Introduction
Across Southeast Asia and beyond, contemporary maritime development projects are often carried out on the assumption that seas and coastal zones are “empty” spaces awaiting rational management. This vision has prompted the need to create standard grids of territory, ownership, and resource use to facilitate efficient management. As shown by James C. Scott (Reference Scott1998), such designs of “state simplifications,” have the propensity of reordering and obscuring the lived complexities of environments and societies to fit administrative rationalities. While the analysis of everyday strategies of resistance and resilience of marginalised groups to counteract pressures of state simplifications has been investigated more deeply in terrestrial research (Scott Reference Scott1985, Reference Scott2009), comparatively less attention has been paid to maritime domains. This paper presents a comparative study of two sea nomadic groups: the Moken on the southwestern coast of Myanmar and Thailand, and the Orang Suku Laut in the Riau-Lingga Archipelago of Indonesia (Figure 1). Despite facing numerous challenges, these mariners have managed to maintain their presence in Southeast Asia’s maritime waters and coastal areas. Some remain fully nomadic communities, while others oscillate between life on land and sea, and still others have been sedentarised in coastal settlements.
map showing the distribution of the Moken and Orang Suku Laut.
Maritime nomadic populations have been and still are predominantly framed as passive victims of state expansion, environmental degradation, or capitalist encroachments. Their mobility, rhizomic territorialities, and more-than-human relational worlds are often interpreted as signs of marginality and backwardness. Such representations not only echo colonial imaginaries but also subject them to being dispossessed of their maritime and land rights. In challenging these assumptions, this article shifts the analytical lens from perceiving exclusion as a condition to exclusion as a process. It veers away from just seeing exclusion as a static state of being to grasping it as ongoing actions that generate the exclusion. Hence, this article probes into the counter actions of how actors navigate, negotiate, and at times reconfigure challenges of exclusion. It looks into the ways that sea-nomadic populations actively engage in, resist, and rework the dynamics of state simplifications and maritime territorialisation. We foreground resilience as the capacity to navigate uncertainties, reassemble relationships, and generate new configurations of life under constraint. This perspective moves beyond narratives of loss or simply adaptation, toward a nuanced understanding of how sea-nomadic societies enact forms of agency that are at once pragmatic, strategic, and embedded in multispecies and spiritual worlds to retain their inalienable connection to the ocean.
This paper begins by establishing the concepts of state simplifications, powers of exclusion, and resilience to contextualise the particular challenges in competing nomadic and state territorialities. It then discusses three key aspects of Moken and Orang Suku Laut experiences. First, it examines perceptions by land-based populations towards the ontologies of these communities. Misconceptions of the sea-oriented communities as uncivilised and aimless wanderers since as early as the colonial period have perpetuated a rationality to dispossess them of their rights to sea and land-based resources. Second, it examines the challenges brought by the commodification of land and sea resources on the Moken and Orang Suku Laut’s reproduction of their lifestyle. Lastly, it investigates their strategies of resilience and countering exclusion as they strive to preserve both their cultural identities and rights to the seas and coastal regions that they inhabit. It is our contention that recognising nomadic groups as active agents of counter-exclusion processes is essential for both empirical accuracy and the conceptual rethinking of maritime political ecology.Footnote 1
State Simplifications, Exclusion and Resilience
The many powers at work in commodifying resources in the maritime world often adopt the view that the seas and coastal areas are virgin spaces. Whilst this perception supposedly lends to greater legibility and easier management of what would have otherwise been a far more complex modus operandi in effecting huge development projects, it narrows the vision of a far more intricate reality. Transformative “state simplifications,” as Scott (Reference Scott1998: 4-5) explicated, arise from authoritarian high-modernist states imposing coercive powers to reorder complex social systems and environments to conform to technocratic blueprints that ignore local experiences and diversities. The imposition of state-driven territorial enclosures simplifies resource access by replacing complex, customary “bundle-of-rights” systems with individual private ownership. This process, which is a characteristic of modern state-promoted privatisation, converts collective governance of the commons into a simplified individual ownership designed for exclusive enjoyment (Schlager and Ostrom Reference Schlager and Ostrom1992). Consequently, lies the paradox of state simplifications: while it increases accessibility for some, it simultaneously results in greater exclusion for others.
As voiced by Hall et al. (Reference Hall, Hirsch and Li2011: 4), “[e]xclusion is not a random process, nor does it occur on a level playing field. It is structured by power relations. Across rural Southeast Asia and elsewhere, exclusion from land can be understood in terms of the interaction between regulation, force, the market and legitimation.” Exclusion as they have argued has a “double edge” (Hall et al. Reference Hall, Hirsch and Li2011: 7). Whilst exclusion has been widely discussed in studies of land access as a “condition” to allude to people lacking access to land, Hall et al. (Reference Hall, Hirsch and Li2011: 5) offer us a different approach by focusing on “processes and actors.” As they have observed, “all land use and access require exclusion of some kind” and “[e]ven the poorest people, farming collectively and sustainably, cannot make use of land without some assurance that other people will not seize their farms or steal their crops.” In a similar vein, Scott (Reference Scott1998: 49) has made the case of how “[t]he capacity of state simplifications to transform the world” is also challenged by “the capacity of the society to modify, subvert, block, and even overturn the categories imposed upon it.” Compared to land, state enclosure of maritime spaces began in earnest only after WWII. This notably led to the creation of Exclusive Economic Zones (EEZs). Consequently, this gave rise to what has been coined by Campling and Colás (Reference Campling and Colás2017: 2) as “terraqueous territoriality” to refer to how national appropriation of marine resources and land-based capitalist mechanisms of control are applied to maritime spaces. As described by Guattari and Deleuze (Reference Deleuze, Guattari and Massumi1987), this transformation seeks to ‘striate’ via categorising and enclosing previously “smooth” sea-nomadic spaces to facilitate capitalist accumulation. The enactment of terraqueous territorialities is a deeply political process that redefines powers of structures and mechanisms of exclusion in the control of marine resources.
Meir (Reference Meir and Levin2020: 175) postulates that in the pre-modern period, nomadic populations were the dominant group in ecological and spatial organisation. Their skills in resource management and conceptions of territoriality enabled them to challenge sedentary state dominance in controlling spaces. Like the nomads in pre-modern times, the sea nomads of today are actively resisting exclusion through resilient strategies. Nevertheless, there remains an oversight in recognising the sea nomads as full-fledged actors in processes of counter-exclusion. We address this gap by examining their resilience and adaptive capacities. This paper thus explores their resilience as demonstrated in just a few of their disparate and wide-ranging ways in navigating changing socio-political and economic land- and sea-scapes to defy the taxonomic ordering of state simplifications.
Resilience is neither static nor returning to a prior state of stability. It is about “wayfinding” (Ingold Reference Ingold2000: 219) through changed environments. It is both a practice or action and a process that is constantly expanding in diverse ways. This transformability is not about single adaptation processes or evolutionary hierarchies. It is about the ability to bounce back and forward to create an essentially new system (Folke Reference Folke2006: 262; Gibson-Graham et al. Reference Gibson-Graham, Hill and Law2016). This ability to rebound or “resiliency” (Wesley-Equimaux Reference Wesley-Equimaux, Valaskakis, Stout and Guimond2009: 26) to a form of flexibility reframes this into what Māori scholar Mason Durie (Reference Durie2006: 8) calls “indigenous resilience” that reflects the “innate determination by indigenous peoples to succeed” versus “suffering subjects.” Resilience as a multidimensional art of relating is a more-than-human endeavour. It also demonstrates alternative ways of dealing with crisis. Hence, importantly, the spectrum of resilience should always include the interplay with more-than-human actors such as forces in the spiritual realm (Kearney Reference Kearney2022).
Seeing like a Landlubber: Perceptions of Sea Nomads by Land-based Powers and Populations
While power dynamics in regulatory and market forces shape exclusion, legitimation is the critical factor in the exclusion of present-day sea-nomadic communities. Their nomadic mobility challenges the identity and conceptual framework of the nation-state. As such, they are viewed by settled populations as a fundamental other (Levin and MacKay Reference Levin, MacKay and Levin2020: 8-9; Scott Reference Scott1998: 187-188). Therefore, to understand their current exclusion from access to land and marine resources, we begin by exploring historical perceptions of the Moken and Orang Suku Laut that have contributed to shaping the legitimation of justifying their current-day exclusion from land and marine resources.
The Moken are Austronesian-speaking marine nomads. Until the early 2000s, they roamed the sea aboard their houseboats (kabang) during the dry season and settled in temporary dwellings during the monsoons. They were traditionally divided into five subgroups, each named after a mother-island: Olang Chadiak, meaning “people of Chadiak” Island (Zadetgyi in Burmese), Olang Lebi (Lampi), Olang Nyawi (Nyaung Wee), Olang Jait (Pale or Pearl Island), and Olang Dung (Don). Today, the Burmese government estimates their population at around 1,500 in Burmese waters, with an additional 500 living in Thailand (Nan Lwin Hnin Pwint Reference Pwint2017).
The small numbers of the Moken subgroups, combined with perceived notions of their technical destitutionFootnote 2 – as until recently, they relied solely on harpoons for hunting in forests, the sea, and underwater – have led observers to systematically depict them as a primitive population on the verge of extinction. Ethnographic studies have shown that their numbers have remained relatively stable, fluctuating between an estimated 1,000 and 5,000 individuals (Ivanoff Reference Ivanoff2004, Nan Lwin Hnin Pwint Reference Pwint2017). They have occupied the maritime space between Myanmar and Thailand, possibly from the 16th century to the present day (Boutry and Ivanoff Reference Boutry and Ivanoff2024). Unlike the Orang Suku Laut (see below), there are no written traces about the Moken prior to their arrival in the Malay Peninsula. Whether they were once integrated or not into early Malay kingdoms like the Orang Suku Laut is unknown. However, according to their oral literature, they constantly fled the grip of rising polities since they identified themselves as MokenFootnote 3 (Boutry and Ivanoff Reference Boutry and Ivanoff2024). As far back as written accounts of the Moken take us, they have been portrayed as uncivilised and unadapted. One 19th-century account describes them as follows: “Surrounded with valuable riches of Nature, [the Moken] remain miserably poor. A true ichthyophagist, to whom the Earth has no charm, and whom he neglects so much that he does not even entrust to her a single grain of rice” (Helfer Reference Helfer and Potter2019: 11).
For British officials and missionaries of the 19th century, the Moken were not only perceived as primitive within the dominant Morganian framework of evolution but were also considered “outcasts” (Brown Reference Brown1907). According to some accounts (Anderson Reference Anderson1890; White Reference White1922: 57-58), the Moken took to the sea as a strategy of mobility in response to threats such as Burmese and Malay piracy and slavery, implying that their nomadic condition was imposed rather than chosen. While Western interpretations (see Carrapiett Reference Carrapiett1909: 1) of the ethnonym “Moken” (e.g. from lemo, “to be submerged,” and oken, “saltwater”) tend to essentialise their identity as intrinsically tied to the sea, such readings risk overstating the ecological determinism of a marine environment. This emphasis is reinforced by exonyms used by sedentary populations – Thai (Chao Nam, Chao Lay Footnote 4), Malay (M’sing, Besing Footnote 5), or Burmese (Hsalon Footnote 6) – which foreground the sea and portray the Moken as landless wanderers.
However, these external categorisations obscure the fact that in their own ontology, Moken view the world as a balance between sea and land, where their domain extends precisely from the foreshore exposed by the tides to the edge of the forests. Beyond the sea and the forest are domains reserved for men who hunt in these two environments with the same gears (Ivanoff Reference Ivanoff2004: 431-433). The Moken’s own self-identification points not to the sea as such, but to the islands as their primary ecological and social setting. Terms such as Olang Polao (“people of the islands”), as well as distinctions made by neighbouring groupsFootnote 7, highlight an insular orientation that integrates both land and sea. Ivanoff’s (Reference Ivanoff2004: 166) thorough exploration of Moken oral literature convincingly links the ethnonym to their ethnogenesis mythFootnote 8, whereby the princess Ken was condemned by her elder sister, the queen, to be drowned (lemo Ken) along with her followers for engaging in an adulterous affair with the queen’s husband. Therefore, mobility – rather than the sea as an ecological setting – constitutes the core of Moken identity.
Landlubbers persistently portrayed the Moken as a purely maritime people – rootless, landless, and inherently nomadic – shaping how they are now perceived by the Myanmar State and Burmese agriculturists. This had tangible consequences for their political and economic exclusion in the process of State territorialisation of the Myeik Archipelago. Efforts in rendering the Moken legible to the State have largely failed throughout colonial and modern history.Footnote 9 With the creation in 1996 of Myanmar’s very first marine reserve, Lampi Marine National Park, the military tried to gather them in what was to become the “Ideal SalonFootnote 10 Village” established within the park, although less than one year later, the Moken had fled back to different islands (Ivanoff and Lejard Reference Ivanoff and Lejard2001). However, more recent state-led enclosures in the region have led to new forms of resources appropriation from which the Moken have been excluded.
In comparison, perceptions and representations of the Orang Suku Laut in the Riau-Lingga Archipelago of modern-day Indonesia by land-based powers have changed over time through political shifts. The term “Orang Suku Laut” literally means “Tribal People of the Sea.” From their elevated stations prior to the nineteenth century in the early Malay kingdoms (Barnard Reference Barnard2007: 33) to their marginalised status in present-day Republic of Indonesia, processes of change altered their social constitution and relationships with land-based communities.
The Orang Suku Laut were sine qua non in the formation of the early Malay kingdoms. Rulers of the Srivijaya empire, Malacca Sultanate and Johor Sultanate regarded them as essential allies in forming the socio-political landscape of the Malay World (Benjamin Reference Benjamin, Benjamin and Chou2002: 45). Their mobility critically provided the communicative and integrative links for the hegemony of successive Malay states over widely dispersed populations (Andaya Reference Andaya2010: 173-201; Urry Reference Urry1981: 7).
Held in the highest esteem until the mid-twentieth century because of their mobile seafaring lifestyle and unparalleled knowledge of resource-rich places and areas where human societies could survive in the maritime world, the Orang Suku Laut played a critical role in burgeoning international trade and socio-diversity in the region. Wealth for the sustenance of the land-based communities depended on them. Their skills procured essential edible seaweeds, sea cucumbers, pearls and turtle shells in places unknown to others for international trade (Andaya Reference Andaya1997: 487). Because of their knowledge of the currents, winds and many hidden dangers in the maritime world, they also were tactically positioned as guardians of the Malay rulers. It was they who provided early warning of attacks from the sea and who formed the first line of defence. Most importantly, they navigated international merchant ships to call at the port of the Malay rulers and mercilessly punished those who refused (Andaya Reference Andaya1975: 51). At the directives of the Malay lords, they would also raid incoming vessels to acquire supplies for trade vital for the success of the Malay entrepôt (Andaya Reference Andaya2010: 181).
Through their relationship with the Malay sultans, the Orang Suku Laut were divided into numerous suku-suku or feudally organised territorial groups that were obliged to perform different kinds of corvée services. Such feudal groups were most characteristic of the Riau-Lingga archipelago and adjacent islands, and less so further south in the Pulau Tujuh area. Each group was assigned a different task and thus differed in size and economic as well as political significance. Groups closer to the centres of power were accorded higher rank and status but came under stricter control of the central power. Those further away from the centres of power were lower in rank and status but enjoyed far greater autonomy as they were beyond the control of the Malay overlords.
As noted by Andaya (Reference Andaya2010: 177-184), the mariners never united under a single Orang Suku Laut leader, and hostilities occurred. Different groups identified themselves with their territories of exploitation and were devoted to their own elders. Despite such differences, their sense of Orang Suku Laut identity developed because of a shared common loyalty to a powerful Malay patron and because of being valued as a people for their specialised maritime skills. Their favoured status with the Malay ruler encouraged their maintenance of a lifestyle and collective identity that clearly distinguished them from the sedentary Malay communities. There was indeed little reason for the Malay overlords and the Orang Suku Laut to abandon this separation. Instead, there was greater incentive to retain and strengthen this boundary premised on their different yet mutually complementary beneficial economic roles and lifestyles.
To strengthen their ties with the Orang Suku Laut, the Malay rulers bestowed them with rights to the seas, prestige, marriage alliances and economic incentives (Trocki Reference Trocki1979: 56; Wolters Reference Wolters1975: 10). Seventeenth-century Dutch sources reveal that Orang Suku Laut leaders were made captains of royal trading vessels and kin relations were forged with them through marriage with prominent families (Andaya Reference Andaya2010: 185). The most favoured Orang Suku Laut were honoured with titles and entrusted with lucrative raiding expeditions that gave them huge “commissions” and access to foreign goods. In a volatile maritime environment where their skills were in great demand, they were never fully constrained by their loyalty to just one ruler (Andaya Reference Andaya2010: 190). Hence, the Malay rulers competed for their loyalty and conferred handsome rewards for their services. Insubordinations were often overlooked without punishment because they were highly mobile (Andaya Reference Andaya2010: 186). The Malay rulers had also never felt the need to know the islands that were under their control. Such matters were left in the hands of the Orang Suku Laut chieftains (Andaya Reference Andaya2010: 191). Moreover, the Malay rulers did not govern the Orang Suku Laut directly. Instead, officials were appointed from within the respective Orang Suku Laut groups or those with blood ties to them (Andaya Reference Andaya2010: 185).
The relationship between the Orang Suku Laut and the Malay rulers, however, began to decline when the young and childless Sultan Mahmud Syah was assassinated in 1699. Without an heir apparent, the lineage and sovereignty of the Malacca-Johor dynasty disintegrated rapidly. After Sultan Mahmud Syah’s death, political and social structures in the Malay World were transformed as migrant groups of Bugis, Minangkabau and Illanun became established in the region. The Bugis brought more sophisticated maritime technology, the Minangkabau formed a sedentary economic base, and the Ilanun’s superior naval power and large-scale raiding abilities, as well as integration into local sultanates (Andaya Reference Andaya1975: 321-323; Barnard Reference Barnard2007: 42-26), displaced the Orang Suku Laut in the region. Perceptions of the Orang Suku Laut shifted from indispensable allies to inferior communities. The diminished importance of the Orang Suku Laut further intensified when European colonial powers penetrated the region. In 1856, the British colonial administrator, John Crawfurd (Reference Crawfurd1856: 354) portrayed them as a class of thieving Malays. Many other European colonialists perpetuated such negative perceptions. The new European powerholders viewed them as a people with no history” (Crawfurd Reference Crawfurd1856: 25) and who were “less civilised than the Orang Darat [land-dwelling Malays]” (De Bruyn Kops Reference De Bruyn Kops1855: 108). New conceptions of delineating fixed political borders and boundaries and prescribed activities within these boundaries were also introduced to severely quell their seafaring lifestyle. Meanwhile, local Malay lords were pressured to salvage and re-establish whatever political power they could garner from sedentary land-based communities. Hence, all this made the Orang Suku Laut redundant in the Malay World (Trocki Reference Trocki1979: 85).
Today, the Orang Suku Laut are disdainfully viewed by land-based communities, with the added twist that the land-based Malay communities are their harshest critics. Current-day state policies to quell their mobility are framed within the context of modernisation and development ideologies. In the archipelago, the emphasis has been on sea nomadic groups. In 1994, the Indonesian government launched a Presidential Instruction Program for Less Developed Villages. Before that, the National Development Planning Board surveyed the country’s villages. The Orang Suku Laut were categorised as a suku-suku terasing and suku-suku terbelakang (isolated and backward people) who had been left behind (Colchester Reference Colchester1986: 89). Problems for the mariners were further exacerbated when, in 2005, legislation was passed that permitted the government to evict people for the implementation of large-scale national development projects.
In view of these modernisation and development ideologies, pressures were and continue to be exerted to sedentarise the Orang Suku Laut. Some of them have moved ashore, yet others persist in their mobile lifestyle. Nonetheless, they all distinguish themselves as “Orang Suku Laut” rather than orang darat (land people) or any other kind of sea people. In everyday communication, they differentiate themselves from the orang darat (people of the land) by speaking of kita (us) versus meraka (they or them). Orang Suku Laut group belonging is often articulated by delineation in the phrasing “bukan orang lain”, meaning “not stranger.” As the sea is for them an inalienable gift from their ancestors, it means that their occupancy of it cannot be separated, removed, or alienated from them (Chou Reference Chou2010).
Long-held negative perceptions of the Moken and Orang Suku Laut by land-based States and societies have facilitated their exclusion from land cum maritime tenure rights and justified state-driven transformations of their environment. Their supposed lack of attachment to land has made it convenient to overlook their presence when allocating coastal and island spaces for tourism infrastructure, enclosing areas in the name of conservation or pearl farming projects. By defining them as “land-needless,” authorities have legitimised the jurisdiction to appropriate key areas of their traditional territory on the authority of economic development, and thus relegating them further into the margins of both land and sea. Processes of “state simplifications” (Scott Reference Scott1998) and “powers of exclusion” (Hall et al. Reference Hall, Hirsch and Li2011) have played out in practice, shaping policies that have redefined Moken and Orang Suku Laut livelihoods and territorial claims in favour of State-driven developments.
Commodification of Coastal Land and Marine Resources
Scott’s (Reference Scott1998: 262) elucidation of “the radical simplification” of fields and forests for utilitarian purposes is germane to how state-led “blue economy” (Belton et al. Reference Belton, Little, Zhang, Edwards, Skladany and Thilsted2020; Fabinyi et al. Reference Fabinyi, Belton, Dressler, Knudsen, Adhuri, Aziz, Ali Akber, Kittitornkool, Kongkaew, Marschke, Pido, Stacey, Steenbergen and Vandergeest2022; Satizabal et al. Reference Satizábal, Dressler, Fabinyi and Pido2020) strategies are also standardising and commodifying the complex oceanic worlds of the Moken and Orang Suku Laut. While the guiding idea for the commodification pivots on “the existence of a commodity market and competitiveness pressure, on states as well as on entrepreneurs, to maximise profits or revenue” (Scott Reference Scott1998: 263); the “unspoken logic” is “one of consolidating the power of central institutions and diminishing the autonomy” (Scott Reference Scott1998: 286) of such communities as the Moken and Orang Suku Laut.
Through practices of “ocean grabbing” (Benett et al. Reference Bennett, Govan and Satterfield2015) and “terraqueous territoriality” (Campling and Colás Reference Campling and Colás2017) that reallocate marine resources and spaces to dispossess vulnerable populations, “the existing distribution of power [and] wealth” (Scott Reference Scott1998: 286) is altered. As articulated by Wee and Heyzer (Reference Wee and Heyzer1995: 30), “What grows then is the stockpile of resources that is transferred into a portfolio of stocks, commodities, products, goods, [and] things.” As this stockpile increases, the extent of its ecological base also expands far beyond the Moken and Orang Suku Laut sites of resource consumption. Borgström’s (Reference Borgström1967) conceptualisation of “ghost acreage” may be used to describe this extended ecological base. That is, resources are extracted and transferred to feed countries that have exceeded their own ecological carrying capacity.
The enclosure of maritime spaces in Myanmar was formalised by the State unilaterally claiming a 200-mile economic zone on 19 April 1977. However, this was not recognised by Thailand (Phiphat Tangsubkul Reference Tangsubkul1982: 64). A 1980 agreement between the two governments on the delimitation of their maritime boundaries entered into force in 1982 but conflicts persisted until the end of the 1990s (Nitiruchirot Reference Yodsapon2022: 46). This process of re-territorialisation of ocean frontiers (Raharja and Karim Reference Raharja and Karim2022) extended territorial logics from land to sea and profoundly reshaped access to marine resources. In Myanmar’s Myeik Archipelago, the Moken experienced exclusion from accessing both land and sea-based resources due to powers of regulation, force, the market, and legitimation (Hall et al. Reference Hall, Hirsch and Li2011: 4).
The enforcement of maritime frontiers – together with newly enacted land laws – provided the necessary regulatory frameworks for the re-territorialisation of the region by the State. For instance, pearl culture in Myanmar began in 1954 with the establishment of a private Japanese-Myanmar joint-venture farm. (Tint Tun Reference Tun1998) However, the pearl-farming sector reached a disruptive scale for the Moken with the creation of the military-owned Myanmar Pearl Enterprise (MPE) in 1989, which led to the creation of three joint ventures. Following the 1990 military coup and the shift from a socialist economy to a market-oriented system under the SLORC/SPDC,Footnote 11 resource exploitation became widespread across the country, particularly in border areas. Much like how marine and coastal areas were considered as virgin spaces, many frontier areas were also regarded as untouched wastelands (Ferguson Reference Ferguson2014). The 1991 Wasteland Laws institutionalised this vision by enabling the auctioning of land concessions across the archipelago. This had the subtle effect of rendering both land and adjacent marine environments legible, divisible, and allocable through state regulation.
The effective control of these newly defined spaces was underpinned by force. Most concessions were sold to military battalions or private entrepreneurs with military ties, typically for plantation development (notably rubber and oil palm). However, as with many land concessions during this period, the percentage of land that was actively developed remained marginal (San Thein et al. Reference Thein, Diepart, Moe and Allaverdian2018). The presence of military-backed actors ensured territorial control and exclusion. In this sense, coercion operates not only through direct displacement but also through the latent capacity to enforce claims, securing both land and maritime zones for state-aligned interests while marginalising local populations, including the Moken.
These regulatory and coercive dynamics are further reinforced by the market that expands and deepens exclusion through commodification. In the 1990s, the privatisation of marine fisheries prompted thousands of Burmese individuals, mainly from Lower Myanmar, to seek economic opportunities in the islands. This led to the creation of new mixed Burmese-Moken settlements and an increase in intermarriages between the two populations (Boutry and Ivanoff Reference Boutry and Ivanoff2008; Boutry Reference Boutry2015). At the same time, the liberalisation of the economy facilitated the establishment of pearl farming joint ventures, beginning in 1993, with Niino International Corporation of Japan forming the Myanmar-Niino Joint Venture Company Ltd. In the following years, other joint ventures formed with companies coming from Japan and Australia that started operating principally in the northern half of the Myeik Archipelago.
During the 2011-2021 period of political transition in Myanmar, the lifting of economic sanctions accelerated foreign investment. Pearl farming joint ventures expanded from three to twelve, and Myanmar’s pearl production nearly doubled between fiscal years 2013-14 and 2020-21 (Central Statistical Organization 2023: 137). This expansion monopolised larger areas of sea grounds, further restricting access to islands and fishing grounds for local communities, including the Moken. Parallel developments in tourism saw the multiplication of hotel concessions, with up to fifteen such projectsFootnote 12 (some completed, others not). These projects have sometimes taken control of entire islands, rendering them inaccessible to the Moken. Beyond the official tourism infrastructure, Burmese entrepreneurs also invested in land and unregistered tourism developments, primarily catering to local and Chinese tourists who are less scrutinised than Western tourists.Footnote 13 This tourism-driven speculation has created a land market that has negatively impacted housing availability in local villages. As land became a commercial asset, a local land market emerged, driving up prices and forcing Moken individuals to sell beach land to cope with financial pressures. Gradually, they were priced out of villages and excluded not only from marine resources but also from coastal settlements.
Underlying and justifying these transformations is the power of legitimation, which naturalises exclusion through specific spatial imaginaries. As with coastal fishing communities under territorial use rights fisheries systems or state claims under EEZ regimes, the assertion of adjacency rights (Foley and Mather Reference Foley and Mather2019: 302) by both public and private actors relies on a geographical ontology that links land and sea. This is captured by terraqueous territoriality, whereby capital accumulation seeks to territorialise the sea through land-derived forms of sovereignty and appropriation. Within this framework, legitimacy is anchored in sedentary, land-based relations to space. The Moken, identified as a “land-needless” population of sea nomads, fall outside these normative constructions of territoriality. As a result, their mobility and maritime lifeways are not only unrecognised but actively disqualified, excluding them from claims to agency and rights in both land and sea domains.
In ways comparable to the changing environment and commodification of marine resources that have impacted the Moken, the Riau Archipelago, which has been home to the Orang Suku Laut for centuries, was incorporated in 1950 into the newly formed Republic of Indonesia (Wee Reference Wee2002: 499). Land reform has been a key part of the Indonesian revolution (Lucas and Warren Reference Lucas and Warren2013). Development programs for nation building have provoked intense hostility and competition over resources and territorial rights. In late 1989, the Riau Archipelago became part of a “Growth Triangle” also known as “SIJORI”. The triangle is a three-country cooperation initiative involving Singapore, Johor (a state in Malaysia), and the Riau Islands with the aim of leveraging the strengths of each to form a larger supranational region to attract international investments for greater economic growth. Riau’s contribution to the economic complementarity is in the form of making available its maritime resources and sea cum coastal spaces. In this globalising paradigm, Riau’s sea- and land-scapes amongst the three countries have been transformed most dramatically. From the optics of the modern Indonesian State, the success of this economic endeavour pivots on supplanting old geographies with new socio-political optics that would make the complexities of maritime spaces and resources more legible for easier administration. (Raharja and Karim Reference Raharja and Karim2022).
The SIJORI Growth Triangle has transformed the Riau Islands from an open-maritime commons into standardised industrial, tourism and infrastructure zones to attract foreign investments (Chou and Wee Reference Chou, Wee, Benjamin and Chou2002: 318-363). This development, driven especially by the partnership with Singapore, has privatised formerly communal fishing waters. This transformation has also seen powers of exclusion systematically curbing local access to fishing grounds, mangrove forests and coastal areas. Sea tenure customary laws such as those observed by the Orang Suku Laut are superseded by licensing and concessions granted to industrial investors. By classifying coastal areas as virgin spaces, the state has simplified the complex ecological and social utility of these areas into economic assets. Key aspects of these maritime enclosures include the zoning of large stretches of coastal areas to create industrial estates, the privatisation of beaches, and the expansion of free trade zones to attract foreign direct investments. Enclosures have been validated by the implementation of special customs, tax, and investment regulations to enable the Riau Islands to operate as an integrated extension of the Singaporean industrial ecosystem. In 1973, the Batam Industrial Development Authority was formed to manage Batam Island as the core of the duty-free industrial zone. By 1990, a Presidential Decree called for a Coordinating Team of Riau Province Development to be formed to expand the development to the other islands in the Riau Archipelago.
With mounting pressures of such new optics, what and how have the attending ideologies of these developmental policies impacted the maritime peoples of Southeast Asia, and how have the mariners strived in their strategies of counter-exclusion and resilience to preserve their cultural identities and rights to the seas and coastal regions they inhabit?
Strategies of Counter-Exclusion and Resilience
Although the Moken and Orang Suku Laut have not been able to ward off state control completely in the contestation of their lifeblood and living spaces, they have persevered in finding ways for continued access to the maritime world which is core to their identity. Their resilience is not about unchanging ways. It is about their ability to adapt and persist with response strategies “to recover from expected and unexpected situations, stresses, or threats in order to sustain, thrive, and to move on” (Eitel Reference Eitel and Stein2023: 2).
Resilience builds on a myriad of relationships that includes collaborating across different life worlds to move on. The Moken and Orang Suku Laut have employed strategies of forming alliances with Chinese thau-ke Footnote 14 networks, engagement with environmental projects, and relationships with more-than-human actors in different life worlds to fortify their position in protecting their access to the sea and coastal areas that they have occupied for centuries. Ethnographic glimpses into their curation of these vastly different strategies exhibit the spectrum of their creative resourcefulness.
Alliance with Chinese Thau-ke Networks
If, following James Scott’s (Reference Scott1998) argument that state simplifications aim at rendering complex social-ecological worlds legible and governable, then the Moken’s historical response has been to remain illegible through mobility and dispersion, like that of many populations in precolonial Southeast Asia (Scott Reference Scott2009). The myth of Gaman, which explains the roots of Moken nomadism (Ivanoff Reference Ivanoff2004), is a metaphor for mobility as a foundational condition of existence (Ivanoff Reference Ivanoff2004). Yet, as the archipelago becomes saturated by concessions and the proliferation of Burmese fishers’ settlements (Boutry Reference Boutry2015), the Moken’s traditional means of evasion have become increasingly untenable. These dynamics have prompted a reconfiguration rather than a disappearance of nomadic agency.
In every single place where pearl farms are implemented in Myanmar, restrictions on locals’ access to resources stem from the combined effects of regulation and force. Pearl farm facilities fully owned by the government after the country’s nationalisation simply expelled locals from their operating area, as experienced by the Jait Moken group. Their expulsion from JaitFootnote 15, considered by this group as their ‘mother-island’, triggered successive displacements: to Taw Wet Island (Bushby in Moken) from where they were again expelled, then to La Ngann (Lengan) and the south of Lampi (Lebi). These repeated movements underline the fact that exclusion is not a singular event but an ongoing process structured by shifting configurations of power. In a twist of fate, in 2017, Tasaki company was allowed an extension of its pearl farming area, which subsequently encompassed the entirety of the La Ngann group of islands where the Jait Moken group had lived and thrived for their livelihood. In 2018, Tasaki company officially delimited former fishing grounds as no-entry zones. The sea, once a smooth space, became partitioned, regulated, and enclosed.
It is precisely at this juncture that alliances with thau-ke networks emerged as a central strategy of counter-exclusion. Historically thau-ke intermediaries facilitated exchange between Moken subsistence activities and wider markets. They bartered (and now buy) Moken products (pearls and mother-of-pearl, sea cucumbers) with rice and other goods. They also served as protectors and brokers for the Moken vis-à-vis external authorities. In the absence of formal leadership structures within Moken society (Ivanoff Reference Ivanoff2004: 412), these thau-ke became de facto representatives, translating between different regimes of value and authority. With the growing migration of Burmese entrepreneurs into the Myeik Archipelago, alliances between Moken women and Burmese thau-ke increased, leading to a greater segmentation among Moken subgroups. Conversely, this multiplication of thau-ke networks has allowed the Moken to navigate the multiple and often contradictory logics produced by state simplifications. The case of the Jait Moken group’s interactions with three distinct thau-ke illustrates how counter-exclusion operates through relational plurality. The Moken Jait group has been interacting principally with three thau-ke. Two are in La Ngann and one in Lampi. The latter is an activist whose viewpoint on how the Moken should be represented and defended differs from the other two thau-ke. Initially, the three thau-ke collectively represented Lengan villagers’ (both Moken and Burmese) in opposing the extension of Tasaki pearl farm to Lengan. Although the company implied that Lengan was an illegal settlement,Footnote 16 it agreed to open up three islands (including the village’s location) to Moken boats. However, the lack of formal recognition maintained a condition of precarious access.
Subsequently, the divergence of thau-ke strategies sprung up to reveal how different articulations of the powers of exclusion are reappropriated by the Moken. One thau-ke is the Lengan village administrator who oversees the village’s economic development. It was also this thau-ke who facilitated the influx of Burmese fishermen to the village in the 2000s. He believes that “the Moken should be educated through proper schooling and taught Buddhism”Footnote 17 for their own good. This Lengan thau-ke-administrator has been a main critic of the establishment of a Locally Managed Marine Area (LMMA) around Lengan that was promoted by an international NGO. This is because this thau-ke is of the opinion that the LMMA prevents trawlers from entering the area and thus deprives the village’s economy of the spending of visiting fishing crews. This thau-ke views the owners and captains of these trawlers as important drivers of the village’s economy and social development since they participate in funding schools and donating to the Buddhist monastery. This thau-ke also took a gentler stance toward the Tasaki representatives when they started to offer healthcare and religious donations to the village as compensation under so-called social responsibility schemes. This thau-ke’s position reflects an accommodation with both market expansion and processes of legitimation that are rooted in a Burmanised socio-cultural order. In contrast, the other two thau-ke mobilise alternative regimes of legitimacy. Advocating the protection of Moken’s livelihoods – to which they also depend – they draw on environmental governance and transnational NGO networks as a resource for counter-exclusion. One was heavily involved in the management of the Lampi National Marine Park alongside an Italian Non-Governmental Organization (NGO), and the other was the keystone in the establishment of LMMA. These two thau-ke brought two Moken elders from Lengan in 2019 to the country’s capital, Naypyidaw, to meet with the Deputy Minister of Natural Resources and Environmental Conservation. This resulted in the mobilisation of media and Civil Society Organisations (CSOs) and pressure from the national and regional governments to reassess Tasaki’s marine and land concessions.
Importantly, these competing strategies do not resolve into a unified political stance. Moken individuals can selectively align themselves with different thau-ke depending on context. Some align themselves close to the village administrator – even by going to the pagoda – for accessing his economic resources, while others choose to be closer to the other two thau-ke involved who are more active in the political sphere regarding protection of Moken claims and rights. In other words, Moken circumvent state attempts at categorisation through distributed relationality. In the absence of a single leader, authority is diffused, making it difficult for state actors to fix responsibility or impose singular forms of governance. In the wake of the 2021 coup, while one Burmese thau-ke was targeted by military authorities for his political activism (including defending Moken’s land claims), the Moken remained unimpacted and maintained a degree of mobility.
Alliances with the Chinese thau-ke have also been forged by the Orang Suku Laut as a strategy to navigate the changes that are happening in Riau. To link the Singapore-Johor-Riau Islands cooperation as a contiguous area in the Growth Triangle, Indonesian engineers took to building six bridges to form a 2,264-meter Trans-Barelang highway. As the islands that dot Riau are scattered far apart from each other and are all a distance from the city centre, the bridges were constructed to connect the three large islands of Batam, Rempang and Galang with a plethora of smaller islands to provide the infrastructure to attract foreign investments into the area. The project started in 1992 and took six years to complete. Since then, luxury hotels, golf courses, marine sports clubs, and seafood restaurants have been proliferating along many coastal fronts. There are now 693 hotels listed in the Riau Archipelago and at least 10 golf courses. It has been explicitly stated that Riau is fashioned to be a recreation zone, particularly in eco-tourism for international tourism (Dwibaskoro Reference Dwibaskoro2025; Indonesia Business Post 2022). As competition over sea and coastal spaces stiffen, so have different communities been denigrating one another in the competition for these spaces.
Although the Chinese have been present in the Riau Islands since the 18th century and have played a significant role in the archipelago’s international maritime trade, they are defined as “internal outsiders” (Sai and Hoon Reference Sai and Hoon2013). They are regarded as a distinct group that is involved in but not part of the Malay World. This distinction has also been accentuated by the Chinese community’s own structural persistence that has perpetuated their separateness within the Malay World. The relationship between the Orang Suku Laut and Chinese is complex and characterised by trade and alliances. While their relationship is marked by economic disparities and exploitation in some cases, the mariners have forged a closer relationship with the Chinese rather than with the Muslim Malays. It is in their belief that the Malays practise ilmu hitam (black magic) and are thus a constant threat to their well-being. In contrast, the Chinese are a neutral and non-threatening group. Hence, it is “safe” to interact with them. Historically, the Orang Suku Laut have bartered with Chinese middlemen, and some have provided labour in various kinds of maritime activities for the Chinese. In return, the Chinese have provided them with essentials such as rice, sugar and coffee. More importantly, the Orang Suku Laut see their alliance with the Chinese as connecting them to big cities beyond the Malay World. For them, although the Chinese may be a group with peripheral status, they have come to dominate the economic realm in Indonesia. The Chinese are seen as having “brought about an inversion of power in the Archipelago by relocating, so to speak, the Malay World into a wider global market economy where status and power structures become redefined” (Chou Reference Chou2003: 118). It is not uncommon to hear some Orang Suku Laut speaking of themselves as the anak buah (followers/underlings) of the Chinese thau-ke. The anak buah-thau-ke relationship may become so strong that it borders on enlisting the Orang Suku Laut employee as a member of the “family business network” (Wang Reference Wang1990).
The ethnography of the Tiangwang Kang community exemplifies how one such group of Orang Suku Laut has continually allied themselves with the Chinese to protect their continued access to the sea and coastal places. Chung Chai Hak, also known as Ce Ha, was an immigrant from China who settled in Riau and worked as a headman of a charcoal-burning kiln business in Tiangwang Kang. The business belonged to a Chinese named Lim Tuang who was based in Singapore. Dengkis, an Orang Suku Laut man, and his wife would frequently moor at Tiangwang Kang Island and do sporadic short-term work in the kilns in the period stretching from 1957 to 1958, and then again in 1962. Through their anak-buah-thau-ke interactions, Dengkis and Ce Ha forged a deep friendship and alliance to the extent that Ce Ha adopted one of Dengkis’ son. Ce Ha gave the boy a Chinese name, Atong, and raised him as his own. Atong became fluent in Chinese and very quickly learned the skills of managing the charcoal kilns. Even so, from time to time, Atong would still rejoin his parents to traverse the seas. As Ce Ha got older, he requested Atong to remain by his side to take care of him. This coincided with the period of Confrontation in Indonesia from 1963 to 1966, whereby the surge in anti-Chinese sentiment resulted in the burning down of many Chinese businesses. In that period, no Chinese was allowed to own any property in Indonesia. Ce Ha, who held the ownership documents for Tiangwang Kang Island and the charcoal kilns, made over the title deeds to Atong. Lim Tuang, the original and first thau-ke did not oppose the transfer of title deeds. Neither did Lim Tuang’s younger brother, Xiao Ti, raise any objections. When Ce Ha died on 12 April 1974, he bequeathed Atong all his possessions, including the charcoal kilns.
The political turmoil highlighted two important aspects of the Chinese community in the eyes of the Orang Suku Laut. First, hostile government policies aimed at the Chinese community remind the indigenes of the Malay World that the Chinese are not Malay, and second, the outsider status of the Chinese thau-ke compels them into alliances with their anak buah in business arrangements. The resultant close relationship between the Orang Suku Laut and the Chinese has therefore led many Orang Suku Laut to consider themselves “united with the Chinese.”
Under Atong’s management, the charcoal kiln business prospered. Upon the recent passing of Atong, his son Amos inherited the documents of ownership to Tiangwang Kang. The charcoal kiln business has ceased as permits to harvest mangroves were stopped in 2007, thereby making current charcoal production illegal (Harada and Kobayashi Reference Harada and Kobayashi2012: 43). Nevertheless, the Orang Suku Laut in Tiangwang Kang have continued to prosper by forging new alliances with the Chinese thau-ke in the neighbouring island of Akar.
Large tracts of forested areas were cleared to build the Barelang Bridge. Tiangwang Kang, which was previously hidden behind a thick growth of trees and penetrable only by approaching it from the sea, is now easily accessible by the newly constructed bridge. Located only three kilometres from the Barelang first bridge, also known as the Raja Fisabillanh Bridge, and with 90 percent of the roads being paved plus the building of a starred resort close by, the coastal fronts of Tiangwang Kang have attracted weekend tourists, bloggers and instagrammers in search of fresh ocean catches and new picturesque locations. Seeing the potential of profiting from this influx of visitors, Amos and the Chinese thau-ke in the opposite island formed an alliance to open a kelongFootnote 18 seafood restaurant built on stilts over the sea in 2009 and a second restaurant in 2015 in Tiangwang Kang. While Amos collects rent from the Chinese thau-ke, the latter has provided the capital to set up the restaurant. As headman of the Orang Suku Laut community in Tiangwang Kang that comprises 63 households or 203 residents, Amos has led his Orang Suku Laut community to work in the restaurants in between their being out at sea to fish. Their fresh ocean catches have been a drawing factor in the success of the restaurants. Financial gains have been garnered by both sides from this alliance. However, most importantly, this alliance that has generated a successful seafood restaurant operation has given the Orang Suku Laut Tiangwang Kang community a firmer hold on their ownership of the island and continued access to their maritime spaces. In what was formerly categorised as an old village that “distrust[s] anything coming from the outside” (Colchester Reference Colchester1986: 90), Tiangwang Kang is now recategorised as a village for “culinary tourism” with the potential of offering an alternative port for tourists who want to visit the neighbouring islands of Lancet, Panjang and Akar (Delpra Yandi et al. Reference Delpra, Rakhman, Martan and Sidabutar2023: 657).
Engagement with Environmental Projects
While exclusion of sea nomads from national conservation projects has been largely discussed (Ariando and Arunotai Reference Ariando and Arunotai2022; Clifton and Majors Reference Clifton and Majors2012), the Moken and Orang Suku Laut have shown how to the contrary of being excluded, they have used their traditional ecological knowledge, or leveraged the very pretext under which it has been appropriated by others, to engage with and to pull some legitimacy from such projects to counter exclusion from sea and land-based resources.
During the political and economic opening of Myanmar (from 2011 to 2021), Burmese people married to Moken invested in the nomads’ naturalist knowledge, particularly relating to the management of marine resources and ecosystems. The drastic depletion of marine resources in the archipelago over the past 30 years (particularly sea cucumbers, Trochus, and mother-of-pearl) has made it increasingly difficult to perpetuate an economy structured by Moken-Burmese relations. From a pioneering niche economy specific to the interaction between these two groups (Boutry Reference Boutry2015), fishing subsequently developed thanks to a population of Burmese migrants who took advantage of the social and economic networks developed by the pioneers and freed themselves from dependence on Moken knowledge. Increased pressure on marine resources threatens the Burmese-Moken economy. In the age of social networks, where environmental issues are becoming increasingly important, Burmese pioneers are investing in the nomads’ naturalist knowledge (location of shells and fish nurseries, reserved areas to allow species’ growth) to promote sustainable and rational exploitation of archipelagic ecosystems. Efforts to promote Moken knowledge of resource management are also part of new initiatives related to the management of the Lampi Marine National Park and the establishment (and institutional recognition) of locally administered marine areas (like the La Ngann LMMA), all of which aim to involve the Moken directly in their management. For the Moken, however, such involvement represents a profound ambivalence. It stands in tension with their long-standing strategy of avoiding incorporation into external systems of authority. Participation in conservation projects implies a degree of visibility, representation, and accountability that contrasts with earlier practices of mobility and evasion. Some older Moken consider those who participate in environmental conservation projects – often young individuals of mixed descent – to be Moken oèn, or “freshwater Moken,” a metaphor pointing to their sociocultural alienation.Footnote 19 Moken individuals are in fact constantly experimenting with new ways of interacting with external forces, to the point that it may lead to a sociocultural segmentation, as it happened for the Moken and the Moklen a few centuries ago (Boutry and Ivanoff Reference Boutry and Ivanoff2024). Yet, rather than interpreting this segmentation as a loss of coherence, it may be more productively understood as part of a broader logic of resilience grounded in experimentation. As suggested by Tsing (Reference Tsing2015: 20), the valorisation of “precariousness” and “indeterminacy”Footnote 20 can be seen as creating a perpetual renewal in society (Boutry et al. Reference Boutry, Galangau-Quérat and Ivanoff2022), enabling recomposition under conditions of uncertainty. Despite tensions brought by possibly diverging individual strategies, involvement in environmental conservation projects has in several instances served to protect the interests of whole Moken groups. It is notably through channels of environmental activism that the Moken could hinder – at least temporarily – the expansion velleities of the Tasaki pearl farm. In Lampi Marine National Park, the involvement of Moken (together with their thau-ke) in underwater trash collection, identification of marine species and awareness raising programs on environmental issues indirectly led the Myanmar Parliament to consider designating “specific islands as being exclusively for use by the Moken” and “to consider steps to protect the islands’ natural environment and reconsider some [development] projects under way there” (Nyein Nyein Reference Nyein2018). Unfortunately, these advances were wiped out by the 2021 military coup.
In the case of the Orang Suku Laut, within the framework of the Growth Triangle, the Indonesian Ministry of Maritime Affairs and Fisheries opened opportunities to foreign and domestic investors to rent and utilise islands in the Riau Archipelago (Ramadhany Reference Ramadhany2024). Investors are given up to 70 per cent of the land and the surrounding waters of an island, and the state controls the remaining 30 per cent (Ministry of Agrarian Affairs and Spatial Planning/National Land Agency Ministerial Regulation No. 8, 2019; Presidential Regulation No. 34, 2019). Investors are also given pioneer status and tax breaks. As an example, an 80-year concession for Rempang Island was awarded to investors of the China industrial giant Xingl Glass for what government officials defined as a project of “strategic national importance.” This spawned much controversy because the villagers who had inhabited the island as far back as 1834 were given less than a month’s notice of their eviction to make way for a $25 billion investment project (Ramadhany Reference Ramadhany2024). While most islanders possessed a Surat Keterangan Tanah (SKT) or letters explaining land ownership from their village heads, they could not obtain title deeds because of an instruction in 2002 from the then-mayor of Batam ordering local administrators not to issue title deeds (Jong Reference Jong2023). Observers of this take-over of Rempang Island see this as a pretext for land grabbing.
Many Orang Suku Laut communities possess neither SKT letters nor title deeds. Hence, with the increased presence of investors encroaching on their sea and coastal spaces, some Orang Suku Laut are experimenting with a strategy of working with non-governmental organisations by participating actively in developing marine conservation with the aim of raising their leverage as custodians of their sea and land spaces. One such example is that of how the Orang Suku Laut in Panglong and Kawal on Bintan Island have involved themselves with an international charitable organisation. Nikoi Island had previously been frequented and fully accessible to the Orang Suku Luat. However, a group of investors purchased the leasehold for the island in 2005 and transformed it into a private island resort in 2007. The resort is accessed by launch from Kawal, which is also inhabited by the Orang Suku Laut. To transport guests to Nikoi Island, an exclusive pier in Kawal was built for this purpose. Neither is this pier nor Nikoi Island accessible to the Orang Suku Laut or the local inhabitants of Riau. However, as part of the operators of Nikoi Island’s commitment to sustainable hospitality to set itself apart from the other island resorts in the Riau Archipelago, a non-governmental organisation called The Island Foundation was registered as a charity in Singapore in 2009 to support the community on Bintan Island. The Foundation promotes itself as working with the community on Bintan Island and adopting a guiding sustainability approach centred on community, culture, conservation and commerce. In the Foundation’s endeavour to work with the community on Bintan Island, it makes available to the community buildings for use as learning centres, provides local teacher training sessions and participates in community engagement activities. To ward off having more island and coastal spaces being cordoned off to the Orang Suku Laut, Tin Tin the headman of the Panglong Orang Suku Laut community and who has strong ties to other Orang Suku Laut communities across Bintan, Batam and beyond has used his current day facet of power which is his ability to have attained a high school diploma and to speak English to work with The Island Foundation. After obtaining another diploma from the Center for Tourism and Education, Tin Tin joined The Island Foundation in 2020 as a learning facilitator. In this role, he leads the Foundation’s engagement with Orang Suku Laut communities, particularly in the area of marine conservation. Tin Tin foresees that through active participation, this would corroborate the value of their knowledge to integrate it with conservation theories to protect their continued access to the many other islands and coastal fronts that dot the archipelago. Tin Tin has brought his cousin, Johanes who is the headman of the Orang Suku Laut in Kawal and who has strong ties with the Orang Suku Laut communities in the Lingga Regencies into the fore to join him in working with the Foundation. Together they are training the younger members in their communities to speak English and in the conservation efforts. A current project is their engagement in seagrass protection and rehabilitation. (Rifai et. al. Reference Rifai, Lukman, Quevedo, Francis, Sjafrie, Triyono, Mckenzie, Hidayat, Aditya, Kuriandewa, Suryawati, Prayudha, Suraji, Risandi and Hernawan2024).
Forces of More-than-human Actors
Paying attention to more-than-human actors reveals how spiritual forces, ritual practices, and religious artifacts participate in both exclusion and counter-exclusion. These forces are closely linked to the powers of legitimation and regulation, shaping how territory, presence, and precedence are recognised or contested within the archipelago. The meshing of development projects (pearl farms, tourist resorts and plantations) across the archipelago in Myanmar has been accompanied by various attempts at symbolic and religious appropriation by the Burmese. These practices can be understood as a form territorialisation enacted through the domestication and reordering of existing spiritual landscapes. Indeed, the Burmese who have migrated to the islands since the mid-2000s fear the Moken’s spiritual imprint on the archipelago, which they try to tame through Buddhism. The story recounted by Ma Kyi Win,Footnote 21 a seasoned Burmese spirit medium (nat kadaw) and specialist of the cult of the Thirty-Seven Nats,Footnote 22 well illustrates the potency attributed by Burmese individuals to Moken spirits.
During the filming in Bo Cho Island (south of Lampi) of a major Burmese production titled Moken Udan (“The Moken Legacy”), the crew encountered a series of supernatural disturbances attributed to the anger of the Moken spirits, including an unexpected storm and the mental and physical incapacitation of the director, unable to speak or work. As panic spread among the cast and crew, the production team called on the Burmese medium for help, who interpreted these events as a consequence of having disrespected Moken spirits. Although Ma Kyi Win made it clear that she was unfamiliar with Moken spirits, she proceeded to offer them an apology and a prayer. Possessed by a Moken ancestor, she demanded that chicken be brought to her and guided the director, unable to act on his own, to perform a sacrifice. The chicken and its blood were then thrown into the sea, and the director recovered his speech and faculties. As Ma Kyi Win remarked, “the Moken spirits are really strong” and not easily subsumed within dominant Burmese cosmologies. It explains that some Burmese settlers wage a ‘spiritual warfare’, which parallels material processes of enclosure, through Buddhist iconography. On the north-eastern tip of Nyawi Island, for example, where the local Moken celebrate their annual ceremony called ‘making the spirit poles’ (bo lobung), an altar to the Buddhist saint Shin Upagutta has been erected right next to it by Burmese villagers. On the island of Bushby, where the Jait Moken group holds the first day of its bo lobung, the spirit posts have been destroyed. Since the Moken shaman decided to build the most recent poles (normally renewed every year) in concrete, some Burmese individuals have come to put a photograph of a renowned Buddhist monk on the altar. Beyond religious devotion, these practices function as semiotic claims to space rendering the territory legible within a Burmese cosmological and moral order. In response, the Moken replace their ephemeral wooden spirit poles their discreet graves hidden in the undergrowth, with more durable concrete structures, translating their territorial presence into a semiotic register recognisable to outsiders. This can be understood as a way to assert their precedence and belonging within a competitive landscape of claims by materialising their spiritual and ancestral ties to the land. Such practices have been used by Burmese activists in their fight to legitimate Moken presence in pearl farming areas.
Correspondingly, in the current crisis of warding off challenges in the Malay World to preserve a measure of autonomy for their cultural continuity, the Orang Suku Laut have also drawn on their relationship with forces of more-than-human actors in different life worlds to fortify their position. Deeply rooted in the belief system of the Malay World is the concept of ilmu. The term stemming from Arabic means “knowledge” or “science.” As explained by Wilkinson (Reference Wilkinson1959: 421), the prominent scholar of Malay culture and history, the word ilmu encompasses “learning [based on divine revelation, science, magic, [and] any branch of knowledge or magic.”
In the Malay World, the Orang Suku Laut are alleged to possess the most powerful and extensive ilmu hitam or black magic. It is recognised as a form of power that can be used for revenge, cause harm, spark misfortune and even trigger death. The mariners are also seen as dangerously beholden to spirits that dwell in the maritime world, which is supposedly why they have such esoteric knowledge and power. Although the Orang Suku Laut speak of themselves as practising good ilmu, they do not deny they have the ability to dominate the inner essences of others and that they make deals with supernatural beings to possess this power. The Orang Suku Laut have strategically leveraged the widespread belief and fear of the efficacy of their ilmu to constrain the power of state or local officials. Hence when officials are tasked with effecting state-directed programs in Orang Suku Laut areas, they try to keep their visits brief so that they would be able to leave these areas as soon as possible. This has led to a considerable lack of systematic official documentation of the Orang Suku Laut in Riau, and many in the more remote islands are thus out of reach to many officials.
Conclusion
The experiences of the Moken and the Orang Suku Laut underscore how maritime nomadic communities in Southeast Asia have been rendered vulnerable by state simplifications, resource commodification, and narratives of development that privilege land-based paradigms of value, territory, and governance. Defined through a lens that often misrecognises their mobility, fluidity, and spiritual engagements with the sea, these groups have been variously portrayed as landless and backward –narratives that have legitimised their exclusion from coastal and marine spaces.
Yet, as this paper has shown, these communities are not passive victims of modernisation. Strategies of counter-exclusion and resilience of the Moken and Orang Suku Laut foreground the diversity of thought, worldviews, relations and practical skills required by them to deal with socio-political situated environmental changes. While the Moken and the Orang Suku Laut share several counter-exclusion strategies – such as forging strategic alliances with thau-ke intermediaries, engaging selectively with environmental governance schemes, and mobilising their spiritual relationships with more-than-human actors – they differ in how these tactics are embedded in their sociopolitical environments. The Moken, historically evasive of state structures, tend to navigate fragmented allegiances across competing stakeholders, using their decentralised social organisation and multi-site mobility to remain elusive and flexible. Their alliances with thau-ke are more fluid and plural, allowing them to play different actors against one another while avoiding centralised representation. In contrast, the Orang Suku Laut have often consolidated alliances through kinship-like ties with powerful thau-ke, which can sometimes anchor entire communities into stable patronage relations. Moreover, the Orang Suku Laut have more openly leveraged their feared spiritual power (ilmu hitam) to deter state intrusion and sustain semi-autonomy, whereas the Moken have increasingly turned to the semiotics of visibility – such as building permanent spirit poles and graves – to claim space and historical presence.
Their strategies of counter-exclusion and resilience – ranging from tactical alliances with Chinese thau-ke networks to pragmatic involvement in environmental governance, from symbolic engagements with more-than-human actors to strategic mobilisations of their cultural identities – demonstrate a remarkable capacity to navigate shifting regimes of power. Their ability to adapt without assimilating, to transform without dissolving, and to persist without retreating into nostalgia, exemplifies what has been called indigenous or relational resilience: not a static return to tradition, but an ongoing practice of living and resisting in precarious times.
The lived resilience of the mariners spans across multiple and different timeframes, spaces, and sociocultural areas. They have demonstrated multiple modes of resilience that have been shaped by constantly shifting socio-material circumstances and multiple power constellations. Their resilience can foreground deficits and sufferings, but it also illustrates how they demonstrate an astounding degree of agency and creativity in their effort to preserve their cultural identities and rights to the seas and coastal regions they inhabit.
Rather than seeking to fix sea peoples into bounded categories or spaces, it is imperative to recognise their entanglements with places, peoples, and more-than-human forces as part of an evolving political ecology. In this light, the struggles and strategies of the Moken and Orang Suku Laut offer not only ethnographic insight but also conceptual tools for challenging the territorial imaginaries of the modern state and envisioning more plural futures for oceanic worlds.
