ABSTRACT
Indonesia—Malaysia borders have been signified by the nature of porous, permeable, ‘soft border’ borders in their history and socio-cultural relationships. However, due to their current interests in their own national priorities of sovereignty, defence, and security, the states have made the borders more rigid. Taking the case of the Ambalat Sea Block dispute as a background, I argue that what was in the past was understood as a deterritorialized border gradually changed to be more reterritorialized through the enforcement of state territorialisation from both the states. This paper aims at to investigate the effects of the state territorialization toward the border landers in their everyday-life mobility. The research was conducted in some villages in the Indonesian part of Sebatik Island, a small divided island of the two sovereign states of Indonesia and Malaysia, in the province of North Kalimantan during 2013–2016, with the Bugis community as the research subject. The findings of the research show the state policies on territoriality have affected what used to be an intensified cross-border flow of people and goods into the Sebatik Island and (re)positioned the border population at a crossroads between openness and control of physical borders and socio-political boundaries’.
