The externalization of border control in the global South: The cases of Malaysia and Indonesia
| Author | Maggy Lee |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/13624806221104867 |
| Published date | 01 November 2022 |
| Date | 01 November 2022 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
The externalization of border
control in the global South:
The cases of Malaysia and
Indonesia
Maggy Lee
The University of Hong Kong
Abstract
Existing scholarship highlights the novel approaches and the capacity of northern states
to control mass mobility by externalizing the border; outsource their control apparatus
to migrant sending and transit countries; process and detain irregular arrivals in offshore
locations; and expand the reach of sovereign powers extraterritorially. Significantly, the
processes and outcomes of externalization are neither homogeneous nor uncontested.
This article seeks to provide critical insights into the divergent nature of border exter-
nalization and contributes to a de-centring of northern-centric notions of the state’s role
in border control by comparing how border control plays out in Malaysia and Indonesia
under Australia’s externalization policy agenda. Their different border control outcomes
reflect important intervening factors in the two countries’internal (domestic political
and economic realities; attitudes towards migrants and their control) and external (inter-
state geo-political relations) environment in shaping the situated meanings and the real-
ities of border security building.
Keywords
Australia, border, externalization, Indonesia, Malaysia
Introduction
There is a significant body of scholarship that examines the novel approaches adopted by
states around the world to control mass mobility. In particular, states in the global North
Corresponding author:
Maggy Lee, Department of Sociology, The University of Hong Kong, Centennial Campus, Pokfulam Road,
Hong Kong.
Email: leesym@hku.hk
Article
Theoretical Criminology
2022, Vol. 26(4) 537–556
© The Author(s) 2022
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DOI: 10.1177/13624806221104867
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increasingly govern unwanted migration from the global South by exporting models of
border control under various guises of migration management and aid; outsourcing
part of their control apparatus to migrant ‘sending’or ‘transit’countries
1
and detaining
unauthorized arrivals ‘at a distance’; expanding the reach of sovereign powers extrater-
ritorially; and transforming border security across organizational entities nationally and
internationally. From different disciplines and with varying emphases, these develop-
ments have been conceptualized as ‘externalization’(Hyndman and Mountz, 2008;
Welander, 2021; Zaiotti, 2016), ‘remote border control’(FitzGerald, 2020) and ‘extra-
territorialization’(Dastyari and Hirsch, 2019).
Border externalization policy developments disrupt conventional distinctions between
the domestic and foreign, the humanitarian and exclusionary, and the correspondence
between state power and territory. These new configurations and proliferation of
border control are marked by unequal global geo-political relations and epitomize
what Aas (2013: 26–28, 2014: 532) theorizes as the ‘Northern penal state’, with the cap-
acity to export its penal models and technologies of crime control; extend its security
agenda and specific visions of order into the international domain; and expand its domes-
tic interests and control functions through ‘extraterritorial forms of policing, prisoner
transfers, investments in prisons abroad and such like’.
Although many studies have provided important critiques of US, European and
Australian externalized border controls and their devastating impact on migrants’lives,
discussions of the actual workings of externalization and border security building from
the perspective of the global South remain scarce (for notable exceptions, see Frowd,
2021; Gaibazzi et al., 2017; Stambøl, 2019, 2021; Stock et al., 2019; Vammen et al.,
2021). It is crucially important to go beyond the northern analytical focus and to ‘see
from the peripheries’(Aas, 2012: 11) in order to understand the ‘situated’meanings
and practices of externalization. In this context, a comparative approach has been particu-
larly useful in providing a much-needed corrective to universalistic claims about border
control—for example, by examining the relational nature and negotiated aspects of
European Union border externalization, as Turkey, Moldova and Morocco develop dif-
ferent strategies of ‘migration and border diplomacy’to leverage with the EU over pol-
itical resources and maximize the opportunities for increased mobility of their own
citizens (Laube, 2019).
This article seeks to contribute to our criminological understanding of the divergent
nature and policy outcomes of border externalization by comparing how offshore
control plays out in Malaysia and Indonesia in Southeast Asia. These two geographically
proximate, non-signatory countries to the 1951 UN Refugee Convention have attracted
much attention in the last two decades in the context of Australia’s controversial
border protection policies, which came to be known as the ‘Pacific Solution’since
2001 (Taylor, 2021; Weber, 2006). Australia regards Indonesia and Malaysia as key
transit states and has pursued a broadly similar policy to keep out Australia-bound
asylum seekers and refugees. The so-called Indonesia and Malaysia ‘solutions’of
migrant interceptions, offshore processing and detention exemplify Australia’s embodi-
ment of the northern penal state and its capacity to outsource migration control and
extend its borders into the sovereign domain of southern states. Seen in this light,
Indonesia and Malaysia can be understood as the ‘most similar cases’under what
538 Theoretical Criminology 26(4)
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