Title

Boats to nowhere?: Navigating Risks and Uncertainties aboard Rohingya Refugee Boats

Speaker

Antje Missbach (Professor, Bielefeld University) 

Abstract

Refugee Studies tend to be terracentristic, so far widely ignoring events that take place at sea. In this presentation I foreground the maritime passages of Rohingya refugees navigating the Andaman Sea. Framing the empirical data along the risk-uncertainty continuum, I seek to highlight unexpected responses to the interruption of maritime movements. Amidst their enforced strandedness at sea, passengers face hunger, dehydration, existential fears, their health suffers rapidly, and they may engage in actions that they would never consider doing under normal circumstances. By capturing some responsive moments from a bottom-up perspective, it becomes possible to reveal some agentic powers that can make a difference to life and death aboard of refugee boats.

While travelling in the same boat, chances of survival differ substantially amongst the passengers, which raises questions on how to best perceive them in social terms. Based on some of the accounts I present in the seminar, I will then ask what collective formations do these dynamics onboard resemble the most? Questioning the nature of these onboard-socialites and whether they should be regarded as a ‘risk community’ or rather as a ‘community of fate’, helps gain more nuanced insights into maritime refugees’ agentic capacity to respond to the risks and uncertainties enforced onto them.

Bio

Antje Missbach is Professor of Sociology at Bielefeld University, specialising in the study of global migration and mobility. She is the author of The Criminalisation of People Smuggling in Indonesia and Australia: Asylum out of reach (Routledge, 2022), Troubled Transit: Asylum Seekers Stuck in Indonesia (ISEAS Yusof Publishing, 2015); and co-author with Jemma Purdey and Dave McRae of Indonesia: State and Society in Transition (Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2020). Her latest co-edited and open-access works include Refugee Protection in Southeast Asia: Between Humanitarianism and Sovereignty (Berghahn, 2024, with Susan Kneebone, Reyvi Mariñas and Max Walden).

Contact

Decha TANGSEEFA (CSEAS)