A Polycentric World? Reimagining Global Futures through South-South Connections

Against the Current: Reimagining Securitized Water Borders through Hydro-Social and Archipelagic Encountering 

Shyamika Jayasundara-Smits and Nanneke Winters (International Institute of Social Studies)

Our study puts forward a hydro-social approach to water and archipelagic thinking to counter top-down, nation-state and terrestrial interpretations of the increasing securitization and militarization of water borders. Empirically, we bring into dialogue experiences from Sri Lanka and the Isthmus of Panama that share histories of water-related mobilities as well as conflict and contestation over key water bodies that – in the current geopolitical context – face intensified scrutiny and militarized border enforcement. We aim for an archipelagic comparison that allows us to acknowledge and appreciate the ambiguities of lived experiences of securitization while resisting epistemic approaches that marginalize local knowledge and conditions. 

Going beyond water as merely a scarce/strategic resource that is fought over, we contend that a hydro-social approach to water borders offers a more nuanced appreciation of water’s agentic, relational, and multi-dimensional qualities — qualities that link water to land and to distant places. Moreover, we explore what kind of possibilities Global South-based archipelagic thinking offers to interrogate, contest and deconstruct dichotomic epistemologies and threatening aquatic metaphors that configure relationships between people and water based on fear, anxiety, friction and scapegoating while silencing other qualities and meanings of water, as nurturing, life-sustaining and identity-forming. 

We find that archipelagic thinking invites us to not only take into account the assimilationist and marginalized histories of riverine and coastal border communities but also to destabilize accepted wisdom regarding the role, experiences and perspectives of communities historically relegated to the margins. Archipelagic thinking allows us to identify disruption as well as pragmatism and re-orientation through emergent connections. We identify fluidity, openness, and ambiguity in the ways people relate to water, in the everyday materiality and im/mobility of their lives, their histories and memories, and their ideas about the future. From an aquatic and connected-insular perspective, we can re-imagine social relationships and political positionings. This attention to place, politics and southern epistemological engagement defy the determinism of nation-state borders, instead drawing insights about how communities re-signify, resist, avoid and accommodate imposed securitization practices.

Into the job market through the back door: Filipino migrant workers in Malaysia

Helena Pérez Niño (International Institute of Social Studies)

Abstract to follow

Africans in India: Rethinking theories of mobility, migration and diasporisation from the Global South

Meera Venkatachalam (International Institute for Asian Studies)

Over the last four decades, a multilayered, multiethnic African presence has developed in most Indian metropolises, such as New Delhi, Mumbai, Chennai and Bengaluru, the result of diverse trajectories of African mobility to India over the last four decades. The African presence in these cities consists of settled persons; semi-settled categories of mobile students and itinerant traders who visit India repeatedly. Transregional migration is largely analyzed from the perspective of South-North frameworks and where the Global South is the point of departure. Where South-South migration is the focus of attention, the focus is on guest workers from the ‘poorer South’ to resource-rich economies (such as the Middle East) or focused on displacement/ forced migration from zones of conflict to neighbouring countries or the movement of ‘highly skilled’ migrants working in service and technical sectors. This research seeks to understand how an analysis of trajectories of migration from Africa, and West Africa in particular, to India has the potential to reconfigure established paradigms and theoretical frameworks in the contemporary studies of migration and mobility and will offer new perspectives from a ‘southern’ viewpoint.

Go to the bustling South: Aspirations, capabilities, and Asian emigration regimes in Korean migration to Vietnam 

My Hang Thi Bui (International Institute for Asian Studies)

Intraregional mobilities within the Asia-Pacific have predominantly been studied through Southeast and South Asian migration to East Asia, focusing on migrant workers, including domestic worker migrants and seasonal guest workers, international students, marriage migrant women, and also undocumented migrants. However, inter-Asian mobility is far more dynamic, with flows of corporate expatriates, self-initiated expatriates, and short-term migrants such as language trainees moving from the Global North to the South, yet these flows receive significantly less attention. This study introduces South Korean migration to Vietnam into the fields of migration studies and inter-Asian mobilities, particularly by exploring Koreans’ aspirations and capabilities to go to Vietnam. How can we read the emerging phenomenon of North-South mobility within the specific context of the Asia-Pacific region? This research draws on observations and in-depth interviews with South Koreans migrating to Vietnam—not only to their own ethnic concentration neighbourhoods in the metropolises of Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City but also to less familiar areas of Vietnam like the North Central Coast. This paper demonstrates how inter-Asian North-South mobilities operate at the intersections of generational perspectives, developmental neoliberal emigration policies and contemporary inter-Asian engagements. This examination further challenges and contributes to critical discussions on neocolonialism within decolonising migration studies.