Counter-trafficking Policies and the Overseas Labour Protection Regime in Indonesia: Between Populism and Securitisation

After the 1990s, in addition to the European cases, scholars working on human trafficking also put major attention to Southeast Asia. This article contributes to the discourse on the nexus between labour migration and human trafficking by analysing the politics surrounding counter-trafficking policymaking in Southeast Asia, particularly Indonesia. This study investigates two interrelated domestic factors influencing the evolution of the state's counter-trafficking framework: (1) the integration of labour protection within a populist policy agenda and (2) the securitisation of labour migration. Combined with the global discourse on labour trafficking, such intertwining factors have resulted in the counter-trafficking approach which tends to criminalise actors within the labour migration sector. Drawing upon extensive fieldwork conducted between 2022 and 2024 in multiple sites in Indonesia, this research argues that domestic political dynamics, when considered alongside broader global debates on human trafficking, have significantly shaped the government's direction in counter-trafficking policy development.