3 - The 'Local Turn' in Humanitarian Protection: Recognizing the Important but Underappreciated Roles of Local Communities as Everyday Providers of Protection for Refugees in Aceh and Cisarua

This paper aims to understand how protection for refugees is provided through the everyday practices of local actors within the local and cultural contexts of Indonesia. It emerges out of the concern that while the majority of scholarship conceptualizes protection in a top-down approach—an institutionalized, 'one-size-fits-all' model with states and international organizations as the primary actors (see Barnes 2009; Sandvik 2011; Yamashita 2017 among others) —it neglects the everyday reality on the ground: the local and cultural contexts in which these continually evolving practices are enacted. This paper intends to bring to the fore the everyday processes through which protection practices are enacted in particular local and cultural contexts. It does so by applying a different yet emerging lens to the analysis of protection: the micro and the everyday. In this regard, this paper argues that local communities play the often-invisible roles yet pivotal role as everyday providers of protection at the local level in Aceh and Cisarua, Indonesia. In this regard, local community provides various alternative forms of protection at everyday level, ranging from material assistances to emotional and religious protections. In doing so, this paper wants to shed light on how localization of humanitarian action and protection for refugees and asylum seekers looks like in practices, especially in the context of non-Western countries and non-signatory countries of the 1951 Convention and its 1967 Protocol.