Forced Migration in Southeast Asia: A Brief Overview of Current Research

Southeast Asian countries host significant numbers of forcibly displaced populations, both within countries and across borders. This brief review paper provides a basic overview on recent forced migration research in Southeast Asia for the period 2013 to 2018. To this end, a keyword search with two predefined sets of search terms was carried out in the Web of Science database in September 2018. The identified research literature corpus was then analyzed regarding persons of concern, study site(s) (country/ies) as well as main drivers of migration. The results show that the major part of studies focuses on refugees and asylum seekers in the region’s main host countries, namely Thailand, Malaysia, and Indonesia. This correspondence between current research trends and the distribution of refugees and asylum seekers in Southeast Asia could, however, not be identified for internally displaced persons (IDPs). Although Southeast Asian countries account for a substantial share of worldwide IDPs, only a very limited number of identified studies focus on this group of persons of concern.