Voting at a distance: Indonesian migrant workers overseas voting in Taiwan
Key information
- Date
- Time
-
4:00 pm to 5:30 pm
- Venue
- Senate House (Paul Webley Wing)
- Room
- SWLT
About this event
For the 2025 SOAS Centre of Taiwan Studies Summer School, we are excited to welcome Dr. Ratih Kabinawa to share her research on Indonesian migrant workers’ overseas voting in Taiwan.
This research raises critical questions about how receiving states may facilitate or impede the political rights of migrant workers. It uses Indonesian migrant workers’ participation in Indonesia’s 2024 general election and Taiwan's role in hosting the overseas voting as a case study. The significance of this case study is twofold.
First, Taiwan is a beacon of democracy in Asia, with a robust civil society and migrant labour movements that advocate for the rights of migrant labourers. Second, despite this impressive democratic achievement, the guest worker system in Taiwan, as a mobility regime sponsored by the state, and the employment practices in the migrant labour market are prone to create unfavourable conditions for Indonesian workers to cast their votes.
By conducting interviews with key informants involved in election administration and migrant voters, this research will generate insights into the role the receiving country has played in facilitating or impeding the participation of migrant workers in their country’s overseas voting. These findings will contribute to the debate on the positionality of migrant workers and the host country under transnational democracy.
Image credit: Marco J Haenssgen via Unsplash
Meet our speaker
Ratih Kabinawa
Ratih is an Adjunct Research Fellow at the School of Social Sciences at the University of Western Australia, where she also earned her doctoral degree in International Relations and Asian Studies. Her research interests include foreign policy/diplomacy, transnational politics, and geopolitics of labour migration, with a regional focus on Taiwan and Southeast Asia.
Ratih has published numerous articles, including commentaries, policy papers, and journal articles, and participated in several Track 1.5 and II dialogues on Taiwan/China-Southeast Asia. She is currently developing her first monograph from her doctoral thesis examining the role of informal diplomacy in Taiwan’s foreign policy in Southeast Asia.
Ratih also served as a judge for the 10th Taiwan Literature Awards for Migrants in 2025.
