At its core, this volume has focused on everyday practices of economic engagement that have transformed – and are being transformed by – the Southeast Asian region's embrace of market-led developmentalism. To this end, the chapters in this volume have sought to illustrate the many and varied ways in which everyday actors and their practices of everyday life both constitute and operate within Southeast Asian political economies. Our contributors have considered the production of Southeast Asia's Everyday Political Economy (EPE) within distinct country contexts, drawing together different disciplinary perspectives and engaging a range of methodological and theoretical tools. Concluding a volume of this nature is no easy task. In this endeavour, the editors Elias and Rethel have been joined by John Hobson and Leonard Seabrooke, the authors of the influential 2007 book Everyday Politics of the World Economy, which, in setting out their Everyday International Political Economy (EIPE) approach, provided an important intellectual precursor to this volume. We use this as an opportunity to reflect about how this book project has sought to push the notion of everyday political economy in some quite distinctive directions to that originally put forward by Hobson and Seabrooke. Thus, in these concluding comments, we highlight the points of commonality and differences between the EIPE and EPE projects.

The argument in this chapter unfolds in two steps. We first sketch IPE's journey from a focus on what Hobson and Seabrooke (2007b) called ‘regulatory’ IPE (or RIPE) to a greater concern with the everyday. We then consider the chapters of this book against this background. One final point of note here is that the starting point of analysis of this book is distinct to that advanced in Hobson and Seabrooke's volume. There the authors were centrally interested in the relationship between everyday actor agency and its effect on the global political economy. The current book, however, tends to focus more on developments within particular national economies situated in the Southeast Asian region. This is not to say that the global political economy is ignored; but to the extent that it is discussed, it is mainly in the context of how international influences and pressures are negotiated, mediated and, in some cases, significantly transformed at the national/local level and the role that everyday actors (can) play in acquiescing, contesting or resisting them.

Introduction

Southeast Asia is an increasingly interdependent, globalized and urbanized region of the world. The eleven countries that are generally understood as comprising modern-day Southeast Asia are now ever more closely linked together via flows of trade, investment and migration, in addition to traditional state-led processes of regional integration – most notably the emergence of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) – as well as ever closer, and overlapping, bilateral economic and security ties. In the nearly two decades since Thailand floated the baht, an event commonly held to mark the outbreak of the Asian financial crisis of 1997–8, the region has become more closely integrated than ever before. The launch of the ASEAN Economic Community marks – at least rhetorically – the high point of a period of state-led economic development, market reform and regional integration. Indeed today, we see a region that while not unified is certainly deeply interconnected. In the shadow of Asia's two giants, India and China, the Southeast Asian region has been somewhat sidelined within debates about and discussions of the looming ‘Asian Century’.

Much analytical effort has been put into understanding the respective influences of state and market forces in driving the region's economic transformation. Nonetheless, Southeast Asia provides an important site for considering how processes of economic transformation are refashioning – and refashioned by – the lives and daily routines of ordinary people: their decisions to migrate across borders; their experiences of growing affluence as well as of inequality, poverty and associated forms of violence and destitution; their activities as activists, citizens and workers; and the ways in which economic and social relations, responsibilities and activities are being transformed. Southeast Asia is, and will remain, a heterogeneous region of the world. And yet, this very diversity of culture, politics, religion, society and economics – intersecting with divisions of race, class, gender and even age – provides important insights into how economic transformation takes shape. If we are entering an Asian Century, then we need to remain attentive to how this transformation is taking shape in the lives of Asia's people and their engagement in changing economic practices, with Southeast Asia providing an important terrain for initiating this focus.

Introduction

Employing domestic workers from a variety of less developed countries in Asia has, in recent years, become widespread practice among middle-class Malaysian households. This normalization of domestic employment reflects both the unwillingness of the state to take on some of the social reproductive burdens needed to support increases in women's labour force participation, as well as the symbolic value that employment of a domestic worker plays in cultural perceptions of middle-class status. Indonesian women, in particular, have tended to dominate paid domestic work. This dependency of the Malaysian middle classes on low-paid Indonesian domestic workers was, however, thrown into flux in June 2009 when Indonesia placed an embargo on formalized flows of domestic workers into Malaysia. The actions of the Indonesian government were a reaction to ongoing cases of abuse against Indonesian migrants and, specifically, the death of an Indonesian domestic worker at the hands of her employer. Subsequently, the Indonesian government sought to engage in bargaining strategies with Malaysia in order to leverage better working conditions for its citizens. As negotiations with Indonesia appeared to falter, alternative sources of cheap domestic work were sought out. In particular, private recruitment brokers in Cambodia sought to bring in large numbers of women to be employed as domestic workers in Malaysia. Prior to the Indonesian ban on domestic workers, the trend of Cambodian women migrating to Malaysia for work was only just beginning to be registered (the more established pattern of female migration was from Cambodia to Thailand). The withdrawal of Indonesian domestic labour resulted in marked increases in the number of Cambodian women arriving in Malaysia (Kuppusamy 2012). However, a series of high-profile media reports of abuse and exploitation both in Malaysia by employers and in Cambodia by recruitment agencies called into question the regulatory measures supposedly in place to protect workers (Holliday 2012). In October 2011 a complete ban on the sending of Cambodian women as domestic workers to Malaysia was announced (LICADHO 2011).

We explore the contours of these disputes between Malaysia, Indonesia and Cambodia. On face value, the disputes can be seen as manifestations of regulatory failures: failures to manage migration flows appropriately; failures to protect workers from abuses; and failures to agree basic terms and conditions of domestic worker employment.