The Penan foragers of Sarawak have developed two responses to territorial encroachment, each of which is shaped by a different sense of the Malaysian government’s sovereignty. The Eastern Penan’s blockade of logging activities has won them international attention; whereas the Western Penan have acquiesced to logging as part of their acceptance of Malaysian rule. Either way, the risks to their survival as viable cultural, self-reproducing groups are enormous; in practice they are struggling mightily against encroachments that estrange them from their nomadic way of life, and reclassify them as would-be Malays and their lands as areas for development. Aboriginal groups in practice thus enjoy very limited protection via-a’-vis their territory, their livelihood, and their cultural identity. Frequently, the state seeks to evict rebel populations and open up their resource-rich areas to timber logging and the construction of golf courses and dams. Irredentist and outlaw groups also dwell in such “brown areas”, and Southeast Asia is riddled with internal colonies of poverty and neglect. Again, theses abandoned areas emerge not out of sheer neglect but out of a neoliberal calculation to invest in and insert groups differently into the processes of global capitalism. Such gradations of governing may be in a continuum, but they overlap with performed racial, religious, and gender hierarchies and further fragment citizenship for people who are all citizens of the same country.