Search

Ways of studying illegal behaviour are important in the context of Indonesia, a country well known for its failure to deal adequately with the corruption that permeates every level of society. They are perhaps even more salient at the peripheries of the nation-state where government agencies struggle to contain the illegal practices that necessarily emerge where nation-states meet. This article reflects on our experiences conducting a decade-long study of an Indonesian borderlands that, while not initially focused on illegality, came – as a consequence of its ubiquity – to include it as a key construct. This experience led us to grapple not only with methodological questions about how to research illegality but also with assumptions about what illegality is and does. We argue that the only way to recognise and account for the quotidian nature of many kinds of illegal activity in the borderlands is to eschew an ethnography of exception in favour of an ethnography of the mundane. This project was funded by Australian Research Council (ARC) Discovery Project grant DP0557368.

The need to increase women’s labour market participation and economic security is on the ‘to do’ list of most governments and major global institutions. Global consulting firm McKinsey calculates that global GDP would increase by 26 per cent— US$28 trillion—by 2025 if women participated in paid work to the same extent as men. But if this goal is achieved, who will look after the children, the elderly, the disabled and ill? Although both women and men can care for others, global estimates show that women assume responsibility for around three-quarters of all unpaid domestic and community labour. Tensions between women’s participation in paid work and unpaid care work are especially acute in Asia and the Pacific, where the distribution of unpaid work between men and women is particularly skewed. In this region, women perform more than four times as much unpaid labour as men. Managing this unpaid workload makes it difficult for women to increase participation in paid employment at a level commensurate with their increasing levels of education and training.

What happens when local unions begin to advocate for the rights of temporary migrant workers, asks Michele Ford in her sweeping study of seven Asian countries? Until recently unions in Hong Kong, Japan, Malaysia, Singapore, South Korea, Taiwan, and Thailand were uniformly hostile towards foreign workers, but Ford deftly shows how times and attitudes have begun to change. Now, she argues, NGOs and the Global Union Federations are encouraging local unions to represent and advocate for these peripheral workers, and in some cases succeeding. From Migrant to Worker builds our understanding of the role the international labor movement and local unions have had in developing a movement for migrant workers' labor rights. Ford examines the relationship between different kinds of labor movement actors and the constraints imposed on those actors by resource flows, contingency, and local context. Her conclusions show that in countries-Hong Kong, Malaysia, and Thailand-where resource flows and local factors give the Global Union Federations more influence local unions have become much more engaged with migrant workers. But in countries-Japan and Taiwan, for example-where they have little effect there has been little progress. While much has changed, Ford forces us to see that labor migration in Asia is still fraught with complications and hardships, and that local unions are not always able or willing to act. DP0880081 and FT120100778

What happens when local unions begin to advocate for the rights of temporary migrant workers, asks Michele Ford in her sweeping study of seven Asian countries? Until recently unions in Hong Kong, Japan, Malaysia, Singapore, South Korea, Taiwan, and Thailand were uniformly hostile towards foreign workers, but Ford deftly shows how times and attitudes have begun to change. Now, she argues, NGOs and the Global Union Federations are encouraging local unions to represent and advocate for these peripheral workers, and in some cases succeeding. From Migrant to Worker builds our understanding of the role the international labor movement and local unions have had in developing a movement for migrant workers' labor rights. Ford examines the relationship between different kinds of labor movement actors and the constraints imposed on those actors by resource flows, contingency, and local context. Her conclusions show that in countries-Hong Kong, Malaysia, and Thailand-where resource flows and local factors give the Global Union Federations more influence local unions have become much more engaged with migrant workers. But in countries-Japan and Taiwan, for example-where they have little effect there has been little progress. While much has changed, Ford forces us to see that labor migration in Asia is still fraught with complications and hardships, and that local unions are not always able or willing to act. DP0880081 and FT120100778

This chapter demonstrates how the actions of the labor rights movement made a decisive contribution to the delegitimization of the regime. Struggling to regain a foothold after the decimation of independent labor unions in the massacres of 1965 and repression in the decades that followed, worker activists and their middle-class allies nevertheless clawed their way back, raising awareness at home and abroad of the Indonesian government's unrelenting subjugation of labor rights in its search for economic growth and political stability. Having been forced to accommodate some of the labor movement's demands in the early 1990s, the government struck back, all but destroying the alternative labor unions that had emerged in the intervening years. As a consequence, there was little evidence of worker mobilization in the immediate lead-up to the fall of Suharto. While continuing to grapple with the ongoing obstacles of low density of unionization among workers, organizational fragmentation, and political isolation, the labor movement has since asserted itself economically and politically.

In this chapter we explore the appropriate conception and agenda for digital rights and associated governance in Asia. We do so from the perspective of an Australian location in the Asian region, and informed by interdisciplinary research on digital rights. Our starting point is a dissatisfaction with the framing, assumptions, and norms of digital rights globally. At the risk of simplification, we will argue that the dominant ways of framing digital rights and governance continue to be modelled on a limited repertoire of Western experiences and concepts of digital technology, rights, and freedom. digital rights are often left off the agenda in the discussion of digital transformations, especially the highly visible, mainstream, official, and authorized discussions. Such theoretical, empirical, comparative, and cross-sectoral work is urgently needed, not least because questions of digital rights and governance are moving beyond earlier, if still pressing issues of freedom of expression to a wider range of privacy, data justice, labour rights, communication rights, governance, and democratization issues, posed by the new platforms (such as sharing and caring economy). Not only are such new Asian and inter-Asia theorisations and practices of rights and governance important in this region (especially for countries such as Australia), but they stand to help us rethink and confront the impasses and political and conceptual problems with dominant global digital rights thinking. In turn, this project of reimagining and mainstreaming digital rights conceptions, practices, and norms makes a powerful contribution to advancing key issues and challenges arising in contemporary Asia. The expansion of digital transactions across Asia requires more comprehensive and considered rights frameworks to guarantee social justice, citizenship and political participation, as well the economic benefits of the many initiatives underway. Otherwise the danger is that digital transformations can hinder rather than advance social progress. University of Sydney Sydney Research Excellence Initiative

Worldwide, debate is raging over the growth of app-based transport services as companies like Uber transform the way transport is provided and how consumers access it (Isaac 2014; Aloisi 2015). Often referred to as ‘ride-sharing’ or ‘peer-to-peer’ services, these companies connect passengers with drivers typically not formally registered for taxi work or car hire services through a smartphone app. Passengers pay a set rate, determined by the company, from which a percentage is deducted before the driver receives the rest. Like other large countries in Southeast Asia, Indonesia has enthusiastically embraced app-based transport services. Indeed, Indonesian consumers have adopted app-based transport services with alacrity, hailing cars, motorcycle taxis (ojek) or even the noisy three-wheel vehicles known as bajaj with just a few taps on their phones. The proliferation of what is known locally as ‘online transport’ (transportasi online) has benefited from commuters’ increasing frustration with traffic congestion and poor public transport, as well as the growing use of smartphones. One of the most popular app-based transport services operating in Indonesia is Go-Jek, a locally owned venture whose drivers’ signature green helmets and jackets can be seen on the streets of most major cities across the archipelago. Such has been the rise of Go-Jek that it is not so much a form of transport as a phenomenon. As one journalist observed, ‘school children, university students, office workers, even the governor of Jakarta … everyone is talking about Go-Jek’ (Kompas, 18 June 2015)

In the first decade of the twenty-first century, the Malaysian government has faced increasing pressure to improve its treatment of its large migrant population. To address international criticism and to improve the treatment of victims of trafficking, the government introduced an Anti-Trafficking in Persons (ATIP) Act in 2007, which was subsequently amended in 2010 to include crimes associated with migrant smuggling. The first section of this chapter traces the emergence of the Act, while the second documents and analyses national and international responses to it. The chapter argues that the Malaysian example offers important insights into the ways in which international pressure can be brought to bear on the drafting of national laws dealing with human trafficking and smuggling. It demonstrates that the geopolitics of regional border control is increasingly shaping Malaysian responses to its large migrant population. In particular, the distinction between smuggling and trafficking is becoming an important means for Malaysian authorities to strengthen border protection while, at the same time, paying lip service to international demands to address 'the most heinous of crimes'. In the absence of human rights laws that address the exploitation of migrants, these anti-trafficking and anti-migrant smuggling laws have done little to address the system-wide factors that create and sustain endemic abuse of the labour rights of temporary labour migrants.

We argue that the localized expression of Chinese Indonesian identity in Karimun suggests a need to move beyond a focus on integration versus assimilation to an analysis of how identity and belonging are tied to a sense of place. As this chapter shows, in making sense of their position in Indonesia's periphery, Karimun's Chinese community makes reference to a series of binaries – native-born versus foreign-born; center (Jakarta) versus periphery (Riau islands); islanders versus newcomers; and Indonesian versus Singaporean/Malaysian – that serve to structure their accounts of identity and belonging. These binaries are constantly negotiated through interconnected processes of resistance to assimilation and acculturation to a Karimun "way of life."

Lia’s and Ani’s narratives raise questions about how we can theorize the “constrained choice to become a sex worker, without moralisingly declaring all sex work to be exploitation or violence against women” (Schotten 2005: 230). The latter view is espoused by those writers who, writing from an abolitionist stance, argue that prostitution is the ultimate expression of male dominance and thus the cornerstone of all sexual exploitation (cf. Barry 1996). According to this argument, there is no place for sex workers to claim that their work is not harmful or alienating. Such a totalizing perspective provides little space for alternative accounts of the intersection between structure and agency and overlooks the ways in which women themselves understand and explain their life histories. The stories that Lia and Ani, two women who became labor migrants, then sex workers, and finally the wives of ex-clients, tell about their lives demonstrate these complexities and challenge commonsense understandings about women’s agency.

The United States has played a key role in international efforts to address trafficking in Indonesia, as elsewhere. In October 2001, the US State Department established an Office to Monitor and Combat Trafficking in Persons, which prepares the annual Trafficking in Persons Report, widely known as the TIP Report. In the reports, countries are divided into three tiers according to their efforts to comply with minimum standards for the elimination of trafficking. Tier One consists of those countries who fully comply with the minimum standards outlined in the US Victims of Trafficking and Violence Protection Act (TVPA); Tier Two of those who do not fully comply but are making efforts to ensure compliance; and Tier Three of those who do not comply and are not making significant efforts to bring themselves into compliance (US Department of State 2000). Countries in Tier Three are subject to sanctions, including the termination of non-humanitarian aid and US opposition to assistance from international financial institutions (Ould 2004: 61). Critics argue that the TIP reports ignore forms of forced labour other than forced sexual labour, gloss over state complicity in trafficking and are vague about numbers of victims, convictions and sentencing rates (Caraway 2006: 298). Concerns have also been expressed about the impact of United States Agency for International Development (USAID) policy regarding the funding of programmes promoting safe sexual practices within brothels, which stipulate that in order to be eligible for US funding non-governmental organizations (NGOs) working in the trafficking field must declare their opposition to prostitution (Ditmore 2005; Weitzer 2007). Organizations that do not take a position on prostitution, as well as those that favour decriminalization or legalization are thus ineligible for funding from the US government.

In October 2009 an Australian customs boat, the Oceanic Viking, sat in an Indonesian port for three weeks waiting for a decision to be made about the fate of the 78 Sri Lankans on board. The Australian Prime Minister had asked, and the Indonesian President had agreed, that the asylum seekers be processed in Indonesia. Neither side anticipated the response of local authorities, who vehemently opposed the arrangement, accusing their own and the Australian governments of using their province as a dumping ground. This development added an extra level of complexity to an already complicated situation in which senior Indonesian bureaucrats had obstructed the implementation of the agreement and asylum seekers refused to disembark. This paper chronicles the unfolding of the crisis, arguing that its resolution depended on interplay of both Australian and Indonesian processes and exploring the implications of the crisis for the regional elements of the Rudd government’s policy on asylum seekers, which relied on the co-operation of countries where asylum seekers transit en route to Australia. Highlighting the limitations of bilateral co-operation in this area, this essay reveals the pressure on Australia’s political leadership to find for alternative solutions in the region.

This chapter calls into question ideas about the existence of a transnational Malay-Muslim identity by examining the ways in which Malay men understand and perform their masculinity vis-a-vis men in the neighbouring countries of Malaysia and Indonesia. It starts from the premise that issues of ethnic (and religious) 'loyalty' are questions that rest on primordial notions of 'self and 'other' attributed to ethnicity and religion. We argue that, in the context of Singapore, concepts of ethnic and national identity are shaped by two significant forces: the presence of the Chinese majority population, and the PAP's stance on Singapore's location in a Malay/Muslim archipelago (Brown 1994; Hill and Lian 1995). The Chinese majority population and the Chinese dominated parliament and bureaucracy play a critical role in shaping Malay identity not through a process of hybridisation that arises through direct contact and interaction, but through a state-led policy of comparison that requires the Malay community to constantly position itself in relation to the majority (Li 1989: 136). At the same time, given the heterogeneity of the Malay community (a fact eluded to in public statements about 'Malay loyalty'), any investigation into the meaning of a shared Malay identity also needs to consider to what extent 'Malayness' is constituted as 'a Singaporean experience, and to what extent this experience has itself been conditioned by geographical proximity to Malaysia and cultural affinities with other related communities in Malaysia, the Riau archipelago, and Indonesia' (Lian and Rajah 2002: 232). By examining how Singaporean Malay men negotiate and construct their identities, this paper both problematises the notion of a homogenous Malay identity in Singapore and seeks to subvert commonly held understandings about the presence of a transnational Malay masculinity in the region.

While there is growing scholarly interest in the everyday meanings and practices of nation building in Indonesia, there has been little consideration of the role the sea plays in drawing the nation together or in the ways that it pulls it apart. Even less attention has been given to the ways in which the communities that live along Indonesia's maritime borders experience and understand the border in their daily lives. By focusing on the communities that live along the outer edges of the Indonesian nation-state, this chapter offers a means to explore the everyday salience of water for the process of constructing the wawasan nusantara. We argue that although Indonesia's maritime borders are a constant signifier of national identity and belonging for Riau Islanders, at the same time islanders have a strong sense of regional identity and belonging built on a dense web of transnational flows across the straits. Our research reveals that, for many Riau Islanders, it is the border that unites them with other Indonesians, but it is the waters of the straits that draw them to their northern neighbours.

Indonesia is the world's largest archipelagic state. By the latest official count, the archipelago consists of 18,108 islands, which lie scattered between the mountainous island of Breueh in the west and tiny Sibir Island in Humboldt Bay (Teluk Yos Sudarso) in the east, and between Miangas in the north and Dana in the south. Indonesia's islands range in size from New Guinea, Borneo and Sumatra, respectively the second, third and sixth largest islands in the world, to tiny islets with only local names. Situated between longitude 97°E and 141°E and between latitude 6°N and 11°5, Indonesia comprises 2.8 million square kilometres of water (including 92,877 square kilometres of inland waters) and 1,826,440 square kilometres of land. If Indonesia's exclusive eco­ nomic zone (EEZ), stretching beyond the archipelago, is included, Indo­ nesia's area of sea expands to 7.9 million square kilometres. Indonesia's archipelagic character creates two distinct but intertwined problems of governance. First, by separating Indonesia's landmass into islands, the sea creates special challenges of communication, coordination and even identity. Governing the land is made more difficult by the intervening presence of the sea. Second, the seas that lie between and around these islands need to be governed. These seas represent a major strategic, economic and cultural resource for Indonesia; they cannot be ignored, yet governing the maritime zone poses enormous practical difficulties.

Since the mid 1980s, Indonesian labour has gone through a turbulent period of restructuring and reformation, as the industrial relations landscape was transformed, firstly by the government’s export-oriented industrialisation strategy and then again when the political edifice of President Suharto’s New Order came crashing down in 1998. Scholarly interest in Indonesia’s industrial working class peaked in the 1990s, when factory workers struggled for the right to organise in the factories and on the streets, at a time when public protest was a dangerous strategy. In this period, Indonesians wrote a number of PhD theses on the subject of labour. The book published from the most influential of these was written by political scientist Vedi Hadiz at Murdoch University in Australia and is now the seminal work on organised labour during the New Order period (1997). Other Indonesian scholars who completed English-language PhD and Masters theses on labour-related issues in these years, included anthropologist Ratna Saptari (1995) in the Netherlands, and scholar-activists Sri Kusnyiati (1998) and Nori Andriyani (1996) in Australia and Canada respectively. Sutanta (also known as Sutanto Suwarno), a Department of Manpower official, also completed his PhD in the United Kingdom (1997). These students re-established the tradition of Indonesian scholars and scholar-bureaucrats from an earlier era, most notably Tedjasukmana (1958) and Hasibuan (1968).

Women and Work in Indonesia is an edited collection of papers that aims to examine the meaning of work for women in contemporary Indonesia. The chapters interrogate some of the formerly clear-cut divisions that even the rhetoric of advanced capitalism is now questioning: the splits between work and life, work and family, between paid work and housework, paid work and child care, and between production and reproduction. In focusing on women's life experiences, we assume a broad meaning tor the word 'work', including not only those activities that bring in income but also home duties, child care, healing and civic work that fulfils obligations for maintaining social and community networks. This in turn impels interrogation of assumptions about economic activity, remunerable activity, divisions of labour, state and other formal definitions of work, and ultimately about the public and private spheres. The book thus seeks to make a significant contribution both to empirical studies of the lived experience and meaning of women's work in Indonesia and to feminist thinking about women's work in the non-Western world.

While migration studies scholars have paid considerable attention to internal migration within Indonesia, as well as to international labour migration flows from Indonesia, they have rarely considered the intersections between these two processes. This paper addresses the gap through a close analysis of migration flows in one of Indonesia’s key transit areas – the Riau Islands. We argue that in the borderlands the processes of internal and international migration are mutually constitutive. The Riau Islands’ status as a transit zone for international labour migrants and as a destination for internal migrants determines its demographic profile and policies of migration control. Bordering practices are strongly influenced by the fact that not everyone who comes to the Riau Islands has the intention of moving on, and not all international migrants returning to the islands intend to go home. Our analysis demonstrates that internal migration cannot be understood as a solely national phenomenon, and that international migration cannot only be explained by push and pull factors in sending and receiving destinations. These complexities necessitate research and policy responses that take into account the unique character of the transit provinces, and the role that their geographical location plays in the formation of multi-ethnic communities and the management of migration.

This chapter begins by examining the arguments most often made about the differences between labor unions and labor NGOs and the effects those differences have on the nature and extent of their accountability to workers. It then explains the context in which NGOs came to dominate the Indonesian labor movement in the early 1990s and the web of accountability in which Indonesian labor NGOs and unions find themselves today. The chapter concludes by outlining the implications of the "accountability dilemma" faced by unions and labor NGOs. It argues that - despite their formally democratic accountability structures - Indonesian unions are not necessarily always more accountable to workers than their undemocratic labor NGO counterparts. This suggests that a multidimensional model of accountability is required that recognizes the impact that pressures associated with a particular environment have on labor movement organizations' ability to be accountable to workers.

The border studies literature makes a strong case against claims for unfettered transnationalism and ‘borderlessness’ in our ‘globalising world’. However, its focus on movement across borders means that it fails to address bordering practices that occur within the nation-state as a result of transnational activity. In this paper, we extend Cunningham and Heyman’s concepts ‘enclosure’ and ‘mobility’ to confront the different layers of bordering (both physical and nonphysical) that have occurred in Indonesia’s Riau Islands since they became part of the Indonesia– Malaysia–Singapore Growth Triangle.

Debates about identity have multiplied across Indonesia in the wake of the implementation of regional autonomy. In the ethnically heterogeneous province of Riau, identity is prominent in the public debate and pivotal to struggles over the distribution of resources and questions of political allegiance. This chapter examines the extent to which these public discourses of identity are reflected at the grassroots level, drawing from my own experiences as an intermittent member of a non-Malay Riau household, and on data from semi-structured interviews conducted in June 2002 with community leaders and 40 other people from a range of social and ethnic backgrounds.

In the late 1990s, scholarly attention turned to glossy publications such as Femina, the premier Indonesian women's magazine, for insights into what it means to be a woman in Indonesia. When Brenner analysed the visual and verbal images of the 'many incarnations' of the modern Indonesian woman, she found that, in addition to being a 'happy consumer-housewife, devoted follower of Islam '" model citizen of the nation-state and alluring sex symbol', the modern Indonesian woman is a wanita kaner, working as a business executive, secretary, lawyer or civil servant (Brenner 1999, 17-24). Sen, too, has noted the increasing dominance of images of professional, working women in 'official and commercial texts emanating from metropolitan Jakarta' (Sen 1998, 35). Unlike Brenner, however, who argues that the Sum of representations of women in these middle-class texts 'offer[s] a bewildering array of lifestyle possibilities' (Brenner 1999, 17), Sen privileges images of the working woman - asserting not only that 'working woman' has replaced 'housewife' as the 'new paradigmatic female subject in political, cultural and economic discourses in Indonesia', but that the new 'iconic figure' of the 'working woman' is a professional who legitimises Indonesia's position as a modern nation, not a working-class woman labouring on the factory floor (Sen 1998, 35).

In Indonesia, the plight of TKW (Tenaga Kerja Wanita - the common term for women migrant workers) has been a subject of public controversy for decades. Academic accounts of the conditions of Indonesian migrant domestic workers tend to resonate with local public perceptions. Authors such as Bethan (1993) and Robinson (2000a, 2000b) and Krisnawaty (1997) focus predominantly on the threats and privations facing women working abroad as domestic help - in Saudi Arabia in particular - and the shortcomings of official labour migration agencies. Yet, while conditions in receiving countries and the experiences of women in the barracks of registered labour export companies in Jakarta are the subject of many books and articles, the conditions experienced by women recruited by illegal agents are relatively little researched. While in Tanjung Pinang recently I conducted interviews with an illegal migration agent, his wife, and five women currently awaiting positions in Malaysia. The results of those interviews are the subject of this research note.