Regarding Borders

In the turquoise waters between the southern Philippines and northern Indonesia, an elderly man from Watunapatto sits in a small wooden boat he built himself from trees felled from the island where his ancestors once migrated when the fishing season changed. The sea breeze caresses his face, wrinkled by time and salt.

He doesn’t know exactly which country he’s in. But he does know one thing: if the authorities arrive, he could be considered a lawbreaker. Yet, for his ancestors, the sea was a highway, not a national boundary.

Since the end of World War II, Southeast Asian nations have been born out of pain and destruction. Flags were raised, proclamations were made, and constitutions were written. Indonesia gained independence in 1945, the Philippines a year earlier, and Malaysia in 1957. But what appears to be the birth of independence is, in many ways, a continuation of the old colonial project: the policing of territory, the subjugation of people, and the discipline of ways of life that deviate from the state’s logic.

One of the most profound colonial legacies is the state’s borders. The lines drawn with rulers on colonial maps have now become heavily fortified, barbed-wire borders. Modern cartography, as historians have noted, is not just a tool for depicting the world—it is an instrument of power. In colonial hands, maps are not just about orientation, but about domination. Modern cartography makes the world an object that can be measured, classified, and ultimately parceled out.

Claude Lévi-Strauss, in his examination of colonial thinking, shows that colonialism conquered territories not only physically but also conceptually. It established binary oppositions: modern versus backward, land versus sea, rational versus magical.

Indigenous Peoples living in forests, mountains, and seas were categorized as “other”—not only geographically, but also epistemologically. Their ways of life were deemed illegitimate, inefficient, and uncivilised. The state, in this colonial legacy, became the institution that disseminated this way of thinking into its policies, laws, and apparatus.

After formal colonialism ended, postcolonial states took over these instruments.

However, instead of eradicating the logic of colonial exclusion, they continued it. Claude Meillassoux calls this a new form of dispossession: the appropriation of Indigenous Peoples’ land, labor, and means of production for inclusion in national economic systems and global capitalism. In this context, the mobility of indigenous peoples, previously central to their lives—moving according to the seasons, resources, or social relations—is suddenly perceived as a threat to state sovereignty.

Michel Foucault provides us with crucial concepts for understanding this dynamic: biopower and governmentality. The modern state, Foucault argues, no longer merely subjugates bodies through violence, but through the regulation of life. The state regulates the birth, death, education, movement, and even the way its citizens think.

In the context of Indigenous Peoples living on the border, their mobility becomes the target of surveillance. They must have identity documents, residence permits, fishing permits, farming permits, and even a permit to live. Without these, they become illegal on their own land.

This form of power doesn’t always cruelly manifest itself. It manifests itself in forms such as in village administrators, in small laws governing forest or sea use.

Foucault called it disciplinary power: power that operates through systems of surveillance, classification, and the internalisation of norms. Indigenous Peoples who were once free to move are now taught to feel guilty when they move. They internalize this guilt, like a schoolchild who fears being late because of a previous punishment.

But behind this bureaucracy and norms, there is another, darker form of power. Achille Mbembe calls it necropolitics: the power to determine who can live and who can die. In the context of borders, indigenous people who cannot access health services because they lack official documents, who are arrested for crossing borders without permission, and who lose their livelihoods because their waters are declared protected or militarized—all are examples of how the state chooses who is worthy of life. In necropolitics, not only are bodies controlled, but life itself becomes an object of power.

In Indonesia, cases like this are too numerous to count. Indigenous Peoples in Kalimantan who move from one village to another are arrested for crossing a palm oil company’s concession. Sea Tribe fishermen in the Riau Islands are prohibited from fishing because their territory has become an industrial zone. The Bajau people of Sulawesi and the southern Philippines are constantly monitored, suspected of being smugglers or separatists simply because they go out to sea as usual.

The state sees them not as citizens, but as a disturbance to the order. Yet, in their own logic, national borders never existed. The sea is not a divider, but a connector. Land is not property, but a shared heritage. Mobility is not a violation, but part of the ethics of life.

So-called modernity, as Lévi-Strauss argued, is often built on the erasure of alternatives. In the postcolonial state project, alternative ways of life for indigenous peoples are pushed aside in favor of the logic of development. Roads are built, schools are established, maps are updated—but all with one goal: to fit them into a controllable system.

Claude Meillassoux sees this as a new form of primitive accumulation, as discussed by Karl Marx: the forcible appropriation of resources and self-sufficient ways of life to fit into the logic of capitalism. In the context of the postcolonial state, this means the abolition of collective property, the conscription of communities into wage labor, and the revocation of community autonomy. The state becomes an intermediary between Indigenous Peoples and the global market. It not only regulates but also facilitates dispossession.

On the ground, all of this occurs in very concrete forms: evictions, criminalisation, restrictions on movement, and violence by the authorities. But it also takes more subtle forms: Indigenous children are taught that their ancestors’ ways of life are “old-fashioned,” that they must “advance,” and that they must “survive in global competition.” This internalisation is far more effective than guns, because it turns indigenous peoples into their own police.

Foucault called this “normalisation”: the process by which individuals voluntarily conform to norms dictated by power. In this context, Indigenous Peoples who were once free to move now ask permission to travel. Those who once lived alongside nature are now required to exploit it for development. Those who were once autonomous are now dependent on the state for survival.

Necropolitics operates not only in biological determinations of life and death, but also in social life. When Indigenous Peoples lose their languages, rituals, living spaces, and social relations, they lose the meaning of life. They remain biologically alive, but culturally dead. The state may not kill them directly, but it does so by killing their world. And this, in many ways, is more terrifying than physical death.

Maps once drawn by colonialists now serve as the basis for military operations, development programs, and exclusionary conservation. On paper, these lines appear neutral. But on the ground, they separate families, cut off migration routes, and destroy identities. These lines are now guarded by soldiers, surveillance cameras, and state regulations. They become the most potent tool of power because they are invisible. It’s seen as “inevitable.”

But Indigenous Peoples aren’t always silent. They persist, adapt, and in many cases, resist. In their own ways: building cross-border solidarity, preserving local knowledge, resisting through the law, or simply continuing life as usual. They move despite prohibitions, go to sea despite protection, and farm despite prohibitions. They defend their lives, not because they want to fight the state, but because their lives demand it.

And herein lies perhaps the greatest paradox of the modern state project: that in its attempt to control life, the state has lost sight of life itself. The state sees mobility as a threat, not as a form of life. It sees borders as protection, not as separation. It sees Indigenous Peoples as the problem, not as part of the solution.

But this resistance never occurs in a vacuum. It always occurs within an asymmetrical landscape of power. Whenever indigenous peoples demand recognition of their right to life—not just the right to land, but also the right to a way of life—the state often responds with a logic of security. In many cases, the security in question is not community security, but rather investment security.

This logic operates through state policies that appear neutral and technocratic, but are fundamentally designed to tame space. Border areas, particularly those rich in natural resources such as mines, forests, and seas, are often remapped for infrastructure, industry, or conservation projects. This mapping rarely involves the participation of Indigenous communities, even though they have lived on the land for generations. Colonial cartography reappears in modern forms: through digitalization projects, national spatial planning, and geospatial information systems.

In the Indonesia-Malaysia border region of Kalimantan, for example, the Dayak people, who for hundreds of years have moved between rivers and forests, are now faced with the reality that part of their territory has become a palm oil concession and another part is a state-managed conservation area. They find themselves in a liminal position: no longer able to hunt or farm because they are considered illegal, but also without viable livelihood alternatives from the state.

This liminal existence, within the theoretical framework of Michel Foucault, is the result of a strategy of “governmentality”—the state’s way of producing governable subjects. The state not only regulates society through law or apparatus, but also through the production of knowledge: surveys, censuses, population classifications, and the development of identification systems that define who is legal and who is illegal. In this context, Indigenous Peoples not registered in the state administrative system are considered “non-existent.” They become shadows within the legal system: alive, but without rights.

This logic is what has driven many Southeast Asian countries, including Indonesia, to establish large-scale digital identification schemes, such as the e-KTP or single identity number system. On the surface, this appears to be an effort to modernize bureaucracy. But behind this lies a vast project of creating fully traceable, regulated, and disciplined “administrative subjects.” Those who cannot fit into this system, whether because they live nomadically or refuse to submit, become targets of control.

In Claude Meillassoux’s framework, this is the most advanced form of “primitive accumulation” discussed by Karl Marx: dispossession is no longer carried out through direct violence, but through more subtle means—registration, standardization, and the imposition of new norms that dispossess old ways of life. Accumulation no longer takes the form of mere physical plunder, but also of control over life itself.

Indigenous peoples, who once lived within autonomous social and economic networks, are now forced into the wage labor market, the national education system, and the logic of a commodity-based economy. They must work on plantations that replace their forests, send their children to schools that eradicate local languages, and pay taxes on land they inherited without title.

In this context, every aspect of their lives becomes part of the mechanism of value production for the state and the market. And when they resist—for example, by continuing to live nomadically, or by continuing to fish in traditional waters now claimed as state territory—they are deemed not only illegal but also uncivilized. This stigma is subtly instilled through school curricula, mass media, and national development narratives that glorify the stability, progress, and formal sovereignty of the state.

This is a form of power that Foucault describes as disciplinary power that operates through mechanisms of internalization. Indigenous people begin to feel ashamed for not being able to show their ID cards, or for their children not attending formal school, or for not having a bank account. Power operates no longer through physical coercion, but through shame, a sense of inadequacy, a sense of failure to be “modern.”

But it’s not just bodies and souls that are controlled. Necropolitics, as described by Achille Mbembe, is manifestly present in the living spaces of indigenous communities. When the state cuts off public services in areas deemed non-compliant, when healthcare access is only available to those with legal identification, when clean water or electricity is only provided to communities willing to relocate, the state is practicing the politics of death.

Necropolitics is not just about physical murder, but also the systematic conditioning of social and cultural death. Communities that do not conform to the state’s plan are left to slowly decay: losing their youth, losing their historical narratives, losing their ecological connections. They die, even though they are still breathing.

The sea as a living space is the most tragic example of this. Since the colonial era, the sea has been seen as a space to be tamed. Modern nations project their power onto the sea through international law, military fleets, and surveillance technologies like AIS (Automatic Identification System).

However, for communities like the Bajau, Sama, or Orang Laut, the sea is not just an economic space, but a spiritual and social one. When the state replaced the sea as a border, cross-community social relations that had existed for hundreds of years—between Sulawesi, Mindanao, Sabah, and Maluku—were severed. Kinship ties and barter-based economic networks were now seen as smuggling routes. Mobility was considered a violation. The fluid identities formed from the intersection of maritime cultures were accused of threatening national unity.

In this context, the sea transformed from a space of life into a space of death. Indigenous fishermen had to contend not only with state officials but also with giant corporations granted permits to manage the sea. In Indonesia, market-based marine conservation projects like Blue Carbon or Ocean Offset further narrowed the living space of Indigenous communities excluded from these schemes. They were deemed insufficiently “scientific,” insufficiently “sustainable,” and insufficiently bankable.

And herein lies the absurdity of state power: claiming to protect the sea while ousting its original protectors. As in a classic tragedy, power cannot distinguish between threat and true sustainability. It destroys in the name of protection, and eliminates in the name of development.

But amidst this repression, there is always a struggle to survive. Indigenous communities are constructing participatory maps, establishing traditional schools, forming cross-border alliances, and pursuing legal action—even though the laws they face are built on the same logic that has erased their existence. This struggle isn’t always grandiose, but it is real: in every ritual that persists despite being prohibited, in every young person who chooses to relearn their mother tongue, in every mother who refuses to move from her homeland.

They live not to fight the state, but to defend the world. A world not divided by lines, not measured by commodities, not governed by deeds.