Forced Migration in Southeast Asia

A Brief Overview of Current Research

Authors

  • Gunnar Stange Department of Geography and Regional Research, University of Vienna
  • Patrick Sakdapolrak Department of Geography and Regional Research, University of Vienna
  • Kwanchit Sasiwongsaroj Research Institute for Languages and Cultures of Asia (RILCA), Mahidol University
  • Matthias Kourek Department of Geography and Regional Research, University of Vienna

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.14764/10.ASEAS-0024

Keywords:

Current Research, Forced Migration, Persons of Concern, Southeast Asia

Abstract

Southeast Asian countries host significant numbers of forcibly displaced populations, both within countries and across borders. This brief review paper provides a basic overview on recent forced migration research in Southeast Asia for the period 2013 to 2018. To this end, a keyword search with two predefined sets of search terms was carried out in the Web of Science database in September 2018. The identified research literature corpus was then analyzed regarding persons of concern, study site(s) (country/ies) as well as main drivers of migration. The results show that the major part of studies focuses on refugees and asylum seekers in the region’s main host countries, namely Thailand, Malaysia, and Indonesia. This correspondence between current research trends and the distribution of refugees and asylum seekers in Southeast Asia could, however, not be identified for internally displaced persons (IDPs). Although Southeast Asian countries account for a substantial share of worldwide IDPs, only a very limited number of identified studies focus on this group of persons of concern.

Author Biographies

Gunnar Stange, Department of Geography and Regional Research, University of Vienna

Gunnar Stange currently holds a position as post-doctoral researcher in the research group Population Geography and Demography at the Department of Geography and Regional Research, University of Vienna, Austria. His research interests include peace and conflict studies, development studies, and forced migration studies. His regional focus is on Southeast Asia.

Patrick Sakdapolrak, Department of Geography and Regional Research, University of Vienna

Patrick Sakdapolrak is Professor of Population Geography and Demography at the Department of Geography and Regional Research, University of Vienna, Austria. His research field is at the interface of population dynamics, environmental change, and development processes, with a focus on the topics of migration and displacement as well as health and disease, mainly in South- and Southeast Asia and East Africa.

Kwanchit Sasiwongsaroj, Research Institute for Languages and Cultures of Asia (RILCA), Mahidol University

Kwanchit Sasiwongsaroj is Associate Professor at the Research Institute for Languages and Cultures of Asia (RILCA), Mahidol University, Thailand. Her research interests include cross-cultural studies focusing on cultural differences between majority and minority ethnic groups, including migrants, and their consequences for their health and well-being.

Matthias Kourek, Department of Geography and Regional Research, University of Vienna

Matthias Kourek holds a BA in Geography from the Department of Geography and Regional Research, University of Vienna, Austria, where he is currently pursuing his MA studies in Geography and working as a student assistant in the working group Population Geography and Demography.

References

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Published

2019-12-26

How to Cite

Stange, G., Sakdapolrak, P., Sasiwongsaroj, K., & Kourek, M. . (2019). Forced Migration in Southeast Asia: A Brief Overview of Current Research. Austrian Journal of South-East Asian Studies, 12(2), 249–265. https://doi.org/10.14764/10.ASEAS-0024

Issue

Vol. 12 No. 2 (2019): Violence in Southeast Asia

Section

Research Workshop

License

Articles published before December 2019 are licensed under the following Creative Commons License: Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported.  Articles published after that date are licensed under the following Creative Commons License: Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 4.0 International.