Revisiting Asean's Pirate Past

It is ironic, to say the least, that today we seem to adore pirates and their piratical ways. Parents take their children to pirate-themed birthday parties and shows; children and adults seem to relish movies about pirates and their seafaring adventures.

The same view is not, however, held by those in the security industry and whose work focuses on keeping the sea lanes safe for commercial maritime traffic.

While most of us seem to imagine pirates in the avatar of Johnny Depp, the modern-day securocrat would probably see pirates as a motley bunch armed with modern-day weapons like rocket launchers and Kalashnikovs.

The two views rarely complement and speak to each other, and perhaps neither is entirely true or justified.

As the Asean region takes yet another step closer to the Asean community of 2015, perhaps the time has come for us to revisit the piratical history of the region and ask ourselves if there is anything that can be learnt about the piratical ways of the past, at a time when maritime Southeast Asia was described as the "land of the pirate wind" and when Western literature abounded with tales of sword-wielding pirates like the infamous Llanuns and the Bugis, the latter having bequeathed us today with the term "bogeyman."

One thing that contemporary Southeast Asians are likely to forget is that not too long ago, the region was populated by not only land-bound but also sea-bound communities that were itinerant.

We need to remind ourselves time and again that the whole of Southeast Asia is made up of hybrid diaspora communities that came from every corner of the world and that for hundreds of years — from the Hindu-Buddhist era to the age of the modern steamship and airplane — migration and movement have been the hallmarks of Southeast Asian ordinary life.

Communities like the Llanun and the Bugis mapped out the whole region, sending their ships from Sulawesi and Borneo all the way to Thailand, the Burmese coast, the Philippines and beyond.

They lived with a sense of attachment not only to land but also to the sea, and they proved that seas and oceans were never empty spaces, but rather inhabited ones.

Today, scholars no longer talk about landscapes but also seascapes, and there is a growing body of research that looks at how areas such as the Indian Ocean were never barren spaces dotted by the odd canoe or gunboat, but rather inhabited territories that produced their own unique maritime cultures.

We raise this point at this juncture for one simple reason: As the Asean community comes closer together, it is important to emphasize that this process of Asean integration has to take place at all levels, from state to state and from society to society.

Since Asean's formation in 1967, it has been the prevailing assumption that the modern post-colonial nation-state is and will remain the dominant actor in Asean's development.

Additionally, it has been assumed that states will stand as representatives of peoples and communities.

Yet even today, there are these liminal communities such as the sea-borne communities we find scattered across Southeast Asia whose own sense of belonging and loyalty are bound not only to hard rock and solid land masses, but also to the shifting waters of the sea.

In the past, these mobile communities were often summarily labelled as pirates simply because their itinerant ways made it difficult for the colonial state to neatly fix them in one place and give them a fixed identity.

While it is true that the Llanun and the Bugis did engage in piracy at times, it has to be noted that piracy was never their primary source of income, but rather trade.

Today, Asean remains a concert of nation-states where the tone and tenor of the grouping's discourse is set by the respective governments of the region.

But let us not overlook the fact that there are also many liminal zones across the region, such as the Thai-Malaysian-North Sumatran zone and the East Malaysian-Indonesian-Southern Philippines zone, where many such communities continue to exist.

In many of these cases, we encounter extended communities with family and kin who live across one or even two borders. Movement, migration, fluidity are the trademarks of such communities still.

Rather than view such activity as potentially threatening, perhaps we need to adopt a more nuanced sociological lens and see them as the prototypes for a new sort of Asean subjectivity that may emerge in the future.

After all, as the Asean community draws closer, the governments of Asean are already moving in the direction of loosening up border restrictions, making internal Asean commerce and tourism easier, creating the communicative infrastructure that will eventually bring the communities of Asean closer together.

All of these developments are seen as novel and revolutionary, but are they really?

If we were to revisit the past of the Asean region and look at it from a more sociological perspective we may come to realize that the seafaring ways of our so-called "piratical" ancestors were already ahead of the curve and that in many ways, they point to an age where individuals could locate their identities in a shared sense of belonging: to land and sea.

If that is the sort of globally minded Asean citizen we wish to create in the future, then our past tells us that it is possible, after all.

And imagine our pirate ancestors re-appraised as proto-Asean citizens before their time: Now that's a thought to keep the historians awake at night.

Farish A. Noor is a Malaysian writer and senior fellow at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore.

Sourced: thejakartaglobe