Forced Migration in South-East Asia and East Asia Page 1 of 10 PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com). (c) Oxford University Press, 2014. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a title in Oxford Handbooks Online for personal use (for details see Privacy Policy ). Subscriber: University of Oxford; date: 09 January 2015 Print Publication Date: Jun 2014 Subject: Political Science, International Relations, Comparative Politics Online Publication Date: Aug 2014 DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199652433.013.0048 Forced Migration in South-East Asia and East Asia Kirsten McConnahie The Oxford Handbook of Refugee and Forced Migration Studies Edited by Elena Fiddian-Qasmiyeh, Gil Loescher, Katy Long, and Nando Sigona Oxford Handbooks Online Abstract and Keywords This chapter provides an overview of responses to forced migration in South-East and East Asia. It begins by outlining the extent of forced migration throughout the region, before discussing responses to forced migration and protection challenges in selected national contexts. The latter sections of the chapter examine two protracted refugee situations that have dominated this regional context: refugees from Indochina (1975–1995) and refugees from Myanmar (late 1970s–present). Keywords: forced migration, South-East Asia, East Asia, refugees, Indochina, Myanmar Introduction This chapter considers forced migration in South-East Asia and East Asia, a vast region that includes Brunei Darussalam, Cambodia, China, Hong Kong, Indonesia, Japan, Lao People’s Democratic Republic, Macau, Malaysia, Myanmar, the Republic of Korea, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, Timor-Leste, and Vietnam. The chapter opens with a broad overview of regional dimensions of forced migration. The second section provides more detail about selected individual country contexts. The third section examines two protracted refugee situations that have dominated this regional context: refugees from Indochina and refugees from Myanmar. A Regional Overview ‘South-East and East Asia’ is a region of tremendous economic, political, and social diversity. To the extent that a shared regional experience of forced migration can be identified, it is one of large mixed migration flows but very limited formal legal protection. Few nations in the region have ratified the 1951 Refugee Convention (with the exception of China, Cambodia, Japan, the Republic of Korea, Timor-Leste, and the Philippines) while none has acceded to the 1961 Convention on the Reduction of Statelessness and only one (the Philippines) has acceded to the 1954 Convention on the Status of Stateless Persons. There is much wider acceptance of general human rights instruments with all states in the region as signatories to the Convention on the Rights of the Child and the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women; including, perhaps surprisingly, such ‘pariah states’ as Myanmar and the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea. (p. 627) Remaining outside the global refugee regime does not mean that states in the region have refused to grant asylum, Thailand, in particular, has absorbed large-scale refugee flows continually for the past four decades. It does mean, however, that approaches to asylum have not been mediated by formal legal obligations. As in much of the rest of the world, South-East and East Asian nations’ primary concern has been with controlling irregular 1 2