Grassroots Integration in Multicultural Singapore

This book studies the role that grassroots volunteers play in the integration and naturalization process in Singapore. With increasing migration, the topics of migrant integration and belonging are of perennial academic and public interest. However, much of the existing literature on the subject is largely focused on European and North American cases. By focusing on the single case of Singapore, this project provides a story of how a city-state grapples with the issue of managing increasing cultural diversity while seeking to maintain a cohesive identity. As a city, Singapore has many ubiquitous features of other urban centres for migration, such as a rapidly diversifying population and an economy that is heavily reliant on foreign labour. At the same time, being a city-state means that the demographic and cultural changes experienced in Singapore also coincide with questions of national belonging and membership in the nation-state, in contrast to larger countries with rural-urban divides or more decentralized systems of migration management and integration. Examining this simultaneously typical yet unique case study means that this project is able to examine the processes where state and society have managed migration and cultural diversity at the level of the nation-state. For example, this project discusses how Singapore’s policy of multiracialism complements nation-building efforts, adding to existing public and academic debate about whether societies can concurrently embrace cultural difference yet maintain a cohesive national identity.

Rebecca Grace Tan is a lecturer at the National University of Singapore’s Department of Political Science, Singapore, after receiving her PhD in Politics from the University of Bristol, UK. She is interested in the topics of multiculturalism, national identity, belonging and migration. As a scholar who primarily studies Singapore, she believes that the case study, while small, has much to contribute to studies of multiculturalism and nation-building in literature often dominated by work on North America and European cases.