Solidarity and ‘social jealousy’: emotions and affect in Indonesian host society’s situated encounters with refugees

Abstract

This article approaches the reception of refugees in Indonesia as an assemblage (agencement) that places a multiplicity of relations among bodies, things, ideas, social institutions and emotions at the locus of the study. Refugees’ indefinite ‘transit’ in Indonesia triggers situated encounters with local residents and institutions that contribute to the flow of affect within the assemblage. This article highlights situated encounters that elicit many emotions, expressed using common themes of solidarity and ‘social jealousy’. These themes came up in observations, conversations and interviews with host societies in Indonesia during a multi-sited study in 2018–2019. I argue that emotions of solidarity and ‘social jealousy’ act to enable and motivate host societies to help refugees, while simultaneously limiting how much help refugees are allowed to expect or feel entitled to, thus contributing to the ordering of territories within the assemblage.

Keywords:

• Indonesia
• refugees
• affect
• emotion
• assemblage
• solidarity

Introduction

Responses and reactions to refugees’ presence are deeply emotive. They are expressed and framed in narratives of despair and distrust in debating refugees’ reception (Nightingale, Quayle, and Muldoon 2017), determining refugees’ status (Rousseau and Foxen 2010), and in refugees’ belonging in destination countries (Askins 2016). Most studies on emotions and affect in refugee reception practice take place in the Global North, which is still generally perceived as a final destination of the refugee journey. This perception persists despite comparable and unprecedented numbers of displaced people living in the Global South. Studies on refugees in ‘transit’ often allude to emotions in the context of their forced emotional hibernation and psychological trauma (Chan and Loveridge 1987), their tactical agency in narrating their victimhood and vulnerability and to navigate war zones and resettlement (Utas 2005), and the emotions they elicit among host societies in relation to social cohesion (Fajth et al. 2019) and hospitality (Rozakou 2012; Missbach 2017). I wish to contribute to literature on the reception of refugees experiencing indefinite ‘transit’ by focussing on host societies’ emotions and discourses of ‘solidarity’ and ‘social jealousy’ and what they ‘do’ within the assemblage of refugee reception in Indonesia.

This article draws upon literature emphasising the sociality of emotions, particularly how emotions feed into processes of meaning-making and challenging and maintaining relations of power (Svašek 2005; Wetherell 2012; Ahmed 2014; Fox 2015). Seeing emotions as embodied social and cultural practices, Ahmed (2014, 10) wrote: ‘it is through emotions, or how we respond to objects and others, that surfaces or boundaries are made: the “I” and the “we” are shaped by, and even take the shape of, contact with others’.

Host societies’ reactions to refugees’ prolonged presence, which are central to my research, are given meaning by the circulation of emotions that shape the boundaries and attachments between the two groups. However, these two groups are neither homogeneous nor isolated within a vacuum. Social norms that are learned and internalised, and the physical spaces that we inhabit and that shape our interactions, are central to understanding the movements of emotions and how emotions in turn shape our environment (Milton 2005).

I will focus on common themes around solidarity and ‘social jealousy’. These themes emerged in my observations, conversations and interviews with refugees, local residents, Indonesian government officials and international organisations during a multi-sited study in 2018–2019. I argue that the tension between solidarity and ‘social jealousy’ is central to the reception of refugees in Indonesia. These expressed emotions are used to make sense of the prevailing dissonance between the offering of solidarity and support for refugees in need while maintaining boundaries between an ‘us’ and the foreign refugee ‘others’.

The paper starts by positioning emotions and discourse on refugees, particularly the notion of refugees ‘in transit’, which is necessary to understand the power dynamics between host societies and refugees. The flows of affect between refugees and the host society, which include but are not limited to the state apparatus that manages refugees, form what I will refer to in the next section as an assemblage of refugee reception. I will then discuss how local practices of refugee reception and situated encounters between refugees and host societies shape and are shaped by the policies that are part and parcel of this assemblage. However, as refugees are living in urban spaces for longer periods of time, the assemblage of refugee reception cannot be attributed only to the central role of the sovereign or state but emerges from a multiplicity of interacting forces (Wiertz 2020, 5).

From this context I will unpack emotions of solidarity and ‘social jealousy’ and analyse what they do within the assemblage. These emotive themes were not necessarily narrated by people with opposing views towards refugees, but often by the same people trying to make sense of their eagerness to help while also limiting the extent to which their help can be offered. I argue that interrelated emotions of solidarity and ‘social jealousy’ act to maintain the ordering of power relations between host societies and refugees within an assemblage of refugee reception.

Refugee reception in Indonesia as an assemblage

Deleuze and Guattari (2004) described an assemblage as consisting of content (bodies, actions, passions) and expressions or enunciations (statements, laws, incorporeal transformations attributed to bodies). Content and expressions have both territorialising forces that stabilise the assemblage, along with degrees of de-territorialisation that resist or move away from it. An assemblage of refugee reception in Indonesia is grounded on its continued resistance to be party to the 1951 Convention and its 1967 Protocol, while claiming to uphold the principle of non-refoulement. It constitutes a multiplicity of international and national actors, national regulations and local practices, along with situated encounters between refugees and host societies’ members whose emotions have the capacity to affect relations and arrangements within the assemblage.

Since it first hosted refugees in the 1970s, during the Vietnam War, Indonesia has consistently positioned itself as a ‘transit’ state for refugees and does not offer any legal pathway for refugees to become Indonesian citizens. In response to the arrival of refugees from Vietnam, it established Galang Island as a temporary refugee processing centre. Geographically secluded from the rest of the Indonesian archipelago, the facilitation, management and resettlement of refugees on Galang Island were left to Western States via the United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) (Tan 2016, 389). Almost every refugee from Vietnam was finally resettled in the early 1990s, and the facility at Galang Island was officially closed in 1997. After the closing of the facility, Indonesia continued to host refugees and currently hosts approximately 13,676 refugees mostly from Afghanistan, Somalia and Myanmar (UNHCR 2019). Over half of the refugee population in Indonesia consists of Hazara refugees from Afghanistan (UNHCR 2019). Different from their Vietnamese predecessors, these refugees are not isolated on one island. Instead, they are spread out across the archipelago, mostly located in big cities like Jakarta, Medan and Makassar. Indonesia continues to rely on UNHCR and the International Organization for Migration (IOM) to financially support and accommodate refugees. However, funding cuts have meant that this reliance fails to offer a sustainable solution for refugees, who are forced to endure increasingly longer periods of transit before being resettled – if they can ever be resettled at all. In February 2014, Australia, which had provided places for the majority of refugees in Indonesia, announced that it would stop receiving refugees registered to UNHCR Indonesia after 1 July 2014 (Brown and Missbach 2016). In 2018, IOM for the first time capped its support, to its present caseload of around 9000 refugees, leaving those who just arrived or those running out of their own funds to support themselves in vulnerable positions (Missbach 2018). Refugees’ extended period of transit at a time when existing support systems became harder to access has led them to increasingly rely on the support of local residents and non-governmental organisations (NGOs), many of which did not have previous experience working with refugees.

To understand refugee reception practice in Indonesia, I approach relations among bodies, things, discourses, social institutions and emotions as an assemblage that can be strengthened and/or moderated by flows of affect. Emotions are one of many elements in an assemblage that can be both products and producers of affect (Fox 2015, 312). Fox (2015, 307) wrote:

It follows that the flow of affect in an assemblage may be highly complex, recursive and fragmenting, particularly where human capacities for language and symbolic interaction bring relations from memories, experiences or social formations into the mix, alongside physical and biological elements, and indeed, emotional responses to the environment.

This accumulation of emotions over time forms affective value (Ahmed 2014), which aggregates to form territorialisations of relatively stable assemblages that permeate social life at every level (Fox 2015, 307). The formation of territorialisations and de-territorialisations shapes a ‘politics of affect’ that allows us to understand social stratifications, such as class, gender, race, refugees’ and citizens’ statuses, and the working of power and meaning-making through patterns within the assemblage.

Literature on refugee and migration studies is often anchored in the omnipresence of nation states and the social-legal categorisation of refugees and other migrants, whose identities are given meaning through their contrast to the sedentariness of host citizens and their lack of being in and belonging to a state. The handling of refugees and refugee discourse starts from a sedentarism that presumes their uprootedness as abnormal and their displacement as a problem that needs to be resolved and adjusted (Malkki 1992). Wiertz (2020, 5) argues that assemblage theory can be useful to study migration, ‘because it offers an ontology of power that does not attempt to capture a particular historical situation and that helps to understand biopolitics as the emergent result of a multiplicity of interacting forces, rather than attributing it to a central figure such as the sovereign or state’. Understanding refugee reception as an assemblage sees the practice of hosting refugees as a dynamic, non-linear process of becoming. This allows us to analyse empirical situations as a result both of state apparatus and its governance of refugees, and of individuals’ ongoing abilities to influence the flow of affect within the assemblage. Fitting individual bodies to ‘refugee status’ is a contestation within the assemblage. Different actors (government and quasi-government actors, citizens and refugees themselves) have different capacities to influence or attempt to influence who is deserving and undeserving of help and what kind of help ‘deserving’ refugees are entitled to.

Individuals’ claims to refugee status are susceptible to the expectations, demands and curiosity of host societies. Host societies’ ability to potentially affect how refugees are perceived and perceive themselves can be attributed to refugees’ susceptibility. Jakimow (2020, 8) defines susceptibility as ‘a fundamental condition in which we have the potential to be affected in ways that inform our sense of who we are, or are becoming’. Refugees stuck during transit live in a state of limbo (Missbach 2015) as they cannot move on, move back or stay put indefinitely. During these prolonged transits, the trustworthiness of their refugee claims is repeatedly called into question, requiring them to assert narratives of vulnerability (Jansen 2008) to convince others of the existence of well-founded fears of persecution that justify their categorisation as refugees and the support that may come with it. Convincing others of the reality of one’s fears requires more than the presentation of facts, but also emotional strategies to trigger empathy and connection.

The power relations between citizens and refugees are not one-directional. In their study on refugees and informal settlement dwellers living in Korail, Dhaka, Bangladesh, Huq and Miraftab (2020) argued that in contexts where citizenship does not guarantee access to state services, the line between citizens and refugees may blur. Understanding refugees’ and citizens’ positions as relational and dynamic can shed light on the affective flows that territorialise and de-territorialise the assemblage of refugee reception. In this article I focus on the perspectives of Indonesian citizens as hosts to refugees and how emotions work to affect and keep in check their susceptibility to be affected by refugees’ presence.

This ontological framework to understanding refugee reception as an assemblage has methodological consequences. Wetherell (2013) has demonstrated the value of fine-grained discursive research that is attentive to the embodiment of emotions and patterns of bodies in action. Affect and emotion inform the script or schema through which people understand the world and their actions in relation to it (see Introduction, this issue). As an example, Wetherell looks closely at the work of Marjorie Goodwin (2006, in Wetherell 2013, 359–64), a conversation analyst and linguistic anthropologist, whose work analysing patterns in detailed audio and video recordings of girls’ activities on the playground show how both affect and discourse are entangled in situated activities that are given meaning through past practices and its immediate situation and context. Wetherell (2012, 361) wrote, ‘Body movements and facial expressions and so on are intimately choreographed and patterned with talk in this very brief episode and the whole complex does impressive amounts of identity work in a nanosecond’. Situated human encounters do not exist in a vacuum. Through observations of locally situated encounters, we are able to understand how emotions work to affect the relations within an assemblage.

My paper is grounded in ethnographic observations collected during my 14-month, multi-sited fieldwork on refugee reception in Indonesia in 2018–2019, which included Jakarta, Bogor and Medan. I recorded semi-structured interviews with representatives of government and non-governmental institutions when given verbal consent to do so. I also generated data by participating in events and volunteering activities and through ‘conversational interviewing’ (Yanow and Schwartz-Shea 2014, 150) documented in my fieldnotes. To protect those involved in my research, I have kept individuals and organisations anonymous, with the exception of international institutions charged with the facilitation of refugees in Indonesia. Each city offered a different viewpoint on refugees’ lives and their reception in Indonesia. In Jakarta, I stayed in Kalideres, West Jakarta, where about 300 unsupported/self-funded refugees had started to camp on the streets in front of the Immigration Detention Centre. In the Bogor regency, I stayed in Cisarua where a community of self-funded Hazara refugees had set up learning centres for their children while living in Indonesia. Medan, together with Makassar, hosts the largest number of IOM accommodations in the country, which are occupied by approximately 3700 refugees (Directorate General of Immigration 2018).

To be clear, this paper does not aim to make generalised claims about how Indonesians feel about refugees. The different contexts of my research mean that it is too difficult to make wide generalisations on responses and reactions towards refugees’ presence. However, despite these differences there were common themes of solidarity and ‘social jealousy’ that recurred in my observations and conversations with the people I encountered during fieldwork. In retelling the emotions expressed and observed in my research, I connect them to flows of affect that contribute to the forming of the assemblage of refugee reception. In the following section I describe how host societies’ locally situated encounters with refugees relate to the state apparatus within the assemblage of refugee reception.

Situated encounters in the assemblage of refugee reception in Indonesia

During my fieldwork in Medan, North Sumatra, on 3 July 2019, I attended the inauguration of a mural that IOM funded and organised with the Perintis sub-district. The mural is on a wall stretching on the side of a road called Jalan Dorowati, just off a main road called Jalan Perintis Kemerdekaan. It consists of seven painted images that do not follow any particular theme and was presented as being the result of a collaboration between refugees and local community members. While the inauguration of the mural was a small project, limited to one location in Medan, it illustrates the affective flows in the assemblage of refugee reception in Indonesia. I will start by highlighting observations I collected during and after the mural’s inauguration ceremony and then show how they are connected to the governmentality of refugees in Indonesia. In this section I will demonstrate varying degrees of refugees and local residents’ susceptibility within the assemblage of refugee reception in Indonesia.

The mural’s inauguration ceremony was opened by IOM representatives who presented the mural as connected to the World Refugee Day held about two weeks prior. Meanwhile, in the speeches that followed, local officials presented it as also part of a programme from the Medan municipal government called Kampung Selfie (Selfie Village), a local initiative to clean up and beautify neighbourhoods in Medan. The last speaker was a Hazara refugee from Afghanistan who had been living in Indonesia for about 10 years and spoke Indonesian fluently. He told the audience that many refugees have skills and would be happy to help the communities where they lived. On behalf of his peers, he expressed their gratitude to the Indonesian people and government for letting them stay. The inauguration ceremony gave space to this Hazara refugee to influence how those attending viewed him and his refugee community. His short speech was received with the warmest applause that morning. I could hear many people in the audience expressing their pleasant surprise and appreciation regarding his fluency in speaking Indonesian.

The inauguration audience were responding to the positive testimony given by the Hazara refugee about Indonesia’s role as a host society. His expressed gratitude and eagerness to contribute to his hosts, his ability to communicate in the local language and his positive, humbled body language (his constant smile, his slightly hunched back, his hands held behind his back) made him an ideal representation of a ‘good refugee’ (see studies on constructs of ‘good migrants’ by Findlay et al. 2013; Collins and Bayliss 2020). The responsibility to play the role of a ‘good refugee’ may not be conscious but it was consistent with officials’ objective in commissioning the mural. According to the head of the Perintis sub-district, the painting of the mural was intended to involve refugees in voluntary activities for the community, which was seen as more desirable than having them engage in negative activities, such as ‘minum tuak’ – drinking a local alcoholic brew (recorded interview, 2 July 2019). The views of the head of the sub-district on what refugees should and should not do shape in part the identities that refugees need to perform in order to be perceived as acceptable.

Equally important is what was not said during the refugee’s brief speech. While the group of refugees attending the inauguration were IOM beneficiaries who received accommodations and a monthly stipend, like other refugees in Indonesia, they were not allowed to search for their own sources of livelihood and had limited if any access to formal education. The prolonged waiting without guarantee for resettlement has pushed refugees to organise protests in Medan in August 2019 and December 2020 (Sitorus 2019; Andriansyah 2020), as well as in other parts of Indonesia. Were the Hazara refugee speaker to use his speech to highlight the challenges he or his peers had to face during their time in ‘transit’, or to discuss the fact that he still could not be resettled after living in Indonesia for about ten years, he might not have received such a warm reception from the inauguration audience. While the inauguration of the mural offered an opportunity for refugees to present themselves in a positive light to local community members, there were tacit expectations of what constituted a ‘good refugee’ that coloured the encounter.

Despite its good intentions, the mural project organised by IOM and local government officials had unintended consequences. Outside the tent where the inauguration took place, around 15–20 residents had been quietly standing and observing the proceedings. It is worth noting that the inauguration ceremony did not include any testimony from residents living in the area. After the inauguration ceremony was over, I approached a small group consisting of three women and two men standing/sitting together. I introduced myself as a researcher and expressed my interest in learning their thoughts about the mural. To my surprise, the woman in front of me answered with contempt, ‘What do you think our reactions would be, we used to be sellers on this street and now we are not allowed to sell there’. I asked her how long they had been selling there. She explained that in the late 1980s they used to sell things on the main road, Jalan Perintis Kemerdekaan. In 1994 the district head relocated them to this smaller road where the mural was now located.

Before I could respond a second woman retorted, ‘Did you pay any rent to sell there? Did you own the land? No, you didn’t. So, the government has a right to tell you to move’. A third woman chipped in, saying to the second, ‘Were you a seller who just lost your income? No! So, just shut up (Jadi, diam saja!)’. A young man supported the third woman, saying to the second: ‘My mother raised me by selling here, I grew up helping in the stalls since I was little. How do you think we feel?’ Thus, behind the official narratives of the mural were stories of street vendors’ displacement.

IOM presented the mural as an object that could encourage sympathy and/or a collective sense of responsibility among local authorities, residents and refugees. However, in its implementation, the mural project did not seem to take into account the unintended consequence of displacing food vendors and the anger that it triggered. The top-down facilitation of a project to stimulate one emotion was challenged through the emotive narratives on the sidelines as expressed by the street vendors whose spaces were taken away. The local food vendors’ access to the space that they had strong ties to had been challenged, rendering them susceptible to the strengthening alliance between IOM and local government officials and their responses to the prolonged presence of refugees in their neighbourhoods.

The last image in the mural included a painting of a tree with six branches. At the bottom of the tree were the logos of Regional Military Command I (Komando Dearah Militer I), IOM and the Municipality of Medan (Medan Kota). At the end of the inauguration ceremony, all of the officials and refugees present were invited to have their palms covered with paint to leave handprints as leaves on the image of the tree. The mural symbolised a successful alliance between IOM and local governmental offices. The increasing collaborations between international organisations, particularly UNHCR and IOM, and local governmental institutions is part of what Missbach, Adiputera, and Prabandari (2018) referred to as the ‘local turn’, which signifies a shift of focus from national governments to local stakeholders and settings in managing refugees. In Indonesia, this shift was most noticeable in the signing of Presidential Regulation no. 125/2016 on the Treatment of Refugees and Asylum Seekers in Indonesia (PR 125/2016), which was the first legal framework that acknowledged refugees’ and asylum seekers’ statuses in Indonesia. The regulation decentralised authority from Immigration Office officials and formalised the pre-existing and sporadic collaborations among local governments, central government and international migration and refugee organisations into a national policy. PR 125/2016 included provisions that gave local governments, particularly municipalities and regencies, authority and responsibilities over the housing, securing, supervising and funding of refugees (Missbach, Adiputera, and Prabandari 2018, 207). However, the PR 125/2016 is void of provisions that guarantee refugees’ rights, such as access to accommodations, livelihood and education opportunities, beyond what local governments were willing and/or able to grant. Therefore, ensuring local goodwill towards refugees became increasingly important to IOM and UNHCR after the signing of the regulation.

The mural was one project that publicly solidified ties between local government officials and IOM, by marrying the celebration of World Refugee Day with ‘Kampung Selfie’ (Selfie Village), a Medan municipality government initiative to beautify neighbourhoods, particularly urban slums, through the painting of walls with bright colours and graffiti. This programme mimics other slum beautification projects such as the Rainbow Village Jodipan in Malang, East Java. The interweaving of different interests to establish collaboration was evident in the speeches opening the inauguration ceremony. The IOM representative, speaking in English with a translator, emphasised the time and effort that refugees had put in the mural. She appealed to the audience, perhaps particularly the officials in the front row, in terms of their collective responsibility to ensure that refugees could be accepted by the community members that hosted them. Meanwhile, the representative of the East Medan District mentioned refugees’ involvement only once in his opening speech, instead using the opportunity to encourage other sub-districts to follow the steps of Perintis Sub-District and undertake similar initiatives to support the ‘Kampung Selfie’ programme, and thanked IOM in partnering with them to make the mural. Whether this collaboration is able to convince local officials of the importance of hosting refugees in their districts remains to be seen, but at least the mural helped build rapport to strengthen inter-institutional relationships.

However, the strengthening of inter-institutional relationships did not necessarily translate into a meaningful collaboration between refugees and local community members during the painting of the mural. When talking to the three Indonesian painters commissioned by IOM, one painter said that refugees only contributed to one of the seven painted images of the mural, while the rest were completed by the commissioned painters (fieldwork notes, 3 July 2019). One painter pointed to the writing at the bottom of one of the images that said in Indonesian, ‘The painting of the mural was done together with refugees from abroad and the residents of Perintis sub-district and East Medan District’. The painter smirked bitterly and shrugged when acknowledging that he and his colleagues were not directly mentioned in the presenting of the mural despite the work they had put into it. The point here is not to be overly critical of IOM’s initiative, but to highlight that since their mandate has been the facilitation of refugees’ basic physical needs in accordance with requests of hosting states, they become auxiliaries to the state apparatus in governing refugees.

This project can be contrasted with more egalitarian collaboration projects between host societies and refugees. For example, writing about the transformative research process of engaging in music projects with Oromo refugees in Depok, West Java, Lumenta, Ariefiansyah, and Nurhadist (2017) recorded a song entitled ‘Pondok Cina Xarafarra’, composed by a young Oromo refugee identified as Hilal. The song tells the story of Hilal’s infatuation for and heartbreak over a young Indonesian girl named ‘Vicky’. Through the experience of making and performing music together, the university lecturers and students and the refugees involved were able to create a collaborative and relatively egalitarian space, which contrasted with the structured and controlled NGO spaces that refugees are more often exposed to (Lumenta, Ariefiansyah, and Nurhadist 2017, 59). The band of lecturers, students and refugees would later perform at events organised by the university and by UNHCR. This unfacilitated, bottom-up collaboration gave the space for participants to perform their identities beyond the dichotomy of ‘good’ refugees and host societies (university lecturers and students), meeting instead as fellow musicians.

The mural in Medan demonstrates the multiplicity of forces within the assemblage of refugee reception in Indonesia. National policies shape and are shaped by local practices that are situated within a web of relations among local government officials, international organisations, local social initiatives and community members, and refugees. The mural was given different meanings by actors within the assemblage of refugee reception. For refugees it was a space to perform as ‘good refugees’ in order to build rapport with local officials and community members. For the food vendors it was a space of contestation where their claim to sell food was being challenged (albeit temporarily). For IOM it was a space to strengthen ties with local government officials, and for sub-district officials the mural exemplified positive activities that ‘good refugees’ could engage with and offered an opportunity to fulfil city directives to create a Kampung Selfie. The different meanings associated with one mural demonstrate how affect flows within an assemblage of different actors, ideas and ideals. An assemblage is processual, always in flux (Fox 2015, 306). As such, the mural’s inauguration ceremony can be understood as a fleeting moment that offers insight into the workings of affect and emotions within an assemblage of relations that continues to be reassembled in different ways.

In March 2020, I had a telephone call with the Hazara refugee who attended the inauguration. I asked him whether he knew what happened to the mural on Jalan Dorawati and to the street vendors who used to sell there after the inauguration. He told me that the food vendors had eventually returned to selling on the street in front of the mural, obscuring the paintings on the wall. The mural momentarily de-territorialised relations within the assemblage, as the project organised by IOM and local authorities seemingly prioritised an activity designed to engage refugees over local food vendors’ interests. However, the return of the street vendors suggests that despite being susceptible to the project organised by IOM and local authorities, at least some vendors were able to reclaim their space.

‘We are all kin’

Former Secretary General of the United Nations (UN) Ban Ki-moon described international responses to the unprecedented number of refugees, internally displaced people and migrants as a ‘crisis of solidarity’ that can only be resolved by first recognising our common humanity (Ki-Moon 2016). A call to stand in solidarity with refugees is commonly placed in opposition to xenophobia and fear (Woods 2020, 508). Meanwhile, from an opposing political stance, the call for humanitarian responses to refugees is often positioned in conflict to national security (Rahman 2010) or in relation to conflict arising out of resource scarcity (Martin 2005). I argue that the seemingly conflicting themes of solidarity and ‘social jealousy’ expressed by Indonesian host societies act to enable and motivate host societies to help refugees, while simultaneously limiting how much help can and/or should be offered. In this sense, solidarity and ‘social jealousy’ are emotions that potentially challenge and re-order the flow of affect within the assemblage of refugee reception in Indonesia.

The notion of being in solidarity with refugees may have different meanings, from alleviating suffering to proclaiming a common cause and/or challenging social structures that lead to another group’s experience of injustice (Woods 2020, 510). Contemporary cities have become spaces where different displaced populations converge. This includes sub-national migrations affected by urbanisation, those marginalised from the state and state services, and refugees and other migrants, thus blurring lines between refugee camps and informal settlements (Huq and Miraftab 2020). Urban spaces offer sites of situated encounters that co-constitute affective flows within the assemblage of refugee reception, which can easily be missed in state-centric approaches to refugee studies. As more and more refugees live in urban spaces for longer periods of time, experiences of exclusion are juxtaposed with common urban experiences that may forge solidarities for collective action (Huq and Miraftab 2020). However, these formed solidarities are often fraught and unstable.

Expressions of solidarity between different groups, particularly between host societies and refugees, are often unidirectional. A person or persons may empathise with the suffering of another group and their less fortunate life experiences that are different from themselves and may be committed to take action to help (Woods 2020, 511). Expressions of solidarity are imbued by the power relations between those expressing solidarity and those receiving it. Rozakou’s (2012) study of ‘the volunteers on the street’ humanitarian work for refugees in Athens, Greece, illustrates the contentious relationship between solidarity and imbalanced power relations. The ‘volunteers on the street’ were committed to challenge the bureaucratic, guarded and hierarchical structure of refugee reception centres by establishing a practice that does not distinguish between refugees and documented or undocumented migrants. They were selective in their sources of funding and positioned refugees as hosts in their homes and on the streets (instead of guests). However, these practices were contrasted by volunteers’ efforts to ‘educate’ and ‘advise’ refugees on everyday matters such as childcare, health and management of domestic spaces. The disappointment volunteers felt when their advice was not heeded and refugees did not transform their behaviour to meet their expectations demonstrate the shortcomings of solidarity between groups with different life experiences and imbalanced power relations (Rozakou 2012, 572). The desire to help a person in need is complicated by the question of who is deserving of help, what help they deserve and how they are expected to respond to help, all feeding into the carrying out and/or the repression of actions.

Most volunteers I talked to during fieldwork had to face questions from friends and family members asking why they are helping refugees when so many fellow Indonesians are in need of help. The tension between sympathy and reluctance or refusal to help refugees in Indonesia is not necessarily representative of polarised political opinions, but emotions that emerge and shift depending on context and over time. In Kalideres, West Jakarta, at the end of 2017, hundreds of refugees had started camping on the sidewalks in front of the Immigration Detention Centre (IDC). Rumours that IOM was going to stop receiving new refugees on top of their current caseload spread among self-funded refugee communities at the end of 2017, and this indeed happened in 2018. Many self-funded refugees, who were running out of money and saw no immediate end to their ‘transit’ in Indonesia, reasoned that if they could get themselves into detention, they could then depend on IOM and UNHCR to get them out of detention and into IOM refugee accommodation. This led to approximately 300 refugees camping in front of the IDC in Kalideres, West Jakarta, in 2018 (Harvey 2019, 11), consisting mainly of young men, but also families with women and children, from Afghanistan, Somalia and Sudan.

The refugees living in these makeshift tents on both sidewalks of a large street attracted a lot of attention from residents living in the area. Initiatives led by individuals and religious organisations started to emerge. They distributed food, drinking water, toys, diapers, etc. for refugees. After a while, some of the individuals set up an informal collective of volunteers who tried to coordinate among themselves the collection and distribution of donations, which I will refer to using the pseudonym Kemangi. Volunteers included a diverse group of people living in the area, who worked as small business owners, students, teachers and employees – people whose occupations had nothing to do with refugees but who were self-organising because they suddenly encountered refugees in their neighbourhood.

Encounters between residents and refugees are often unpredictable, affected by unbidden everyday emotional reactions. Often, emotions are imbued with residents’ unmet expectations of what a refugee should look like and how they should behave. In June 2018, one volunteer shared with me her experience helping a refugee family clean their tent because a disgruntled resident had thrown human excrement into it. Her nose wrinkled and her body shook in disgust as she recalled the smell of the tent. During my first conversation with her, she shared that her motivation to help was driven by a sense of pity (‘kasihan’) and solidarity (‘kita semua bersaudara’ – we are all kin) that she felt towards the refugees on the sidewalks. However, in August 2018, I was told by a Kemangi advisor that this volunteer had been asked not to return after an altercation between herself and a refugee. The advisor explained that the volunteer was distributing an evening meal with a donor when she pointed to a group of Hazara refugee men and told the donator that those refugees did not actually need help. One of the refugees she had pointed at took offence at this comment and confronted her, and a scuffle occurred that ended with the volunteer hitting the refugee. Kemangi apologised to the refugee and the donator for the incident.

Despite altruistic motives to help and stand in solidarity with refugees, tension rose between Kemangi and other groups. Some refugees accused Kemangi of withholding donations for their own use, some donators who wanted to distribute directly to refugees complained that Kemangi was trying to control donations that refugees receive, and some residents who did not like having refugees on their sidewalks complained that Kemangi was only enabling refugees to camp out longer. Kemangi volunteers felt this criticism unwarranted and demotivating as they believed they were doing their best to distribute limited donations through rations and were expected to navigate the demands of IDC officials and sub-district officials who did not approve of refugees’ occupation of sidewalk spaces. The daily encounters among refugees, volunteers and donators on the sidewalks of Kalideres were often tense, as volunteers felt disillusioned by the limits to how they were able to help and by the criticism they received.

By July 2018, IOM was able to offer accommodations to most refugees, and the tents on the sidewalks were replaced with large potted plants put up by the sub-district to discourage refugees from setting up tents there. However, dozens of refugee families were still setting up tents, hoping that IOM would add new refugees onto their present caseload. Some Kemangi volunteers continued to offer support to the refugees who remained; however, most of the original volunteers had stopped coming. As the number of refugees occupying the space declined, Kemangi’s activities also slowly burned out. Kemangi volunteers had the power to help or decline to help refugees, but they were also susceptible to the challenges and allegations expressed by refugees and other groups towards them that affected their self-perception as people who were driven to just help.

While the majority of refugees in Indonesia are hosted in urban spaces such as Jakarta, Medan and Makassar, narratives of hospitality and solidarity are most often exemplified in Indonesian news by Acehnese fishermen who saved thousands of Rohingya refugees, despite hesitation from the Indonesian government over receiving them, during what is commonly referred to as the Andaman Sea Crisis in 2015 (Missbach 2017; Amalia 2020). During this crisis about 1300 Rohingya refugees and Bangladesh migrants were stranded in Indonesian waters and were saved and brought ashore by Acehnese fishermen and hosted in four camps set up in East and North Aceh. Filled with a mixture of curiosity, sympathy and hospitality, local residents reportedly came by to offer food, clothes and activities mainly directed to refugee and migrant children. The hospitality that refugees experienced in Aceh was often attributed to their culture of Peumulia Jamee, an altruistic practice of helping and giving to guests (Missbach 2017, 54). Based on fieldwork observations, Missbach (2017) found four facets of hospitality in Aceh: (a) a history of conflict and disaster that drove Acehnese people to accept refugees as a way to ‘pay forward’ the help they once received from others during their time of need; (b) a cosmopolitan aspiration to connect with other parts of the world; (c) an act of resistance towards the central government in Jakarta; and (d) a pragmatic means for NGOs to generate funding. Narratives of solidarity and the practice of hospitality speak to an understanding of how a host society’s members perceive themselves and what drives their presumptions of who is deserving of help. Amidst this news of hospitality, however, Missbach (2017, 50–51) also noted rising hostility for Rohingya refugees in Aceh. Jealousy felt by some local Acehnese villagers and issues with Rohingya refugees’ behaviour led to rising discontent among local residents, which was mitigated by ensuring that they too could benefit from philanthropic initiatives initially intended for refugees (Missbach 2017, 50–51).

Fishermen’s initiative to rescue Rohingya refugees and other migrants, along with international pressure, eventually led the Indonesian government to agree to temporarily host Rohingya refugees for up to one year until they could be resettled elsewhere (Rosyidin 2015). The Minister for Political, Legal, and Security Affairs of the Republic of Indonesia justified this half-hearted permission for refugees to live in Indonesia by stating that if they were allowed to live there too long it would cause ‘social jealousy’ among Indonesian society (Rosyidin 2015, 173). By the end of 2015, the majority of Rohingya refugees in Aceh had either been resettled or chose to leave for Malaysia, where working restrictions for refugees were less stringently upheld.

‘It will only create “social jealousy”’

The ‘jealousy’ that Missbach (2017) encountered in Aceh and the ‘social jealousy’ that the Minister for Political, Legal, and Security Affairs of the Republic of Indonesia spoke of (Rosyidin 2015) was a repeated theme that I also encountered during my fieldwork at different sites in Indonesia. A conversation I had with a food seller near a refugee IOM accommodation in Makassar illustrated this:

‘The refugees there, they get paid by the UN. They don’t do anything all day, just sit around. Their life here is too good. Better than me probably’, the seller said as he cleaned my table.

MSS: ‘Do you think it would be better if they were allowed to work, to make their own income?’

‘No, of course not’, was the response. ‘Why should they be allowed to take away work from us? If they work, it will only create social jealousy’.

The food seller expressed a relatively common sentiment, which highlighted a general dislike or a sense of unfairness that refugees had access to support that many Indonesians did not have. This sentiment of ‘jealousy’ also found its way into public discourse amidst the widespread narratives of ‘solidarity’. The regional newspaper for North Sumatra, Waspada, ran an article on 20 June 2015 in response to Rohingya refugees’ presence in Aceh, entitled ‘Jangan Cemburu Pada Rohingya’ (‘Do Not Be Jealous of the Rohingya’). The article quoted a member of the People’s Representative Council of Aceh (Dewan Perwakilan Rakyat Aceh), Azhari Cage, who warned municipality and regency officials to focus on economic development in the area in order to avoid ‘social jealousy’ felt by their residents towards Rohingya refugees, who were receiving a lot of attention and donations (Waspada 2015).

The term ‘social jealousy’ (kecemburuan sosial) is widely used in Indonesia to describe perceived and/or actual socio-economic inequalities and the resentment, inferiority and conflict they may trigger. In the 1990s, ‘social jealousy’ was used to refer to tensions due to widening gaps between the rich and the poor. As big businesses were mainly dominated by Sino-Indonesians who were mostly non-Muslims, they became the target of ‘social jealousy’, thus adding a religious and ethnic dimension to discourse of economic inequality (Budiman 1992, 133). The term has also been used to caution against potential conflict between ‘locals’ and ‘outsiders’, as migration within the archipelago may change racial, ethnic and religious compositions of a region (see for example Ananta 2006). An Indonesian mixed corpus collected from 2013, consisting of over 74 million sentences, found that ‘kecemburuan’ (jealousy) is most often found in cooccurrence with the words ‘social’ (sosial), ‘inequality’ (kesenjangan), ‘conflict’ (konflik) and ‘trigger’ (memicu) (Leipzig Corpora Collection, accessed 16 November 2020). Concerns expressed about social jealousy are loaded with assumptions of the potential triggering of tension and conflict. Feelings of discontent among the ‘have nots’ are seen as natural, and the blame is placed on the ‘haves’ for widening inequalities or making pre-existing inequalities more visible. The dangers of ‘social jealousy’ are accepted as given and establish a morality to perform modesty as a solution to avoid such sentiments.

These sentiments were present, for example, in the advice that a former principal of a refugee learning centre in the Cisarua township, Bogor regency, received. He was told by contacts at a local NGO to make sure that the centre’s learning facilities were not flaunted to residents in their neighbourhood. While the learning centre could only offer informal education to refugee children, they covered their costs by collecting small fees from refugee parents, online crowdfunding, and donations from philanthropists and international schools in Jakarta. This allowed the centre to have better facilities (or at least better-looking facilities) than many local public schools in the area. During the time of my research in 2018–2019, there were approximately 2000–3000 refugees who were registered by the UNHCR but were not accommodated or financially supported by IOM and therefore lived in self-rented houses among local residents of Cisarua, West Java (fieldwork notes, 24 April 2018). They included mainly Hazara refugees from Afghanistan and Pakistan who identify as Shi’ite Muslims, a different denomination of Islam from the vast majority of Indonesians, who are Sunni Muslims. In 2014, a group of refugees in Cisarua established the first refugee learning centre, to educate their children in English to prepare them for resettlement and to create a space for their community (Ali, Briskman, and Fiske 2016). Refugees’ experiences in Cisarua represented liminal spaces, where refugees were tolerated but also excluded, vulnerable but resilient (Ali, Briskman, and Fiske 2016, 34–35). Refugees in Cisarua were able to carve spaces for their families and communities. However, these spaces were susceptible to local residents’ scrutiny. The responsibility to perform modesty in order to avoid ‘social jealousy’ lies with refugees, who are perceived as outsiders who have access to facilities that locals do not. Whether or not ‘social jealousy’ poses a real threat to refugees is difficult to determine. Ali, Briskman, and Fiske (2016, 34) documented stories of arguments or violent incidents between refugees and Indonesians but found most of the 30 refugees they interviewed had positive relationships with Indonesians. During conversations with residents in Cisarua and other sites of my research, I heard complaints about refugees but never witnessed open or widespread hostility between residents and refugees.

The repeated themes of solidarity and/or ‘social jealousy’ that emerged in discussions about refugees are less useful for predicting whether tension may or may not happen, and more indicative of how host societies make sense of the emotional reactions they feel towards refugees’ presence. The gnawing suspicion that refugees, or foreigners in general, are obtaining access to resources that many citizens believe they should be more entitled to is not particular to Indonesia. However, within this context it is through the affective flows of solidarity and ‘social jealousy’ that situated encounters between refugees and host societies are given meaning and asymmetric relations of power are maintained.

During an interview with a high-ranking IOM official in Medan, I was told that ‘social jealousy’ was a topic that commonly came out during their community outreach programmes that aimed to introduce refugees and explain their background and presence among host communities. The IOM official said, ‘People were like, “We had no idea. We just thought they are people that you give a ‘salary’ to and they are living much better than our people” and that created social jealousy’ (recorded interview 2 July 2019). According to the IOM official, during community outreach, IOM also asked local leaders and community members in Medan what negative impressions they have of refugees. These included refugees not greeting local residents on the street, pending payments at shops that were left unaddressed, and refugees’ appearances that did not meet local residents’ expectations of a ‘refugee’ (‘Sometimes they look like they dress very nice and have a lot of money’; recorded interview 2 July 2019). These negative sentiments were communicated back to refugees as misunderstandings that they needed to be conscious of.

Despite the intangibility of the notion of ‘social jealousy’, it is taken seriously enough to influence institutional practice. When ‘social jealousy’ enters a conversation, the speaker commonly does not say that he/she is feeling jealous towards refugees. Instead, he/she projects negative emotions of jealousy and discontent to refugees’ presence onto elusive ‘local others’ or an imagined community, who may feel jealous towards the benefits refugees receive and then act upon this emotion. In this sense, the speaker thus purportedly takes a stance in solidarity with the ‘local other’ who may feel at a disadvantage compared to refugees. Whether someone actually feels jealous and will act upon it matters little in the conversation, as expressing the possibility of ‘social jealousy’ is already effective in motivating action or caution to prevent escalation, presumably for refugees’ own protection from the jealous ‘local others’.

Solidarity is the dominant narrative through which the news and social initiatives make sense of public responses to the presence of refugees who are in need of help. Meanwhile, social jealousy becomes the moral logic to ensure that there are limits to the kind of help refugees may expect or feel entitled to during their time ‘transiting’ in Indonesia. As such, solidarity and ‘social jealousy’ both have the power to affect and maintain the assemblage of refugee reception in Indonesia.

Conclusion

This article approached the reception of refugees in Indonesia as an assemblage of relations. Having been forced to endure increasingly long periods of transit in Indonesia due to a decline in resettlement opportunities, refugees’ urban experiences are affected in a multiplicity of ways. By approaching refugee reception as an assemblage, this article demonstrates how solidarity and ‘social jealousy’ flow as repeated reactions and narratives of emotions by local residents towards refugees’ presence. Relations among bodies, things, ideas, social institutions, emotions influence and are influenced by the affective flows within the assemblage. Affect flows over time form territorialisation within the assemblage that can be challenged and augmented.

As refugees stay for longer periods of ‘transit’, the lines between refugees and citizens blur, making refugees more susceptible to the scrutiny of host societies. In addition, a ‘local turn’ in Indonesia’s governance of refugees, with authority and responsibility shifting from central to local governments, further highlights refugees’ presence in their localities. Through a vignette of the inauguration of a mural in Medan, the article highlights the multiplicity of forces that are affected by and may affect the assemblage. The inauguration offered an opportunity for refugees to build rapport with the community where they lived, while the top-down facilitation of collaborations between refugees and local residents had the unintended consequence of temporarily removing food vendors whose livelihoods depended on the space where the mural was commissioned. Situated encounters between refugees and local residents are microcosms of affective flows within the assemblage.

Furthermore, dynamics between solidarity and ‘social jealousy’ demonstrate what emotions can ‘do’ to the affective flows within the assemblage. While solidarity is presented as a positive emotion that has the potential to blur the boundaries between citizens and refugees, it is often imbued with imbalanced power relations. Citizens’ good intentions to help refugees in need are affected by everyday emotional reactions informed by unmet expectations of what a refugee should look like or how they should behave. Moreover, in contexts like Indonesia where citizens’ access to state resources are uncertain, citizens may be affected by perceptions of unfairness due to aid that many refugees receive. This leads to the repeatedly expressed motif of ‘social jealousy’, which is particularly poignant in the Indonesian context due to its underlying association with tension between groups of different class, ethnicity, religion and race. Expressed concerns for ‘social jealousy’ are effective in influencing how refugees are expected to act and interact with and within Indonesian host societies. Solidarity flows have the potential to de-territorialise, while ‘social jealousy’ reterritorialises the assemblage. Together they establish the moral logic that informs the reception of refugees in Indonesia.

Acknowledgements

I thank Dr Tanya Jakimow and Dr Sarah Homan for all the work they have done that made this special issue possible. I also thank Prof. Des Gasper and Dr Roy Huijsmans for their guidance, Nazaruddin (University of Indonesia) for his help in understanding ‘social jealousy’ in the Indonesian context, and contributors to the special issue for their camaraderie on this writing journey.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Mahardhika Sjamsoe’oed Sadjad

Mahardhika Sjamsoe’oed Sadjad is a PhD candidate in the Governance, Law, Social Justice research group at the International Institute of Social Studies, Erasmus University Rotterdam. Currently doing research on host societies’ reactions to refugees stuck in indefinite ‘transit’ in Indonesia, Mahardhika is interested in exploring people’s narratives of identities, emotions and affect, with a focus on movements and (im)mobilities.