This article examines refugee-led community organizations among Chin refugees from Myanmar in Kuala Lumpur. It uses a structuration analysis that recognizes refugee-led organizations as complex governance entities engaged in a dynamic relationship with (among others) national policies of securitization of forced migration and international humanitarian governance. This approach expands the existing literature on the securitization of forced migration by exploring refugees’ lived experiences in a context of south–south migration. It expands the literature on community-based protection by going beyond recognizing the existence of refugee-led organizations to analyse their construction, constitution and consequences. Three primary areas of work by Chin refugee groups are analysed in relation to their immediate activity and longer term effects: organization (‘building ethnic unity in adversity’), documentation (‘asserting a bureaucratic identity’) and socialization (‘learning to be illegal’). These long-term effects indicate the possible impact of local protection activities on macrostructural processes such as identity construction and migration choices. © The Author(s) 2018.

Agency Urban refugees Refugees structuration community-based protection

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