This trend presents a number of profound issues for the state and families involved. These relate to the granting and meaning of citizenship, the question of rights and entitlement to public welfare services, custody of children, and access to employment. How are states coping with these new demands? And how are the individuals concerned coping with the restrictions imposed by states? The principal ways in which state sovereignty has been affected and reconfigured will be investigated at this conference in the context of the phenomenon of the rising trend towards international marriage in East and Southeast Asia.

We are particularly concerned that in the current globalizing processes, international marriage has become an arena of contention over rights, privileges, and access. While the reasons and opportunities for people to contract marriages with partners from different nationalities have increased, state sovereignty rests on the assumption that its citizens and their family units belong to just one nation, regardless of any shifting or migratory lifestyle they may practice. International marriages by their very existence challenge the state and the boundaries of its sovereignty.

This conference seeks to investigate the phenomenon of international marriages, in particular, those issues related to the power of the nation-state, and its custodial relationship towards ‘its’ citizens in East and Southeast Asia. In investigating these issues, the conference seeks to tease out the processes and consequences of institutional control over the “international marriage” in East and Southeast Asia using a variety of disciplinary perspectives, including demography, social policy, law, geography, sociology, social anthropology, politics, gender studies and history.

Key issues:

• Politics of legal recognition in international marriage including gender
  difference in legal status
• Citizenship requirements, categories and processes for spouses in
  international marriage
• Barriers to rights and access to social benefits and employment for spouses
  in international marriages
• The process of legal recognition of children of international marriages and
  their access to state welfare and education systems, as well as the
  custody of children in the event of marriage dissolution
• Consequences of international marriage dissolution: policy and practice
• The ideology of the state in control over the ‘family’ in international unions

 

Workshop on
Muslim-non-Muslim marriage, rights and the state in Southeast Asia

This workshop will examine the phenomenon of marriages contracted by a Muslim and a non-Muslim in Southeast Asian countries, and the processes and consequences of institutional control over them. Different countries in Southeast Asia have different institutional constructs within which marriages can take place across the religious divide.

In Malaysia and Indonesia, for example, Muslim marriages are governed by Islamic family law, and non-Muslim marriages by the civil law. In Malaysia, marriages between Muslims and non-Muslims can only take place under the Islamic family law; in which case, the non-Muslim individual has to convert into Islam. Conflicts occur when an already-married individual changes religion and contracts another marriage under the other legal system, or when these marriages are dissolved and there is contention over custody and guardianship of children.

The dynamics between state and religio-cultural forces will be the key to determining the framework within which marital partners are accorded recognition, receive legal protection, or access to welfare and benefits. In particular, we will look at the ways in which Muslim-non-Muslim marriages and unions are recognised or not recognized, how the family unit is defined, and how legal statuses, including access to social benefits, are assigned to ‘the other’ spouse and children.

State definition and regulation play a primary role in drawing and policing the boundaries. Questions arise as to how the individuals involved in these marriages cope with the situation they find themselves in, whether during the marriage or upon its dissolution. It is pertinent also to ask whether and how these marriages, by their very existence, challenge state and cultural boundaries, or by their being lived out, bring to the fore the contradictions in state legal systems.

The focus will be on the impact of structural factors, the politics of legal recognition, and barriers to rights. In addressing these issues, we will also examine the consequences of marriage dissolution (and inter-religious conversion), in terms of the rights and access of each partner, to abode, to marital property, and to the custody of children.

Key Issues:

• Politics of legal recognition, including gender differences in legal status, in international marriage
• The legal barriers to rights and privileges in Muslim-non-Muslim marriage, particularly in contexts where religion plays a role in the demarcation of rights and privileges
• The process of legal recognition of children of Muslim-non-Muslim marriages, their access to rights and privileges
• The consequences of Muslim-non-Muslim marriage dissolution -- policy and practice – with regards to custody of children, religious conversion and re-conversion issues, etc.
• The dominant state ideology of the ‘family’ and how it plays out in Muslim-non-Muslim marriages