Kami Urang “Sini” (We Are from “Here”): Agency Across Equivocal Space

Abstract

This chapter brings to light the lives of irregular migrants in Sandakan, their survival against the state and its many security apparatuses, and the subtle everyday forms of resistance they have developed. This chapter begins by asking how irregular migrants in Sabah identify and define themselves within an ongoing security ecology and how the Sulu Sea impacts this narrative. Treated as dangerous and foreign, irregular migrants are subjected to a life of ongoing monitoring by the Malaysian government, driving them to seek out illegal methods to avoid detection, further worsening their perilous legal status. With the lives they lead, the community has considered the state’s many legal and security interventions against them to be unfair, violent and degrading. But as an act of resilience, irregular migrants have produced amongst themselves, a system of survival which allows for a semblance of normal life. With an in-depth knowledge and understanding of the state’s apparatuses of security, they have developed a culture of survival, and use the term sini (here) as a way of problematising and contesting their liminal status as irregular migrants in Sabah.