Statelessness, Identity, and Insecurity: Understanding Violent Extremism in Sabah’s Borderlands

Abstract

This article examines the drivers of radicalisation and violent extremism in Sabah within the broader context of regional security and state society relations in maritime Southeast Asia. Drawing on thematic content analysis, it shows that irregular migration has produced a multigenerational stateless population that remains outside formal state protection and is routinely securitised by enforcement agencies. Persistent exclusion from education, healthcare, and social welfare increases vulnerability to recruitment and ideological manipulation by violent extremist groups. The analysis further demonstrates that Sabahan identity is shaped by stronger sociocultural and familial ties to the wider Bornean Nusantara sphere than to Peninsular Malaysia, a dynamic reinforced by the legacy of arbitrary territorial boundaries and by federal approaches to security and belonging that complicate these ties. The article argues that Malaysia’s nativist, enforcement-oriented immigration framework grounded in a Hobbesian conception of state authority reproduces illegality and insecurity and should be reconsidered in favour of a Lockean perspective that recognises long-settled undocumented migrants as tacit consenters or potential citizens, based on their social and economic relationships with the host state. It concludes by assessing the limits of bilateral security initiatives, particularly ESSCOM and ESSZONE, arguing that their stabilising capacity remains constrained in the absence of credible pathways to citizenship, inclusion, and state legitimacy.