Contested “understandings” of migration: Preliminary notes on a proposed ethnography of the 2018 Malaysia-Nepal MoU as transnational assemblage.

Abstract:

In late 2018, following media reporting on the high recruitment costs paid by Malaysia-bound Nepali migrant workers and then Nepal’s temporary suspension of migrant departures to Malaysia, the two countries signed a landmark Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) on the recruitment of temporary labor migrants. This talk offers preliminary notes on a project proposing to study this agreement ethnographically, taking the International Labour Organisation’s (ILO) role in making and implementing it as a starting point for engaging the heterogeneous constellations of actors constituting it as a transnational assemblage. The project thereby asks what kinds of notions of migrant and workers’ rights, distributive fairness, responsibility for welfare, and Asian cosmopolitanism emerge in the transnational space structured by this MoU, in which visions of rising Asia encounter both the stark inequalities that condition Asian migrant journeys and the globally mediated interventions of international organizations.

Jacob Rinck is a Visiting Scholar at the Department of Anthropology at George Washington University, and studies global inequality through a focus on migration and discourses of economic development. Jacob has a PhD in sociocultural anthropology from Yale University (2020), and is currently preparing a book manuscript and articles based on long-term research on the relationship between international labor migration, agrarian change, and narratives of economic development in Nepal. Two new research projects explore histories of neoliberalism and agrarian development, and emerging, transnational forms of migration governance in Asia. Jacob also holds an MSc Violence, Conflict and Development from the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, and studied sociology at Universität Bielefeld, Germany. In a professional capacity, he is currently a consultant for the World Bank, and has previously also worked at the International Crisis Group and for DFID.