CHAIRPERSON
Dr Michelle Ann Miller, Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore
ABSTRACT
In my talk I try to shed light on people-smuggling recruiters in Indonesia who help supply new clients to transnationally operating people-smugglingnetworks. By presenting two cases studies of Middle Eastern people-smuggling recruiters and money collectors, I put forward the argument that especially for rejected asylum seekers stuck in transit, who are unable to return to their conflict-ridden home countries and yet have no options for resettlement to a safe third countries while at the same time being banned from legal work, entering criminal business networks almost seems to be the last option left to make a living. Given that academic research on people-smuggling has often overlooked the highly fluctuant nature of these transnationally operating smugglingnetwork, the different role distribution within the polycentric networks as well as the varying degrees of involvement of members and auxiliary staff, I hope to contribute to a more nuanced understanding of how these people-smuggling structures operate in Indonesia. More significantly, I also hope to explain how current asylum policies and border politics in Australia and Indonesia have – against all political intentions – directly and indirectly buoyed the evolution, the refinement and sometimes, even the consolidation of transnational people-smugglingnetworks.
ABOUT THE SPEAKER
Antje Missbach studied Southeast Asian Studies and Anthropology at the Humboldt University in Berlin. In 2010 she obtained her PhD from the Australian National University in Canberra for a thesis about the long-distance politics of the Acehnese diaspora. She has taught at the universities in Berlin and Heidelberg before becoming a McKenzie Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Melbourne. Currently she is a research fellow at the Department of Anthropology at Monash University in Melbourne. Her main research areas center around transit migration, diaspora politics as well as border and mobility studies and recent fieldwork has been supported by the Australian Research Council, Fritz-Thyssen-Stiftung and the German-Academic Exchange Service (DAAD).
REGISTRATION
Admission is free. We would greatly appreciate if you RSVP to Ms Tay Minghua via email: minghua.tay@nus.edu.sg.
