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Short abstract:

With the case of Rohingya refugees in Malaysia, this paper critically examines the constructions of alterity and biopolitics inscribed into assemblages of governing technologies, like the compulsory MySejahtera contact tracing app during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Long abstract:

Akin to other governments around the globe, Malaysia responded to the COVID-19 pandemic with an assemblage of emergency public health policies, movement restrictions, and digital technologies. Besides decidedly analogue measures like barbed wires in the streets, this also included the country's compulsory contact tracing app MySejahtera; which the government touted as a form of digital, 'participatory surveillance' that would allow its citizens to help containing the spread of the virus.

MySejahtera’s Bluetooth tracing and QR-code check-ins in public spaces made the majority of the population digitally visible, which was thus allowed gradually more mobility after the initial lockdowns. The same technology, however, made populations like the unrecognised Rohingya refugees less visible, and hence exposed them to increased movement restrictions; accompanied by online vitriol casting refugees as contagion clusters.

Drawing on our analysis of interviews with Rohingya refugees, government statements, and documentation materials of the MySejahtera app, we argue that the socio-technical imaginary underpinning MySejahtera constructs its intervention target in epidemiological terms as a population under viral threat, spatially (co-)present within Malaysia's borders. However, the (pre-pandemic) construction of refugees as a potentially dangerous, more contagious ‘other’ is equally inscribed in both the contact tracing app and complementing public health measures (like the enhanced movement restriction zones that targeted areas with large refugee populations).

We thus propose to understand apps like MySejahtera as technologies of power that co-produce new subjectivities of populations under viral threat, and, simultaneously, re-enact and enforce alterity for those not granted the ‘privilege’ of digital ‘participatory surveillance’.