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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.

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.

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.

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.

This paper examines recent debates about reproductive policy in Singapore by examining the responses of two different groups of women - women Members of Parliament and feminist activists. Women currently make up 10% of MPs in Singapore. Although this figure is low when compared to average rates of female representation globally, it is the highest level in Singapore since Independence. All these women are members of the ruling People's Action Party (PAP) in power since 1959. While publicly supportive of the view of the PAP male elite, this group of women has introduced a level of critique into reproductive policy not previously seen by the Singapore public. Local women's groups too have played a visible role in public debates about population policy. The feminist group, the Association of Women for Action and Research (AWARE) has had a long interest in reproductive policy issues and released its own position paper to address the government's recent policy making. This paper examines the responses of these two groups of women towards the PAP's pro-natalist stance. It explores the extent to which these women have challenged the PAP as well as the obstacles to an independent feminist voice on population matters Keywords: Singapore, population policy, reproductive policy, total fertility rate, feminism, women in politics