In 2010, more than 87,000 international students were studying in Malaysia. The Malaysian government wants to increase the number of international students to more than 200,000 by 2020. The case of Malaysia as an emerging player in international education is particularly interesting as it is not only one of the first former colonies of a European country to achieve such high international attractiveness, but also one of the first Muslim-majority countries to become a hub of international education. This article analyses both the supply and demand side of this remarkable trend. The historical and political circumstances for the institutional buildup of Malaysian higher education are discussed, followed by an analysis of the religious, linguistic, and developmental background of the international students coming to Malaysia. Lastly, factors affecting other prominent destinations of international student migration, such as the implications of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, are taken into account.

This contribution is about a female transnational student from Turkey, Hafize, studying for four years at an Islamic Malaysian university. She was interviewed during the research project “Transnational Student Mobility in Higher Education in Asia”, a multi-sited ethnographic project containing six sub-studies aiming to illuminate student voices and the impact of cultural processes on student-inhabited transnational spaces, identity negotiations, and networks. Through a bottom-up perspective, and with life story as the principal method, the project illustrates processes of social change and relations between the individual and society. Questions are posed about, inter alia, the motivations and reasons that may be identified in the educational stories. Hafize's narrative is discussed as a relational and contextual story, in which family relations and the significance of education, gender, ethnicity, religion, and socio-economic and political situations intersect. Education is given different meanings: instrumental and reflexive as well as emotional aspects. Turning points and the concept of capital, especially social and emotional capital, are addressed. Hafize's family of eight siblings is deeply involved in serial reciprocity, a tightly bonded network supporting all the children in their efforts to study. Hafize's story is substantially gendered and ‘ethnified’ – a reflexive emotional identity project, in which education and religion are given high priority. In Turkey secularist legislation was an obstacle. The studies abroad provided possibilities for self-development but tempered with some limitations.

Over the past two decades, Singapore has steadily become a popular destination for migrants. While the reasons for migrating to Singapore are many and contextual, labour and education have been the primary driving factors for attracting migrants from around the world to Singapore. Although a popular migrants’ destination, education and migration policies in Singapore are often gendered, and are negotiated along and across other axes of identification and differentiation such as ethnicity and ideas of ‘modernity’. This article analyses gendered educational migration from Malaysia to Singapore focusing particularly on how educational migration leads to female self-transformation. Specifically, I argue that social actors negotiate educational migration within their gendered family constellations. The article first contextualises the empirical material by illustrating socio-historical processes in Singapore and Malaysia. In the next sections, I discuss my ethnographic methods and examine a brief history of the state of research in gender and educational migration. In conclusion, I offer a significant contribution to the growing and important body of scholarship on gender and transnational families by illustrating how gender is negotiated in migration using the case of a single Chinese woman's migration journey to becoming a ‘modern woman’.

This article addresses transnational higher education strategies both to and from Singapore. It does so by focusing on outbound educational mobility from Singapore to the UK and inbound educational mobility from Vietnam to Singapore. Since the turn of the century, Singapore has pursued the agenda of developing itself as a regional hub for higher education, aspiring to be a Global Schoolhouse. Yet, while the number of international students grows in local universities, Singapore's academically brightest do not necessarily take advantage of higher educational opportunities within the shores of the city-state, with many traveling to universities overseas through a form of sponsored mobility. Using two case studies, I trace two logics of commodification and consecration as observed through the processes whereby individuals and institutions devise transnational higher education strategies into and out of Singapore. The first case study draws on interviews conducted with Singaporean undergraduates at Oxbridge while the second case focuses on Vietnamese students at two Singaporean universities. Together, the analysis from these cases uncovers the value for these Southeast Asian students in studying abroad and distinguishes between different types of routes that exist: one where students choose their own educational plans and another where students are chosen for a prestigious educational and occupational pathway. With increasing participation in mass higher education taking place across the region, the article outlines, through the site of Singapore, strategies of transnationalism employed by both individuals and institutions as a means of social differentiation.

This article discusses eleven Southeast Asian students’ transnational mobility in order to obtain higher education at an Islamic university in Jakarta. A life story approach has been used and semi-structured and interviewee-oriented interviews have been carried out in the field, as well as on the internet. The focus is not only on the students’ individual experiences, such as educational background, strategies in mobility, prevailing life conditions, educational objectives, and future plans, but also on why they chose international Islamic studies in Jakarta and how they evaluate the education offered there. Gender constitutes an overall empirical and analytical aspect of this article, taking into account the prevailing gender order, or norm, in the students’ homelands and families, as well as gender regimes, or relations, in the educational and social environment in Jakarta. These students have mixed backgrounds regarding nationality, class, parents’ education, gendered and religious norms, and previous contacts outside of their homelands. All, however, accumulate social capital in the transnational social fields or networks – physical and digital – that they take part in during their time in Jakarta and after they finalised their studies. All the students plan for further studies or a working career, and a majority of the students intend to return – or have already returned – to their home country, while a few prefer a third country. They can be defined as so-called temporarily uprooted locals, with an even spread on a scale from localism to cosmopolitanism in their individual identity formation.

Studies of Siam's diplomatic relations from the mid-nineteenth century have been focussed on its troubled relations with Western colonial powers, often within a bilateral framework. While highlighting issues such as territorial losses and treaty revisions, scholarly interest tends to have overlooked Siam's relations with its neighbouring countries. Based on archival records at the National Archives of Thailand, this article aims to fill this gap by examining diplomatic exchanges between the Siamese and Vietnamese courts that took place between 1879 and 1882. In April 1879, a royal mission from the Vietnamese court bearing gifts and a royal letter from Tự Đức to Chulalongkorn arrived in Bangkok. It was allegedly the first formal mission from the Vietnamese court in almost half a century after the two countries had come into conflict in the 1830s. By examining how Siam and Vietnam sought to maintain and manipulate ‘traditional’ interstate relations in the face of treaty arrangements that France enforced upon Vietnam, this article reveals complex issues involved in the process of negotiations, such as the questions of maintaining the equality between the two monarchies and of the ‘translation’ of the concepts of sovereignty between Thai and Sino-Vietnamese languages, and suggests the necessity to pay more attention to historical and broader regional contexts in Asia.

This article uses primarily British colonial documents and Singapore sources to examine the history of proposals for the construction of a shipping canal through Thailand's Kra Isthmus from the 1850s. It provides historical background for continuing interest in constructing a Kra canal with the most recent speculative discussions involving Chinese interests. Since the 1850s the idea of a canal was revived on numerous occasions with several detailed surveys conducted over this time to assess the feasibility of a shipping canal via the Kra Isthmus. This research examines how speculation and actual proposals were handled by the British colonial authorities and how this related to the British policy of using Siam/Thailand as a buffer state separating their colonies and those of their European rival France. In colonial Singapore canal proposals created great angst and to some extent this has continued to be the case to the present day. The article suggests that while British colonial policy was always against, or at least not in favour of, the construction of a canal, other factors are equally important for explaining why canal proposals never proceeded beyond planning and surveys.

The peoples who inhabit the states that lie in the direct paths of typhoons in the Western North Pacific share a common history of repeated dislocation, destruction, and death that delimits a zone of comparative enquiry and historiographical interest. The track left by typhoons across ocean and land perfectly outline the dimensions of a more transnational historical region encompassing the Philippines, Vietnam, China, Korea, Japan, Taiwan, and the island states of Micronesia. The peoples of these lands are bound together by a common experience of risk. Wind and water together offer a radical alternative historiography to state-centred master narratives that are revealed by pursuing issues and questions that transcend the spatial and temporal boundaries of any one state or region.