Securitization and Community-Based Protection Among Chin Refugees in Kuala Lumpur
| Author | Kirsten McConnachie |
| DOI | 10.1177/0964663918755891 |
| Published date | 01 April 2019 |
| Date | 01 April 2019 |
Article
Securitization and
Community-Based
Protection Among Chin
Refugees in Kuala Lumpur
Kirsten McConnachie
University of Warwick, UK
Abstract
This article examines refugee-led community organizations among Chin refugees from
Myanmar in Kuala Lumpur. It uses a structuration analysis that recognizes refugee-led
organizations as complex governance entities engaged in a dynamic relationship with
(among others) national policies of securitization of forced migration and international
humanitarian governance. This approach expands the existing literature on the secur-
itization of forced migration by exploring refugees’ lived experiences in a context of
south–south migration. It expands the literature on community-based protection by
going beyond recognizing the existence of refugee-led organizations to analyse their
construction, constitution and consequences. Three primary areas of work by Chin
refugee groups are analysed in relation to their immediate activity and longer term
effects: organization (‘building ethnic unity in adversity’), documentation (‘asserting a
bureaucratic identity’) and socialization (‘learning to be illegal’). These long-term effects
indicate the possible impact of local protection activities on macrostructural processes
such as identity construction and migration choices.
Keywords
Agency, community-based protection, refugees, structuration, urban refugees
The future of international refugee protection is precarious, arguably more so than at any
time since the creation of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees
(UNHCR) in 1950. As national governments have become increasingly unwilling to
Corresponding author:
Kirsten McConnachie, School of Law, University of Warwick, Coventry CV4 7AL, UK.
Email: kirsten.mcconnachie@warwick.ac.uk
Social & Legal Studies
2019, Vol. 28(2) 158–178
ªThe Author(s) 2018
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DOI: 10.1177/0964663918755891
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accept refugees and as the UNHCR has become increasingly stretched in its capacity to
provide international protection, multiple policies and reports have encouraged recog-
nition of the protection potential within refugee populations (e.g. South et al., 2012;
UNHCR, 2005, 2008, 2009, 2014). There has been particular interest in the activities of
refugees in urban settings, reflecting new urbanization of forced migrant populations
(ActionAid, 2010; APRRN, 2013; UNHCR, 2009; Women’s Refugee Commission,
2010). Recognizing that refugees play a central role in securing their own protection
is not in itself an original insight (Harrell-Bond, 1986; Kibreab, 1993). It is novel to see
this recognition reach the centre of global refugee policy, where it has the potential to
profoundly shape the nature of refugee protection.
Existing work on community-based protection recognizes the importance of refugee
communities and details some of their activities but is largely incurious as to the nature
of those communities. ‘Community-based protection’ is as broad and varied as refugees
themselves. Some ‘community-based’ organizations are created organically by refugees
in situ, while others are established by external agencies or encouraged by diasporic
movements. Some organizations are highly effective, others are not. These are not
generic institutions but situated, contextualized and highly specific entities. This raises
important questions, such as: How are refugee communities constituted? What are the
differences between refugee populations, and are some groups more effective organizers
than others? How do refugee community organizations interact with other layers of
refugee governance? What are the consequences of their activities?
This article examines some of these questions in relation to Chin refugee organiza-
tions in Kuala Lumpur. It is part of a wider body of work on refugees from Myanmar
which has included research on camp management among Karen refugees in Thailand
and on organization in urban settings in India and Malaysia (McConnachie, 2012, 2014).
Sociolegal scholarship on refugee issues has largely concentrated on formal legal insti-
tutions such as policing and detention (Bosworth, 2014; Weber, 2013). However, socio-
legal methods also have much to offer in terms of understanding refugees’ lived
experiences of law and in recognizing the governance landscape beyond national legal
systems. For example, my research in refugee camps in Thailand challenged assump-
tions of refugee camps as temporally and physically bounded spaces, revealing a tem-
poral frame of governance stretching back to precolonial times and demonstrating that
the spatial environment, though geographically remote, was rooted within extensive
local and transnational relationships.
Chin refugees in Kuala Lumpur live in a global metropolis rather than a remote camp
but their experiences are also constituted by policies, norms and relationships far beyond
the refugee community, and they too can be understood as both governed and governing.
This dynamic is a clear example of structuration, that is, the mutually constitutive
relationship between structure and agency. Structuration is a valuable heuristic to recog-
nize refugees’ agency while acknowledging constraints on that agency (Betts et al.,
2016: 168; Healey, 2006; Horst, 2006: 11). However, despite its intent to synthesize
agency/structure, structuration retains an oppositional logic which is all too often carried
into its application. Certainly, in refugee studies, researchers have tended to focus on
structure (often treated as synonymous with official policy) at the expense of a truly
integrated analysis (see further Bakewell, 2010; Doty, 1997). Furthermore, both
McConnachie 159
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