Religion has a powerful hold on the nationalist imagination. Many a nationalist struggle has come to be inflected, even appropriated, by religious discourses and authority figures. At the same time, the rise of nationalism and the emergence of nation-states have also produced nationalizing effects on religious communities. Either way, it is clear religious identity and conceptions of nationhood cannot be understood divorced from the social, cultural, and historical contexts of societies and their interactions with power. This contention is premised on the view that “nationalism is a field of debates about the symbol of the nation, and national identity is a relational process enacted in social dramas and ‘events’ as well as in everyday practices.” It is bearing this in mind that the following proposition is made: in Southeast Asia, the role of religion in political conflicts and contestations is best understood in the context of national identity formation and contestation that continues to define much of post-independence politics in the region.

Before proceeding to see how this plays out in the study of religious conflicts in several cases drawn from Southeast Asia, it is necessary to first consider the theoretical literature in terms of the political aspects of religion and the religious impulses of nationalism. Towards that end, this chapter will introduce and discuss the current literature and debates that define the fields of religious conflict and nationalism studies, and how they intersect and speak to each other, before making its case for a view of religious nationalism that accounts for the dynamic and intimate relationship between the notions of religious faith, identity, rights, and belonging.

Religion

Until recently, scholarly study of religion – whether in its monotheistic or polytheistic forms – as a sociological phenomenon had been for the most part relegated to the backwaters of social sciences. With the emergence of modernization and rationalist theory as dominant paradigms in the field after the Second World War, interest in religion as a phenomenon that impacted on social, political, and economic developments diminished considerably. Consequently, its study was largely confined to the disciplines of theology and religious studies.

Religious nationalism, as Chapter 1 pointed out, is premised on the idea that religiosity and patriotism can weave together in a manner that gives rise to a narrative which articulates a confessional perspective of nationhood. At its extreme, however, and in a climate where assertive religious claims dominate the narration of national identity and the institutions of the state, a heightened religious discourse potentially results in identity diffusion within the nation-state along religious lines, where confessional claims engender the creation of in-group and out-group identities. Malaysia provides a compelling case for how this process takes place.

In Malaysia, fault lines have formed over the issue of what it means to be a member of the Malaysian “nation” according to the official narrative of nationhood, and how this narrative has changed as erstwhile pluralist conceptions of national identity embraced by (and embracing) minority communities have been threatened, if not supplanted, by a religious discourse that seeks to rearticulate nationhood along narrow and exclusivist terms of a growing Malay-Islamic nationalism. If the previous cases of the Philippines and Thailand have demonstrated how religion offers a language and metaphor of resistance in the process of conceptualizing alternative nationhoods and national identities, in Malaysia it has taken the form of a hegemonic narrative of supremacy and exclusion dominated by religious vocabulary that is harnessed to reinforce, express, and institutionalize a narrowly interpreted narrative of Ketuanan Melayu – the dominance and lordship of the ethnic Malay-Muslims in multicultural Malaysia. Correspondingly, this has elicited responses from religious minorities who contest the legitimacy of this reframing of national identity and consciousness for reasons of the existential threat that they pose to their claims to be part of the “Malaysian nation.”

The rise of religious conservatism among Muslim actors who dominate the discourse of Malaysian politics touches on issues of both national identity construction as well as political legitimacy. This is so because of how social-political entrepreneurs operating both within and outside the state threaten by dint of explicit religious referents to erode any semblance of shared history, common sense of belonging, and “deep horizontal comradeship” upon which pluralist conceptions of nationhood stand.

Introduction

A key debate in the recent literature on Indonesian politics has centred on the extent to which everyday actors, including citizens from poor and lower–middle-class backgrounds and their allies in the NGO movement, have been able to participate effectively in the policy-making process since the fall of Suharto's authoritarian New Order regime in the late 1990s. On one side of this debate, scholars such as Vedi Hadiz, Richard Robison and Olle Tornquist have argued that policy making in the post–New Order period has remained just as exclusionary as it was under the New Order despite the fact that the country has become more democratic and decentralized (Hadiz 2003, 2010; Hadiz and Robison 2005; Robison and Hadiz 2004; Tornquist et al. 2004). Power relations, they have argued, have simply been reorganized rather than transformed: instead of fading from the scene, the politico-bureaucratic, business and criminal figures who dominated the New Order ‘have been able to reinvent themselves through new alliances and vehicles, much like they have, for example, in parts of Communist Eastern Europe/Central Asia’ (Hadiz 2003: 593). At the same time, they suggest, Suharto's rule left a powerful legacy in relation to the participation of everyday actors in policy making. The New Order's systematic pursuit of a policy of disorganizing civil society and repressing any form of political activity on the part of opposition groups, they suggest, has ‘effectively paralyz[ed] most independent capacity for self-organization among groups like the urban middle class and the working class’ (Hadiz and Robison 2005: 232).

On the other side of this debate, scholars such as Hans Antlov, Marcus Mietzner, Ed Aspinall and myself have argued that democratization and decentralization have opened up new opportunities for everyday actors to influence policy-making, resulting in a slightly more inclusive political system. For instance, in a paper co-authored with Kurnya Roesad and Donni Edwin (Rosser et al. 2005), I argued that the shift to a more democratic political regime has (i) removed key obstacles to organization by poor and disadvantaged groups and NGO activists, making it easier for them to engage in collective action aimed at achieving pro-poor change; and (ii) created an electoral incentive for politicians to promote policy changes that benefit these groups or at least appeal to them.

Introduction

Since gaining its independence from the United Kingdom in 1957, Malaysia has undergone rapid economic development. For Malaysian women, this development has also signified their large-scale entry into the formal labour force. Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, women in Malaysia entered waged employment, particularly within the manufacturing sector, in unprecedented numbers (Lim 1993). During these decades, female labour force participation rates increased dramatically (Noor 1999). However, despite the expansion of the economy, declining fertility rates (Razak 2011) and increased educational attainment of women (UN and Malaysia 2011), female labour force participation rates in Malaysia have never reached above 50 per cent (Fernandez 2011). In fact, World Bank data suggests that Malaysian women have the lowest participation rates in the entire Southeast Asian region.

A closer examination of Malaysian labour force data reveals a strong ‘one peaked pattern’ (Horton 1996) of female labour force participation. This suggests that women tend to be active in the formal labour market when they are younger, but around the average age of marriage and childbirth, their participation rates decline quite rapidly. As a result, over half of the women of working age in Malaysia (4.9 million out of 9.4 million women) are found ‘outside the labour force’, with over three million stating ‘housework’ as their main reason not to enter waged work (Malaysia 2012: 15–6, 21). It is, however, highly unlikely that such a large share of women in Malaysia are ‘housewives’ – with no other income-earning activities. Instead, a more likely explanation is the lack of recognition for (Loh-Ludher 2007) and inadequate coverage of women's informal work in labour data (Franck 2012). This expectation, that women ‘outside the labour force’ continue to work informally, is also put forward in several official documents (see, e.g., Malaysia 2006: 290, 2012: 16). While official labour force data is generally agreed to provide inadequate coverage of women's work (Benería 1999; Chen 2001), it can nonetheless provide some indications regarding women's informal work – notably through the labour reported as own account and contributing family work. In the Malaysian case, such data shows that women seem to move from formal to informal types of work over the life course. This chapter engages with the fairly straightforward question: Why?

Introduction: Vernacular Modernities and Directional Goals

This chapter explores, through the everyday lives of urban migrants in Vietnam and rural dwellers in Thailand, a puzzle when it comes to understanding the intersection between modernization as a project and modernization as a practice. It is evident that most of the populations of Southeast Asia subscribe, in broad terms, to modernization ends. Their personal sacrifices to achieve material prosperity are both remarkable and humbling. At the same time, detailed investigation shows that they embrace and orchestrate this process of social and economic transformation in ways that run counter to and sometimes against both state-led intentions and simplistic views as to the path that is followed. So, on the one hand, we see in the everyday actions of ordinary people an undoubted, irrepressible enthusiasm for modernization. But in the details of how they go about achieving this, we discern not a resistance to modernization but rather a resistance to the modernization project.

This illustrates a point highlighted by the political economist Dani Rodrik, who suggests that the ‘central economic paradox of our time is that “development” is working while “development policy” is not … [and] we are [therefore] faced with the confluence of two seemingly contradictory trends’ (2007: 85). To address this paradox, Rodrik makes a case for heterodoxy in understanding international development achievements and failure. This chapter will seek to address the paradox/puzzle in another way: by looking at the explanatory gap between development as policy as envisioned and orchestrated by states and development as practice as pursued and given meaning by people in their everyday actions.

To provide some structure to the empirical evidence and discussion that follows, a simplified two-by-two matrix provides a starting point (Table 2.1). This highlights two binaries: between directional history and vernacular modernities, on the one hand, and everyday practices and state intentionalities, on the other. The four resulting categories inevitably bleed into each other; they are not viewed as neat and tightly bordered but permeable. Indeed, it is at the margins – at the points of contact – where much of interest lies. The matrix serves a purpose in highlighting the intersections and tensions with which the chapter is concerned:

At its core, this volume has focused on everyday practices of economic engagement that have transformed – and are being transformed by – the Southeast Asian region's embrace of market-led developmentalism. To this end, the chapters in this volume have sought to illustrate the many and varied ways in which everyday actors and their practices of everyday life both constitute and operate within Southeast Asian political economies. Our contributors have considered the production of Southeast Asia's Everyday Political Economy (EPE) within distinct country contexts, drawing together different disciplinary perspectives and engaging a range of methodological and theoretical tools. Concluding a volume of this nature is no easy task. In this endeavour, the editors Elias and Rethel have been joined by John Hobson and Leonard Seabrooke, the authors of the influential 2007 book Everyday Politics of the World Economy, which, in setting out their Everyday International Political Economy (EIPE) approach, provided an important intellectual precursor to this volume. We use this as an opportunity to reflect about how this book project has sought to push the notion of everyday political economy in some quite distinctive directions to that originally put forward by Hobson and Seabrooke. Thus, in these concluding comments, we highlight the points of commonality and differences between the EIPE and EPE projects.

The argument in this chapter unfolds in two steps. We first sketch IPE's journey from a focus on what Hobson and Seabrooke (2007b) called ‘regulatory’ IPE (or RIPE) to a greater concern with the everyday. We then consider the chapters of this book against this background. One final point of note here is that the starting point of analysis of this book is distinct to that advanced in Hobson and Seabrooke's volume. There the authors were centrally interested in the relationship between everyday actor agency and its effect on the global political economy. The current book, however, tends to focus more on developments within particular national economies situated in the Southeast Asian region. This is not to say that the global political economy is ignored; but to the extent that it is discussed, it is mainly in the context of how international influences and pressures are negotiated, mediated and, in some cases, significantly transformed at the national/local level and the role that everyday actors (can) play in acquiescing, contesting or resisting them.

Introduction

There are currently over 320,000 full-time, live-in migrant domestic workers (MDWs) in Hong Kong, the vast majority of whom are from Southeast Asia. In recent years, women from the Philippines and Indonesia have constituted 48 per cent and 49 per cent, respectively, of the MDW population, with women from Thailand, Sri Lanka and Nepal making up most of the remainder (Immigration Department 2012). These women and previous generations of women from Southeast Asia account for a significant proportion of the intra-Asia migration of workers, being at the same time a part of the widely observed feminization of migration (see also Elias and Louth, this volume). In the social fabric of Hong Kong, their arrival in ever-increasing numbers, especially since the second half of the 1980s, also marked a sea change in which household chores, child and elder care were commoditized to the extent that in approximately one in eight Hong Kong households an MDW carries out or helps with these tasks.

The nature of domestic work, its private location and the dispersal of its workers, very often as single employees in a household, coalesce to produce a vulnerability that is, in many parts of Asia, worsened by live-in arrangements which may have an impact on access to unions or to help and advice. This vulnerability is why the International Labour Organization has identified women domestic workers as one of the three most vulnerable groups of migrant workers (ILO 2004) and why a Domestic Workers’ Convention has now been adopted (ILO number 189). This convention and the longer-standing UN Convention on the Protection of the Rights of All Migrant Workers and Members of their Families (1990) have had some indirect impact in Hong Kong in terms of consciousness raising and lobbying. NGOs and migrant workers’ unions, which in Hong Kong are permitted the political space in which to establish themselves and pursue their activities, have invoked both conventions in their ongoing campaigns and, arguably, drawn legitimacy from them in fighting two recent major issues: the exclusion of MDWs from the right of abode (akin to permanent residency) (Vallejos and Domingo v Commissioner of Registration 2011) and the exclusion of domestic work from the minimum wage regulations.

Introduction

Southeast Asia is an increasingly interdependent, globalized and urbanized region of the world. The eleven countries that are generally understood as comprising modern-day Southeast Asia are now ever more closely linked together via flows of trade, investment and migration, in addition to traditional state-led processes of regional integration – most notably the emergence of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) – as well as ever closer, and overlapping, bilateral economic and security ties. In the nearly two decades since Thailand floated the baht, an event commonly held to mark the outbreak of the Asian financial crisis of 1997–8, the region has become more closely integrated than ever before. The launch of the ASEAN Economic Community marks – at least rhetorically – the high point of a period of state-led economic development, market reform and regional integration. Indeed today, we see a region that while not unified is certainly deeply interconnected. In the shadow of Asia's two giants, India and China, the Southeast Asian region has been somewhat sidelined within debates about and discussions of the looming ‘Asian Century’.

Much analytical effort has been put into understanding the respective influences of state and market forces in driving the region's economic transformation. Nonetheless, Southeast Asia provides an important site for considering how processes of economic transformation are refashioning – and refashioned by – the lives and daily routines of ordinary people: their decisions to migrate across borders; their experiences of growing affluence as well as of inequality, poverty and associated forms of violence and destitution; their activities as activists, citizens and workers; and the ways in which economic and social relations, responsibilities and activities are being transformed. Southeast Asia is, and will remain, a heterogeneous region of the world. And yet, this very diversity of culture, politics, religion, society and economics – intersecting with divisions of race, class, gender and even age – provides important insights into how economic transformation takes shape. If we are entering an Asian Century, then we need to remain attentive to how this transformation is taking shape in the lives of Asia's people and their engagement in changing economic practices, with Southeast Asia providing an important terrain for initiating this focus.