The Domestication of Protection

Abstract This article seeks to address some of the issues surrounding Indonesia’s overseas labour protection programme. Despite the fundamental reform of the programme since 2004, observers have assessed that this programme has faced a considerable implementation deficiency. While many studies have identified that this programme was not successful, in this article I aim to explain why. I argue that the government and civil society organizations have helped define, frame, and impose the term ‘protection’ in the process of policy production. In that process, the two stakeholders have demonstrated ‘the domestication of protection’, or an attitude in which the stakeholders of migration view the problems that appear in overseas labour settings as being ones originating in the migrant-sending countries. Therefore, protection is limited to taking action directed at the migration process within the jurisdiction of the sending country. In my research on this topic, I mainly employed open-ended interviews and field observations between 2013 and 2019 in Indonesia and Malaysia.