Article 28G(2) in Indonesia’s 1945 Constitution reflects a human rights approach to asylum; it guarantees “the right to obtain political asylum from another country,” together with freedom from torture. It imposes an obligation upon the state to give access to basic rights to those to whom it offers asylum, following an appropriate determination procedure. By contrast, in Presidential Regulation No. 125 of 2016 concerning the Treatment of Refugees, the Indonesian government’s response to asylum seekers and refugees is conceptualized as “humanitarian assistance,” and through a politicized and securitized immigration-control approach. We argue that the competition between these three approaches—the human right to asylum, humanitarianism, and immigration control—constitutes a “triangulation” of asylum and refugee protection in Indonesia, in which the latter two prevail. In light of this framework, this article provides a socio-political and legal analysis of why Article 28G(2) has not been widely accepted as the basis of asylum and refugee protection in Indonesia.

Surging flows of international migrants challenge the state's capacity to control borders. This problem is especially acute when it involves unwanted, yet often the most vulnerable, incomers. In liberal democracies, policymakers are caught in the dilemma of how to block their presence without contravening the state's fundamental liberal principles. Against the backdrop of these realities, this article traces the development of monetized means of inducing the voluntary repatriation of such migrants. In contrast to the conventional view that associates this political phenomenon with the neoliberal marketization of belonging, I contend that the growing practice of incentivizing migrants to leave is better conceptualized as a subset of immigration control policies rooted in the liberal ideals that imbue the institutional orders of liberal democracies. From the state's perspective, such post-arrival measures pay greater attention to the individual rights of migrants. This argument is advanced with special reference to the underexplored case of Japan.

In the early 1920s Southeast Asia, before communism compelled the creation of inter-colonial intelligence networks in the late period of the decade, a situation that can be called the ‘China problem’ emerged as an issue for the colonial powers in the region. This problem refers to the political activities by local Chinese populations in response to events that were taking place in China. The colonial powers, however, could not find a common solution to this issue, but instead dealt with it individually. An explanation to this lies in the fact that, unlike in Northeast Asia where the ‘Washington System’ shaped international politics in the 1920s, in Southeast Asia no such official framework had been established to deal with regional issues. This article sets out to demonstrate that under Britain's ‘informal empire’ in Southeast Asia, the colonial powers informally started to exchange information on domestic Chinese politics in their colonies as well as the political development in China. The ‘China problem’ was thus a catalyst that brought to the region ‘international’ politics and in particular the politics of immigration control.