Fauzan Fauzan and Kamarulnizam Abdullah have published “Hybrid Border Governance in Southeast Asia: Formalization, Securitization, and Everyday Governance in the West Kalimantan-Sarawak Borderland” in the Journal of Borderlands Studies. The article examines what happens when Indonesia strengthens official border infrastructure through the PLBN system while local communities continue to rely on jalur tikus, or informal crossings, for trade, kinship, and daily mobility. Based on fieldwork, interviews, and policy analysis from 2017 to 2024, the study finds that formalization does not erase informality. Instead, it reshapes informal mobility into negotiated, adaptive, and sometimes selectively tolerated practices, especially during COVID-19 border closures. The article introduces “hybrid border governance” to explain how state control, securitization, and community adaptation are co-produced in the West Kalimantan-Sarawak borderland.
Read the article: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/08865655.2026.2671015