ABSTRACT
Introduction This paper focuses on Arabs in the contemporary urban social landscapes of peninsular Malaysia with the aim of exploring changes in the forms of belonging that might be underway with the substantial increase in non-citizens who now share cities with citizens. The following inquiry relates the question of belonging to the scholarship that has expanded the scope of citizenship to take into consideration the non-juridical means by which people become ‘citizens’. The influx of large non-citizen groups followed the liberalisation of the Malaysian economy in the late 1980s in tandem with the adoption of what are regarded as neoliberal policies across the globe. Scholarship on populations such as this has moved from regarding them as juridical non-citizens to understanding the various ways in which they assert themselves as citizens when citizenship is understood by a variety of claims and place-making whose legitimacy does not rest on powers of the state (Isin and Turner 2008). The current thinking on citizenship thus does not rest on either the sovereignty or the territory of the nation state, and challenges us to consider a variety of ways by which people make a place for themselves in social contexts of different scales, within nation states and in transregional terms. Ong notes the following with regard to the changing nature of citizenship:
MALAYSIA’S NEW ETHNOSCAPES AND WAYS OF BELONGING
This reconsideration of citizenship provides a framework within which to locate noncitizen populations such as the Arabs under study.
