Producing the Self-Regulating Subject: Liberal Protection in Indonesia’s Migration Infrastructure

Labour protection has become a dominant agenda in global migration governance, particularly for sending countries whose diasporic citizens are denied political rights in host states. Despite having limited authority to arbitrate extraterritorial disputes, sending countries like Indonesia have deployed novel techniques of statecraft to improve migrant protection. Through the prism of the professional competence exam and pre-departure orientation seminar, this article investigates the Indonesian state’s regulatory practices that focus on migrant conduct. Although outbound domestic workers are subject to a prolonged process of skill formation, other Indonesian contract workers pursue emigration upon acquiring basic legal knowledge without undergoing accreditation. While both programs are designed to inculcate migrant capabilities for self-protection, the state’s professionalization of domestic workers constitutes a liberal strategy of exclusion that is predicated on their master status as “vulnerable victims” in public discourse. To understand Indonesia’s increasingly mediated migration infrastructure, then, requires attention to the liberal rationality of protection that involves the transformation of migrants into self-regulating subjects.

制造自我监管的主体：印度尼西亚劳工流动基础设施的自由主义保护

关键词： 流动劳工； 基础设施；治理术；民族志；印度尼西亚。

劳工保护在全球劳工流动治理中已经成为一个主导性的议程，对那些其海外公民在输入国中被拒绝给予政治权利的输出国来说尤为如此。尽管在仲裁境外纠纷问题上权力有限，像印度尼西亚这样的输出国还是采用了新颖的治国之道，以提高对国际流动者的保护。本文通过透视专业能力测试和出发前培训讲座，考察了印度尼西亚政府对于国际流动者品行的规管实践。尽管对外流动的家政工人要经受漫长的技能培养过程，但是其他印度尼西亚合同制工人是通过获取基本法律知识实现移民这一目标的，并没有经过认证过程ｐ尽管两个政府项目都是设计用来培养国际流动劳工自我保护的能力，但政府对家政工人的专业化训练构成了一种自由主义的排除策略，是以他们在公共话语体系中“弱势受害者”的主要身份为预设而设计的。因此，为了解印度尼西亚日益受政府调节的劳工流动基础设施，就要求我们对提出将流动劳工转型为自我规管的主体的自由主义劳工保护理性加以关注。

Translated from English by Li Guo