In Indonesia's Overseas Labour Migration Programme, 1969-2010, Wayne Palmer offers for the first time a detailed, critical analysis of the way in which Indonesia's Overseas Labour Migration Programme is managed and how that fits with other developments within the Indonesian government. Commonly portrayed as a corrupt bunch of officials out to line their own pockets at the expense of migrant workers' welfare, here we are shown that they also make exceptions to rules when the law and political climate are not on their side. Wayne Palmer used interviews with over 120 officials in six Indonesian provinces and three diplomatic missions in the Asia-Pacific region to understand motivations for corrupt and other illegal behaviour.

Villagers in Indonesia hear a steady stream of stories about the injuries, abuses, and even deaths suffered by those who migrate in search of work. So why do hundreds of thousands of Indonesian workers continue to migrate every year? Carol Chan explores this question from the perspective of the origin community and provides a fascinating look at how gender, faith, and shame shape these decisions to migrate. Villagers evaluate men's and women's migrations differently, leading to different ideas about which kinds of human or financial flows should be encouraged and which should be discouraged or even criminalized. Despite routine and well-documented instances of exploitation of Indonesian migrant workers, some villagers still emphasize that a migrant's success or failure ultimately depends on that individual's morality, fate, and destiny. Indonesian villagers construct strategies for avoiding migration-related risks that are closely linked to faith and belief in supernatural agency. These strategies shape the flow of migration from the country and help to ensure the continued confidence Indonesian people have in migration as an act of promise and hope.

As the first directly elected Indonesian president, Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono (SBY) served at a crucial juncture in Indonesia’s history. Succeeding the three short presidencies of BJ Habibie, Abdurrahman Wahid and Megawati Sukarnoputri, his presidency had a lot to prove. While critical assessment of SBY’s domestic policies have been undertaken, less attention has been paid to his foreign policy. This volume seeks to fill this gap by examining key foreign policy issues during SBY’s tenure, including bilateral relations, Indonesia’s involvement in international organizations, and pivotal issues such as international labour and terrorism. The book provides an assessment of the direction of his foreign policy and management style, paying particular attention to his concerns over Indonesia’s territorial integrity and sovereignty, the significance of international institutions, and Indonesia’s right to lead.

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.

The anthropological demography of health, as a field of interdisciplinary population research, has grown from the 1990s, extending to a remarkable range of key human and policy issues, including: genetic disorders; nutrition; mental health; infant, child, and maternal morbidity; malaria; HIV/AIDS; disability and chronic diseases; new reproductive technologies; and population ageing. By observing group formation and change over time, tracking people's networks, and observing variance between what people say and do, anthropological demography goes beyond the characteristically top-down formal methodologies of most mainstream socio-economic demography and population health. This path-breaking volume charts and integrates the growing body of research that combines ethnography with quantitative models and methods in the field of population health. It offers a clear agenda based on important conceptual and methodological advances, and often working in close collaboration with medical and historical research. Approaches to population that are grounded in sustained ethnographic and historical research provide more than substantive knowledge of how cultural and social formations interact with health. They enable understanding of how local institutions and experience of vital events come to be translated into the demographic and health measures on which survey and clinical programmes rely. This, in turn, makes possible critical evaluation of the empirical adequacy of such translation, reflection on what happens when these models and measures become standardised evaluations of health statuses, and what this implies for governance. The combination of anthropological, demographic, historical, and biological research has gone beyond the initial demographic prioritisation of fertility regulation, to take on an expanded range of key health policy issues, and locate them in the context of the inequalities that so frequently give rise to major health differentials. The Anthropological Demography of Health offers a clear agenda for the application and extension of combined anthropological and demographic thinking in population health, and will provide a point of reference for the field.

Passport Entanglements examines the problems with documents issued to Indonesian migrant workers in Hong Kong and explores the larger role that passports and other types of documentation play in gendered migration, precarious labor, and bureaucracy. Focusing on the politics and inequalities embedded in passports, anthropologist Nicole Constable considers how these instruments determine legal status and dictate rights. Constable finds that new biometric technologies and surveillance do not lead to greater protection, security, or accuracy, but rather reinforce violent structures on already vulnerable women by producing new vulnerabilities and reproducing old ones.

Globalisation is more complex than ever. The effects of the global financial crisis and increased inequality have spurred anti-globalisation sentiment in many countries and encouraged the adoption of populist and inward-looking policies. This has led to some surprising results: Duterte, Brexit and Trump, to name a few. In Indonesia, the disappointment with globalisation has led to rising protectionism, a rejection of foreign interference in the name of nationalism, and economic policies dominated by calls for self-sufficiency. Meanwhile, human trafficking and the abuse of migrant workers show the dark side of globalisation. In this volume, leading experts explore key issues around globalisation, nationalism and sovereignty in Indonesia. Topics include the history of Indonesia’s engagement with the world, Indonesia’s stance on the South China Sea and the re-emergence of nationalism. The book also examines the impact of globalisation on poverty and inequality, labour markets and people, especially women.

Vehicles, their infrastructures, and the environments they traverse are fundamental to the movement of migrants and states' attempts to govern them. This volume's contributors use the concept of viapolitics to name and foreground this contested entanglement and examine the politics of migration and bordering across a range of sites. They show how these elements constitute a key site of knowledge and struggle in migratory processes and offer a privileged vantage point from which to interrogate practices of mobility and systems of control in their deeper histories and wider geographic connections. This transdisciplinary group of scholars explores a set of empirically rich and diverse cases: from the Spanish and European authorities' attempts to control migrants' entire trajectories to infrastructures of escort of Indonesian labor migrants; from deportation train cars in the 1920s United States to contemporary stowaways at sea; from illegalized migrants walking across treacherous Alpine mountain passes to aerial geographies of deportation. Throughout, Viapolitics interrogates anew the phenomenon called “migration,” questioning how different forms of contentious mobility are experienced, policed, and contested. Contributors. Ethan Blue, Maribel Casas-Cortes, Julie Y. Chu, Sebastian Cobarrubias, Glenda Garelli, Charles Heller, Sabine Hess, Bernd Kasparek, Clara Lecadet, Johan Lindquist, Renisa Mawani, Lorenzo Pezzani, Ranabir Samaddar, Amaha Senu, Martina Tazzioli, William Walters

Providing a critical overview of transnationalism as a concept, this Handbook looks at its growing influence in an era of high-speed, globalised interconnectivity. It offers crucial insights on how approaches to transnationalism have altered how we think about social life from the family to the nation-state, whilst also challenging the predominance of methodologically nationalist analyses.