Explore the vast range of titles available.

Based on the authors’ long‐term field research on low‐skilled labor migration from China and Indonesia, this article establishes that more than ever labor migration is intensively mediated. Migration infrastructure – the systematically interlinked technologies, institutions, and actors that facilitate and condition mobility – serves as a concept to unpack the process of mediation. Migration can be more clearly conceptualized through a focus on infrastructure rather than on state policies, the labor market, or migrant social networks alone. The article also points to a trend of “infrastructural involution,” in which the interplay between different dimensions of migration infrastructure make it self‐perpetuating and self‐serving, and impedes rather than enhances people's migratory capability. This explains why labor migration has become both more accessible and more cumbersome in many parts of Asia since the late 1990s. The notion of migration infrastructure calls for research that is less fixated on migration as behavior or migrants as the primary subject, and more concerned with broader societal transformations.

This article considers the emergence of informal brokers in the context of an increasingly formalized regime of transnational labour migration from Indonesia. Following the 1997 Asian economic crisis and the fall of the Suharto regime, there has been a dramatic increase in documented transnational migration to Malaysia at the expense of undocumented migration. In this process, a growing number of private agencies have come to control the increasingly deregulated market for migrant recruitment. These agencies, in turn, depend on informal brokers who recruit migrants in villages across Indonesia to work on palm oil plantations and as domestic servants in countries such as Malaysia and Saudi Arabia. This article takes these informal brokers as a starting point for considering the current Indonesian migration regime, using ethnographic data from the island of Lombok. Along with offering a description of brokering practices, the article argues that the dual process of centralization of migration control and fragmentation of labour recruitment has created a space of mediation for individuals who can navigate bureaucratic process while embodying the ethical qualities that convince Indonesian villagers to become migrants.

This article argues that antar-jemput (escort) is critical for understanding low-skilled international migration from rural Indonesia to countries across Asia and the Middle East. Antar-jemput forms the basis for the development of a migration infrastructure comprising recruitment, documentation, transport, temporary housing, reception, and physical restraint centered on the “protection,” or perlindungan, of the migrant. Such so-called security measures set the stage for protection rackets. As villagers have increasingly been valued as an overseas labor reserve since the 1980s, a culture of (im)mobility has taken shape, especially for female migrants, centered on the vulnerabilities of traveling alone and the comfort and security of traveling together. From this perspective, antar-jemput offers an entry point for conceptualizing migration infrastructure in Indonesia not strictly as an apparatus for the regulation and extraction of labor, or the management of a particular population, but also as an historically embedded cultural form.

Social media engagements, such as likes and follows, have become crucial for driving algorithmic recommendations and underpinning platform economies. This has given rise to disinformation industries that focus on the production and sale of engagements, including Instagram followers—a phenomenon we term the “engagement as a service” market. However, this market poses significant challenges for empirical research as its operations remain obscured from the scrutiny of platforms, their users, and researchers alike. In this article, we propose a mixed-methods approach to make visible the relationship between the engagement market and platform governance, the latter of which increasingly aims to moderate account behavior in terms of authenticity and inauthenticity—what we refer to as “authenticity governance.” By developing this approach, we explore the relationship between the engagement market and platform ecosystems through three case studies: (1) engagement market responses to platform governance; (2) the evolution of engagement as a service; and (3) testing the quality of engagement as a service on Instagram. These investigations allow us to comprehend disinformation as an ongoing negotiation between the engagement market and authenticity governance. Overall, our three integrated approaches can help researchers move forward with the empirical study of disinformation markets that operate at the periphery of platform ecosystems. In short, this article presents a methodological outlook for analyzing (in)authentic engagements as a form of disinformation.

This special issue takes the migrant broker as a starting point for investigating contemporary regimes of transnational migration across Asia. The articles, which span large parts of Asia-including China, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Singapore, South Korea, Thailand, Vietnam, as well as New Zealand-show that marriage migration, student migration and various forms of unskilled labour migration, including predominantly male plantation and construction work and female domestic, entertainment and sex work, are all mediated by brokers. Although much is known about why migrants leave home and what happens to them upon arrival, considerably less is known about the forms of infrastructure that condition their mobility. A focus on brokers is one productive way of opening this \"black box\" of migration research. The articles in this issue are thus not primarily concerned with the experiences of migrants or in mapping migrant networks per se, but rather in considering how mobility is made possible and organized by brokers, most notably in the process of recruitment and documentation. Drawing from this evidence, we argue that in contrast to the social network approach, a focus on the migrant broker offers a critical methodological vantage point from which to consider the shifting logic of contemporary migration across Asia. In particular, paying ethnographic attention to brokers illuminates the broader infrastructure that makes mobility possible while revealing that distinctions between state and market, between formal and informal, and between altruistic and profit-oriented networks are impossible to sustain in practice.

This paper takes the broker as an entry‐point for considering the problem of exemplification in anthropology. In particular, it approaches this problem by way of the relationship between figure and type, or between example and theoretical exemplar. While the figure is contingent on a specific socio‐historical context, the type consciously accentuates particular characteristics in order to form the basis for comparison. More specifically, the paper approaches this relationship by considering the broker as type in relation to two specific figures in the current regime of transnational Indonesian migration, namely the NGO outreach worker and the informal labour recruiter, both identified as ‘field agents’, or petugas lapangan, in Indonesia. By way of juxtaposition the paper discusses the oscillation between figure and type in order to consider biases in the anthropological literature on brokers – most notably that the the broker is inherently amoral if not immoral – while suggesting that the broker is an exemplary methodological starting‐point for contemporary anthropology. Figures et types : négocier savoir et migrations en Indonésie et au‐delà Résumé L’article fait du courtier un point d’entrée pour examiner le problème de la création d’exemples en anthropologie. Plus précisément, il aborde ce problème par le biais de la relation entre figure et type ou entre exemple et exemplaire théorique. Alors que la figure est inscrite dans un contexte sociohistorique donné, le type accentue consciemment des caractéristiques particulières afin de constituer la base de la comparaison. Plus précisément, l’article aborde cette relation en examinant le courtier comme un type en relation avec deux figures spécifiques du régime actuel de migrations transnationales des Indonésiens : l’envoyé en mission sur le terrain des ONG et le recruteur de main‐d’œuvre informel, appelés tous deux « agents de terrain » ou petugas lapangan en Indonésie. Par juxtaposition, l’auteur examine, par une discussion de l’oscillation entre figure et type, les biais de la littérature anthropologique sur le courtier (en particulier le fait qu’il serait, par essence, amoral sinon immoral), tout en suggérant que celui‐ci constitue un point de départ méthodologique exemplaire pour l’anthropologie contemporaine.

During the last decade there has been a marked shift in the structure of migration from Indonesia with the deregulation of the transnational labour recruitment market after the fall of Suharto and a broader attempt across the region to regulate migrant flows to and from receiving countries in the wake of the Asian economic crisis. In this process, hundreds of Indonesian labour recruitment agencies have come to function as brokers in an increasingly government-regulated economy that sends documented migrants to countries such as Malaysia and Saudi Arabia. Based primarily on fieldwork on the island of Lombok, one of the major migrant-sending areas in Indonesia, the article considers the gendered aspects of this state-market relationship by focusing ethnographic attention on the initial stages of recruitment, as informal labour brokers deliver migrants to formal agencies. Critically, the article describes how capital increasingly flows \"down\" towards female migrants and \"up\" from male migrants-i.e., men must go into debt while women do not pay (or are even offered money) to travel abroad-thus highlighting the gendered dimensions of the current economy of transnational migration. More generally, the article argues for a renewed focus on the migration industry as a way of reconceptualizing Indonesian transnational migration in the context of contemporary forms of globalization.

This article explores the trend of \"infrastructuralization\" in state-sponsored programs of low- and semi-skilled labour migration from Asia. These programs increasingly focus on facilitating migration rather than generating actual opportunities for mobility and substantive development. While providing training to develop skills targeting specific jobs in specific countries, the programs generally leave complaints about actual working conditions and wages to be managed by the migrants themselves. In this process, labour migration programs are infrastructuralized, meaning that there is an ongoing expansion and intensification of the socio-technical platform that makes mobility possible, as facilitation becomes an end in itself. This trend is tied to changes in the general development paradigm, labour and state-citizen relations across Asia, as well as the increasing importance of brokers in facilitating connection. This article first probes a number of internal dynamics around which infrastructuralization unfolds in practice. We then highlight how commercial intermediaries and public institutions, the two key actors in infrastructuralization, shape migration by producing context-specific migrant subjectivities, making aspirational work a central element of infrastructuralization. In the conclusion, we explore research agendas that can be developed further.

This introductory article lays the groundwork for the special issue on \"Social Media and Society in Indonesia.\" It examines the co-constitutive relationship between social media and Indonesian society, focusing on their mutual shaping within enduring socio-cultural dynamics. The article calls for a nuanced understanding of how technologies are localized and how diverse \"social media publics\" emerge in the Indonesian context. It begins by tracing the social and material histories of Indonesian social media and subsequently explores three key themes that emerge from the curated collection: the business and labor of cultivating social media publics; social media's political publics; and social media's religious publics. Challenging dominant narratives of social media as a homogenous phenomenon, the article positions Indonesia as a critical lens for analyzing and reimagining global social media discourse.