Fifteenth Global Studies Conference

Abstract

Throughout the late 2000s, likely thousands of Burmese people living in Malaysia were subjected to deportation, extortion, and enslavement in an arrangement between Malaysian immigration agents and Thai traffickers. For years, NGOs and the press had publicly raised the alarm about the trafficking operation but were met with denial and dismissiveness by Malaysian officials. Yet, the April 2009 publication by the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee of a report on the scheme sparked a chain of results: an acknowledgement of the problem by the prime minister, a police investigation, arrests of five immigration officers, changes in immigration staffing practices, and within a few months, a sharp decline in reported trafficking at the border. This paper asks, why did a single Senate staff report move the Malaysian government in ways that years of advocacy by civil society could not? Conventional wisdom would simply attribute this to the cachet of the U.S. government, but closer examination reveals that this facile explanation is far from the whole story. Through documentary research as well as interviews with Malaysian and American advocates, this paper studies the behind-the-scenes tactics employed to maximize the Senate report’s impact, explores differences in approaches to advocacy, and ultimately offers considerations for civil society actors seeking to exert influence over government.

Presenters

Alexander Blocker
Student, MA in Conflict Resolution and Coexistence, Brandeis University - Heller School for Social Policy and Management, Massachusetts, United States