civil society organizations have framed opposition to proposed
market-opening reforms either in terms of its social consequences or in terms of
environmental impacts. However, practices of resistance to neoliberal forms of
mining management operate within the terrain of neoliberal spaces, and therefore,
politically it is difficult to generate alternative frames against the dominant consensus
regarding neoliberal forms of market building. Combined with a history of weak state
building and low levels of public trust to political institutions, proposed reforms
falling outside the neoliberal logic have been received with less enthusiasm by
political actors. This, above all, points to the complexity of re-regulating capitalism in
small state contexts, in which ideas of vulnerability and power differentials have been
creatively used by elites to justify the lack of an alternative policy paradigm. Overall,
this paper examines theoretically how practices of resistance are conditioned by
neoliberal practices, thereby, making legitimate challenges to existing growth models
less credible in seeking for pathways of development.
Malayan Independence and British Imperialism – Alex Sutton (Warwick)
The paper focuses on Britain’s relationship with Malaya shortly before and after its
independence from the British Empire. The paper looks at the negotiations concerning
the constitutional and financial settlements prior to independence, as well as the
negotiations over an independent Malayan dollar reserve. Britain sought to keep
Malaya within the Sterling Area at all costs, even after de jure convertibility had been
achieved, due to its high dollar earning capacity, which remained important due to
persistent trade deficits with the US since the end of the Second World War. The
paper argues that these settlements, while seemingly very generous for an independent
Malaya, were still very much intended to maintain Britain’s role within the global
economy, to ensure Sterling’s status as an international currency, and to support
conditions for British economic growth.
Daily Encounters with Defamation Regimes in Southeast Asia - Adam Tyson
(Leeds)
On 18 June 2012 Irshad Manji’s Allah, Liberty and Love was being removed from
bookshelves and a Borders bookshop manager in Mid Valley, Kuala Lumpur was
charged with distribution of defamatory materials. One week earlier Jakartans stood
by as hundreds of copies of Douglas Wilson’s Five Cities that Ruled the World were
burned outside of a Gramedia bookshop. This paper draws on the work of Streckfuss
(2011), who argues that defamation represents the ‘explosive alchemy’ between
power and truth, which in turn demarcates what can and cannot be said in a given
society. As the bookshop incidents above demonstrate, the defamation dilemma
extends well beyond the Kingdom of Thailand, so long ring-fenced by lèse-majesté
laws. It shall be argued that defamation regimes in Indonesia and Malaysia are most
effective when set in sacred religious spheres, rendering God in the service of politics,
narrowing the spectrum of public debate and leading to intellectual containment.
The IPE of Post-Crisis Recovery in Malaysia: Continuity and Change in StateSociety Relations - Christopher Wylde (York)
In the post-Asian Financial Crisis period Malaysian economic growth has been
characterised by relative torpor when compared to its pre-crisis performance. This
article seeks to trace the contours of continuity and change in the state-market, statesociety, and state-international relationships in order to develop an understanding of
contemporary Malaysian political economy. It will conclude that the specific
constellation of institutionalised relationships present in contemporary Malaysia
represent essential continuity with its past, and it is that continuity – in the context of
the Asian financial crisis in 1997 – that has led to the perpetuation of a form of Crony
Capitalism in a pseudo-democracy.