Transnational Flows and Permissive Polities

Barak Kalir is assistant professor in the Department of Anthropology and Sociology at the University of Amsterdam. He is Co-Director of the Institute for Migration and Ethnic Studies, and Director of the Master Programme in Contemporary Asian Studies. Malini Sur received her PhD from the University of Amsterdam in 2012 and is a fellow at the University of Toronto in Fall 2012.

"By foregrounding the negotiations that lie at the intersection of competing political and social authorities, this volume radically transforms conventional meanings of sovereignty. By separating legality from order, rules from rule, legitimacy from power, and, illegality from crime, we encounter gendered and national state effects that take shape in startling and counter-intuitive ways. The complex relation of human movement to subjectivity becomes the common axis for fine-grained empirical essays that range across Asia, from the Persian Gulf to India, from Israel to China." -- Itty Abraham, National University of Singapore|"Transnational Flows and Permissive Polities is a must-read volume exploring the subtle connections among human mobility, uneven state regulations, and complex transnational practices that enrich and challenge relationships and identities in ways rarely imagined." -- David Kyle, Executive Director of the Gifford Center for Population Studies and Associate Professor of Sociology at UC Davis "By foregrounding the negotiations that lie at the intersection of competing political and social authorities, this volume radically transforms conventional meanings of sovereignty. By separating legality from order, rules from rule, legitimacy from power, and, illegality from crime, we encounter gendered and national state effects that take shape in startling and counter-intuitive ways. The complex relation of human movement to subjectivity becomes the common axis for fine-grained empirical essays that range across Asia, from the Persian Gulf to India, from Israel to China." - Itty Abraham, National University of Singapore

• Transnational Flows and Permissive Polities - 2 Table of Contents - 6 List of Tables, Maps, Figures and Photographs - 8 Acknowledgements - 10 Introduction Mobile Practices and Regimes of Permissiveness - 12 1 Illegality Rules Chinese Migrant Workers Caught Up in the Illegal but Licit Operations of Labour Migration Regimes - 28 2 Contesting the State of Exception in the Afghan-Pakistani Marchlands - 56 3 ‘Looking for a Life’ Rohingya Refugee Migration in the Post-Imperial Age - 76 4 Smuggling Cultures in the Indonesia-Singapore Borderlands - 92 5 Trade, Transnationalism and Ethnic Infighting Borders of Authority in Northeast Borneo - 110 6 Bamboo Baskets and Barricades Gendered Landscapes at the India-Bangladesh border - 128 7 Moving between Kerala and Dubai Women Domestic Workers, State Actors and the Misrecognition of Problems - 152 8 Emigration of Female Domestic Workers from Kerala Gender, State Policy and the Politics of Movement - 170 9 Mainland Chinese Migrants in Taiwan,1895-1945 The Drawbacks of Being Legal - 190 10 ‘Playing Edge Ball’ Transnational Migration Brokerage in China - 208 Epilogue Irregular Mobilities and Disjunctive Moralities - 230 About the Editors and Contributors - 242 Bibliography - 248 Index - 262