Controlling a people: The Orang Asli, governmentality, and state crime in Malaysia

Abstract

The Orang Asli are the indigenous people of Peninsula Malaysia and like other indigenous peoples around the world face assimilation, cultural denigration, displacement, and dispossession. In this thesis I argue that the Orang Asli face settler-colonial control and violence at the hands of the Malay dominated Malaysian nation-state. Their experience is both similar to and different from the settler-colonial violence and control that indigenous peoples face in Western settler-colonial contexts such as the United States, Canada, Australia, and Aotearoa New Zealand. As Agozino (2004) has argued, because criminology as a discipline is rooted in Western colonial imperialism it is not surprising that it has not yet been able to see beyond the colonialism of the Western settler state. Even indigenous criminology, an emerging and significant subfield of criminology, has yet to comment on non-Western settler-colonial indigenous experiences. This gives rise to a gap that this thesis aims to address. In this thesis, I conduct an examination of current and historical literature, academic literature, and grey literature such as legislative and policy documents, media releases, judicial writings, and case law. Using this literature base, I argue utilising settler governmentality as an analytical lens, that the Orang Asli have faced and continue to face the Malaysian nation-state’s settler tactics of control and management. Settler governmentality is an emerging theory of governmentality posited by indigenous and postcolonial scholars based on Michel Foucault’s concept of governmentality and neo-Foucauldian theorisations on power, race, and empire. I argue that tactics of settler governance seek to disempower, silence, control, and manipulate the Orang Asli. A settler governmentality reading reveals the deliberate, active, and passive failures of the Malaysian nation-state to recognise the Orang Asli’s rights and freedoms. These failures are in effect state crimes against the Orang Asli.