Ethics of Care Under Constraint in Refugee Interventions in Indonesia

The treatment of refugees is predominantly framed through the language of rights; specifically, their rights to enter and remain within a territory and to access provisions such as healthcare, education, and livelihoods. While this framing is crucial, it can also narrow debate into a binary of acceptance or refusal, protection or exclusion. This panel turns to an ethics of care to move beyond this divide by considering how care for refugees is practiced, constrained, and negotiated. In doing so, it foregrounds the tensions that emerge when intentions to provide care encounter the structural inequalities that shape refugees’ positions within host societies, revealing care as both a moral commitment and a site of constraint.

Humanitarian infrastructures for refugees are key sites where questions around morality and the politics of belonging are augmented, as host societies grapple with questions of what constitutes a moral community and who is recognized as part of it. Refugee regimes are shaped by shifting moral sentiments and political priorities, informed by entanglements between hospitality and hostility, compassion and repression. Care is extended conditionally; the onus is placed upon refugees and asylum seekers to demonstrate their vulnerability to be recognized as being deserving of it. Reframing the discussion with an ethics of care pushes us to complicate this dynamic. By foregrounding attentiveness, responsibility, competence, and responsiveness, an ethics of care recognizes that ‘good care’ involves conflict. Principles of care are always enacted within unequal power relations, where care is delivered from positions of authority – often limited authority, making it a deeply situated and political practice rather than a universal moral good.

This panel brings us to concrete sites where care for refugees is practiced, tracing the tensions that emerge in the process. The first paper examines informal healthcare provision in Indonesia, showing how institutional ambiguity both produces and sustains precarity. While refugees’ right to healthcare is undermined, providers themselves are placed in a dilemma: compelled to provide care while being forced to navigate limited referral options and constrained decision-making. The second interrogates refugee “self-reliance” within entrepreneurship programmes. It argues that such initiatives are framed as care yet operate through a paradox: they are enabled by informal economies with low barriers of entry, while simultaneously constrained by regulatory and social gatekeeping that restrict refugees’ access to livelihoods. The third paper turns to the Transition Living Lab, where participatory methods encouraged displaced youth in imagining futures. The paper highlights care as an evolving, relational practice requiring flexibility and responsiveness, often necessitating a loosening of formal facilitation control and compelling the researchers to continually reflect on their own positioning and perspectives on care.

Together, the panel foregrounds care as a site of tension. It concludes with an invitation to reflect on the ethics of researching care for vulnerable populations, like refugees and other displaced communities, and the responsibilities this entails for researchers in producing knowledge. The panel welcomes further contributions that interrogate the ethically charged terrains of care in contexts of displacement.