Tirtosudarmo worked with the Indonesian Institute of Sciences (LIPI) from 1980, and is now retired since February 2017. He was a Fulbright Visiting Fellow at the Department of Sociology, Brown University (1996-1997), Fellow-in-Residence 2000-2001 at the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study in Humanities and Social Sciences (NIAS), Visiting Senior Research Fellow at Refugee Studies Center, Oxford University (Michaelmas Term, 2002), and Visiting Professor at the Research Institute of Language and Culture, Tokyo University of Foreign Studies (2003-2004). In March-April 2008, he became Visiting Researcher at KITLV, Leiden and Visiting Senior Research Fellow at Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore (July-September 2008). He got his PhD in Social Demography (1990) from the Research School of Social Sciences, the Australian National University, Canberra, Australia, and has been publishing extensively in scientific and popular journals on political demography and the politics of population mobility in Indonesia and Southeast Asia. He is also the author of Demografi-Politik Pembangunan di Indonesia: Dari Riau sampai Timor Timur (The Political Demography of Development in Indonesia: From Riau to East Timor, 1996); Mencari Indonesia: The Political Demography of Post-Suharto (Searching for Indonesia: The Post-Soeharto Political Demography, 2007); Mencari Indonesia 2: Batas-batas Rekayasa Sosial (Searching for Indonesia 2: The Limits of Social Engineering, 2010); From Colonization to Nation-State: The Politica-Demography of Indonesia (2013); and On the Politics of Migration: Indonesia and Beyond (2015), the revised version of which was published by Springer with the title "The Politics of Migration in Indonesia and Beyond" in 2018.

Offers a new approach on political demography perspectives to study migration in Indonesia from colonial times to the present

Presents Indonesia as a showcase of how demography plays an important role in shaping the contours of the nation state

Demarcates the future of migration studies as interdisciplinary

Introduction: The Political Demography of Nation State Building.- Part I Demographic Engineering and Territorial Integrity.- Chapter 1 From Emigratie to Transmigrasi.- Chapter 2 Transmigration and the New Order's Development Plan.- Chapter 3 The Center-Regional Contexts of Transmigration: Riau and South-Kalimantan.- Part II Migration, Development and the Centralized State.- Chapter 4 Migration Patterns and Development.- Chapter 5 Under Development and the Politics of Migration in Eastern Indonesia.- Chapter 6 West Kalimantan: The Political-Demography of the Borderlands.- Part III Movement of People across Borders.- Chapter 7 Indonesia and the Political Dimension of International Migration.- Chapter 8 The Politics of Regulating Overseas Migrant Workers.- Chapter 9 Internal-International Migration Divide?.- Part IV Human Flows, Identity Politics and Nation-State.- Chapter 10 Ethnic Mobility: The Bugis in Samarinda, East Kalimantan.- Chapter 11 The Javanese in Lampung: Strangers or Locals?.- Chapter 12 Disintegration from Within? Ethnicity and Decentralization Politics.