Locally Mobile Workers in Southeast Asia: An Invisible, Gendered, and Precarious Nebulosa

Since the last decades of the twentieth century, the mobility of populations has rapidly increased, both in type and extent. This has been happening throughout the world and is now considered to be a major structuring element of societies. It calls for a radical rethinking of the very notion of local society, not to mention of nation-state (Adey 2010; Salazar and Smart 2011). While ideas and symbolic constructions involving mobile subjects make up one of the powerful emerging battlefields of modern politics in the West, it is more and more clear that in Asia, too, locality is constituted as much by small-scale and international movement as it is by rootedness. Work- related mobility plays a big role in this new world configuration. ASEAN has acknowledged its fundamental vision for the region as a shared economic space by promulgating as early as 2007 the Declaration on the Protection and Promotion of the Rights of Migrant Workers and, in more recent years, a permanent forum for its implementation.