Proceedings of the Southeast Asian Conference on Migration and Development (SEACMD 2023)

Conference: Proceedings of the Southeast Asian Conference on Migration and Development (SEACMD 2023)
Date: 19-20 September 2023
Location: Mataram, Indonesia (Hybrid)
Website: https://seacmd.unram.ac.id/#

Thirty years ago, when the World Bank published iconic research on eight high performing economies in Asia, the world switched its focus from Cold War politics to the ‘East Asian Miracle’. The world has become disentangled from the bipolar world and thus has sought new directions in a multipolar order. Since then, Asia has paved its way to becoming the centre of attention. The rise of China, to name just one, has turned the foreign policies of many countries to adopt ‘the look east policy’. The end of Western domination has given way not only to the rise of both political and developmental issues but also to decolonizing approaches in social sciences which have centred on Asia. In the past decade, scholars have even proposed the term ‘Asia as method’, or using ‘Asia as an imaginary anchoring point...’ (Chen, 2010, p. 212). This means that academia has switched from looking mainly at European and American experiences to Asian experiences.

The above development has attracted more scholars to focus on Southeast Asia, beyond economic and political matters. In the field of migration and development studies, Southeast Asia has increasingly contributed to global knowledge production. Anthropologists and geographers, for instance, have drawn both methodological and conceptual innovations called ‘migration infrastructure’ mainly from the case of migration in Southeast and East Asian countries. Development studies scholars have drawn from case studies in Southeast and East Asia and pointed out the uniqueness of the Asian developmental model or how development has imposed demographic changes among its societies. The many scholarly contributions to the field of migration and development drawing from case studies in Southeast Asia cannot be separated from much earlier innovation in conceptual development which centred upon the complex interactions between cultural-ritual societies and colonialism-modernization projects that have taken place in Southeast Asia. In the light of the rising Southeast Asia in the centre of knowledge production, the Department of International Relations, the University of Mataram has sought to explore more wide-ranging topics of migration and development. Therefore, we have organized the Southeast Asian Conference on Migration and Development (SeaCMD) in Lombok Island of West Nusa Tenggara Province in Indonesia from 19 to 21 September 2023. In this conference, we have encouraged a broad range of scholars, including researchers, lecturers, policymakers, research consultants and postgraduate scholars, to share their ongoing research or promote their past papers at this conference.

Topics covered in this conference include diaspora and transnationalism in Southeast Asia, migration governance in Southeast Asia, labour migration in Southeast Asia, Refugees, asylum seekers and irregular migration, subaltern and marginalized communities in Southeast Asia, civil society and multiscalar development, decentering developmental challenges, religion and sustainable development, tourism and development nexus, maritime security, defence and economy, multilateral cooperation in Southeast Asia, special economic zone and capitalism in the twenty-first century.