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The Role of Local Governments in Accommodating Refugees in Indonesia: Investigating Best-Case and Worst-Case Scenarios

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 September 2021

Antje Missbach  and
Yunizar Adiputera
Antje Missbach*
Affiliation:
Faculty of Sociology, Bielefeld University, Germany
Yunizar Adiputera
Affiliation:
Department of International Relations, Universitas Gadjah Mada, Yogyakarta, Indonesia
*
*Corresponding author. E-mail: [email protected]
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Abstract

This article analyses the “local turn” in refugee governance in Indonesia through a comparative case-study of two cities: Makassar and Jakarta. It compares how these two cities have responded to the obligations to provide alternative accommodation to detention, imposed upon them by the Presidential Regulation No. 125 of 2016 concerning the Treatment of Refugees (PR). While the shift to non-custodial community shelters has been widely praised, we discuss issues that arose when the national government shifted the responsibility for providing accommodation for refugees to local governments, without the allocation of the required funds. The outcome has been a general lack of engagement by local governments. By locating this case-study in the wider global trend of “local turns” in the management of refugee issues, we argue that, in Indonesia, the “local turn” in responsibility for refugees is not fostering a protection approach, but has worsened the conditions for refugees.

Keywords

local turn in refugee governanceIndonesiaimmigration detentionalternatives to detentionrefugee rights
Type
Refugees in Indonesia
Information
Asian Journal of Law and Society , Volume 8 , Issue 3 , October 2021 , pp. 490 - 506
Copyright
© The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of Asian Journal of Law and Society

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