Coercing Mobility: Territory and Displacement in the Politics of Southeast Asian Muslim Movements

This introductory article explores the recent turn in Asian history towards work that foregrounds mobility, circulation, and cosmopolitan connections, decentring colonial territoriality and postcolonial geo-bodies as the primary units of historical analysis. In it, and to frame our own special issue on Muslim movements in Southeast Asia, we point out that some of this mobility was coerced via projects of state territorialisation that actively displaced select, targeted Muslim actors whose presence in the polity was deemed problematic by states seeking to consolidate their power. Echoes of this displacement can be traced in the politics of the Muslim movements that these actors created, as we argue in this article and throughout the special issue.