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ItemDiaspora organizations, political settlements, and the migration-development nexus: the case of the Indonesian Diaspora Network(Oxford University Press (OUP), 2022-09-08)This article examines the Indonesian Diaspora Network (IDN), an organization that seeks to ‘facilitate’ and ‘empower’ Indonesia’s diaspora and enhance its contribution to the country’s development. IDN portrays itself as an expression of the collective will of a unified and coherent Indonesian diaspora that is working to promote development-for-all, while critics suggest it is the instrument of elite and professional elements within the diaspora pursuing narrower interests and agendas. By contrast, this article suggests that IDN is a political settlement between these and other elements within the diaspora, each of which has distinct interests and agendas with regard to Indonesia’s development. Its impact on Indonesia’s development is consequently much less clear-cut than existing analyses suggest while also being contingent on processes of political and social struggle. In theoretical terms, the article encourages an understanding of diaspora organizations in terms of political settlements analysis.
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ItemNo Preview AvailableTransnational linkages, political dynamics, and the migration-development nexus: Towards a political settlements approach(Elsevier, 2020-10-01)This paper examines how transnational researchers have incorporated political dynamics into their analyses of transnational linkages and their impacts. It argues that they have done so in ways that have focused on conflict and contestation between migrant/diasporic communities and homeland states/communities rather than within them. At the same time, in construing transnational linkages as instruments of particular actors, they have presented a narrow conception of how transnational linkages interact with political dynamics. As an alternative, the paper proposes a political settlements approach which views transnational linkages as institutions embedded in power relationships between competing groups defined in class, racial, ethnic, religious and gender terms. This approach, it is argued, overcomes these two problems by presenting a more disaggregated view of the actors, interests and agendas involved and construing transnational linkages as simultaneously instruments and arenas of contestation.
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ItemBeyond the Crisis: Re-energizing Southeast Asian Studies(Bina Nusantara University, 2022-12-21)This article examines the main drivers of the fiscal crisis in Asian/Southeast Asian Studies and considers ways of overcoming or at least ameliorating it. In the Australian context, several leading scholars in Asian Studies have called for various new forms of strategic state financial support to help keep the field alive, including incentives and structural support for Asian languages at both school and university levels and priority in publicly-funded research grant schemes. However, re-energizing Asian Studies in fiscal terms will undoubtedly require efforts to make the field more appealing to prospective students because of the prevalence of higher education funding models in which money follows student enrollments. This will particularly be the case with Southeast Asian Studies, given the weakness of enrollments in this sub-field. In this respect, there may be some value in seeking to create new education pathways in Asian Studies that focus on cross-national issues and problems within the region as an alternative to the traditional country-focused area studies approach.
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ItemImplementing the United Nations Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights: Insights from Indonesia(JOHNS HOPKINS UNIV PRESS, 2022-02-01)Following the endorsement of the United Nations Guiding Principles for Business and Human Rights (UNGPs) in 2011, attention has shifted towards challenges of implementation. Through detailed analysis of the case of Indo-nesia, this article analyses the conditions under which implementation oc-curs and explores strategies for strengthened implementation. While UNGP implementation has often been argued to depend on strong collaborative learning networks, we demonstrate instead that power balances between rights coalitions and politico-business and technocratic elites have proved decisive—implementation varying across sectors and over time depending on configurations of market power, histories of rights struggles, and patterns of high-level political support.
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ItemIntroduction: Transnationalism, diaspora and the migration-development nexus in Asia and Australia(Asia Institute, University of Melbourne, 2021-11-10)The number of people living outside their country of birth has increased dramatically in recent decades. In 1970, according to estimates produced by the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs (UN DESA), there were 84 million people living abroad, representing 2.3 percent of the world’s population. By 2020, these numbers had increased to 281 million and 3.6 percent respectively.
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ItemFailing to Engage: The Politics of Diaspora Policy in Australia(Asia Institute, University of Melbourne, 2021)In 2003, the late Professor Graeme Hugo, one of the country’s top migration and population experts, and his collaborators published a major report for the Australian government on the Australian diaspora and associated policy issues. Still the most detailed study of this subject, it recommended that the government adopt a diaspora policy to harness ‘the potential of the diaspora to be a positive factor in national economic and social development’. One year later, Dr. Michael Fullilove and Chloë Flutter published another major report on the Australian diaspora, this time for the Lowy Institute, a prominent international affairs think tank. They also called on the government to adopt a diaspora policy to harness its potential for Australia’s development.
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ItemTransnational linkages, power relations and the migration-development nexus: China and its diaspora(WILEY, 2021-12)While accepting that the migration–development nexus is best understood from a transnational perspective, recent studies analyse this nexus in a partial way rather than holistically. We review the literature, then attempt an enriched account of the complex and rapidly evolving relationship between diaspora and development in China – a country undergoing profound demographic, economic and social changes. Using in‐depth interviews with a variety of key informants or stakeholders and a transnationally oriented framework, we analyse features across three core policy dimensions that incorporate both international and domestic dynamics: citizenship, top talent recruitment and soft power. Our findings contribute to the literature on Chinese‐state‐diaspora relations. They show that China's approach to its diaspora policy and development, practice and outcomes reaches with powerful new effects across national borders. The transnational–relational perspective gives an optimal paradigm for researchers and policymakers to understand changing strengths and complexities in interactions (contestation, conflict, negotiation, cooperation) between multi‐scalar and multi‐dimensional linkages, and to form diaspora policy and engagement programmes responsive to unprecedented global political, economic and social disruption.
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ItemConflict, contestation, and corruption reform: the political dynamics of the EITI in Indonesia(ROUTLEDGE JOURNALS, TAYLOR & FRANCIS LTD, 2020-03-14)1. We know little about the political dynamics shaping country responses to the EITI, despite their importance as a determinant of these responses and the fact that the EITI’s success hinges on its ability to attract country members. This paper seeks to enhance our understanding in this respect by examining the Indonesian case. Indonesia was slow to sign up to and implement the EITI but eventually did so. It has remained compliant with the initiative more or less ever since, although its commitment has waned in recent years. We argue that this response reflected the changing balance of power between four sets of actors – national politico-business elites, regional politico-business elites, controllers of mobile capital, and subordinate classes and their NGO allies – as affected by economic shocks, political mobilisation, and elites’ political strategies. We accordingly suggest that EITI proponents consider the nature of such dynamics in devising reform strategies.
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ItemPandemics, politics and principles: business and human rights in Southeast Asia in a time of crisis.(Asia Institute, University of Melbourne, 2020)Business activity has been a key driver of economic dynamism in Southeast Asia and one of the main reasons for the region’s growing prosperity in recent decades. It has led to increases in investment and consumption, boosted exports and, in so doing, promoted economic growth. This has in turn created jobs, improved incomes, increased governments’ ability to provide social welfare, and lifted millions out of poverty.
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ItemOvercoming Oligarchy? The UN’s Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights in the Philippines(Asia Institute, University of Melbourne, 2020)