Indonesia in transition

Asian Affairs, 1985

This paper is based on a talk I gave to the Royal Institute of Asian Affairs in London in late 1984. At that time, Suharto's 'New Order' regime (1966-98) was just 18 years old and my paper attempts to assess its achievements and challenges. Rereading it now at a distance of over 30 years brings up a certain poignancy. 'The past is a foreign country they do things differently' (Hartley 1957). But it may be of contemporary interest as many of the New Order's problems are still with us in the Jokowi era (2014-19), corruption not least.

Indonesia is both the world’s largest Muslim-majority country and one of its most ethnically diverse. Home to approximately 230 million people, of whom more than 85 percent follow Islam, there are almost as many Muslims living in Indonesia as in the entire Arabic-speaking world. The Sunni branch of Islam predominates, while approximately one million Indonesians adhere to the Shia variant. A signifi cant number of Sufi communities also exist in the archipelago state. Indonesia is also the world’s third largest democracy, after India and the United States. President Suharto’s New Order regime, one of the most repressive dictatorships in Southeast Asia, collapsed in May 1998 after controlling Indonesian politics for more than 30 years. Since Suharto’s downfall, the most dramatic reform initiative has been the introduction of an extensive regulatory framework governing the conduct of executive and legislative elections. Based on the new system, three national legislative and presidential elections, as well as balloting in several hundred localities, have occurred throughout the last decade. Overall, elections in Indonesia are considered free and fair. The quality of democracy remains low, however.

2014

Asian Studies Review, 1997

Artikel Sosial-Politik, 2020

The change in the pattern of the political system in Indonesia is inseparable from the development of democratization and the political turmoil that engulfed it. the most significant change is the shift of authoritarian systems to more democratic systems. This paper will explain the causes of the Reformation Era and their impact on the relationship between the executive and legislative, the relationship between central and local governments, and the democratic process in the region.

My first attempt to look at what a post-Soeharto Indonesia would be like. What would the political agenda and approach be. What kind of ideologies would or would not lead in those efforts?

Moussons, 2007

Bijdragen tot de Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde, 2019

Indonesia is a very significant country (the fourth largest by population, the biggest Islamic democracy, a BRICS candidate) yet Western knowledge of it is in steady decline. University area studies programs continue to close, feeding growing isolationism in the world's wealthiest countries. What can be done to help social science departments rediscover their curiosity for this most fascinating of countries? Provide good textbooks, for one thing, but not too heavy (students are reading less) and not too light (no point in reproducing common stereotypes). They should be empirical enough to convey new knowledge, but also theoretical enough to integrate that knowledge into a coherent whole. The Elements series conceived by Cambridge University Press is in that sense a godsend. In the space of a short book-the length of three journal articles-they aim to "combine an overview of the topic with the author's unique research perspective." Jamie Davidson's Indonesia: Twenty Years of Democracy does a pretty good job navigating between these various trade-offs. Without excessive name-dropping or endless citations, he has written a well-balanced, illuminating account of Indonesia's politics, economy and society over the last twenty years. It's not perfect, and I will come back to that, but it's better than probably anything else at this time. A core argument in the book is that the twenty years since the end of the New Order are long enough to have developed a dynamic of their own. It will no longer do to evaluate today's Indonesia by the extent to which it still resembles Suharto's era. Since then elite decisions and popular movements have come and gone that have reshaped Indonesia. Another core argument is that democracy should be the key criterion by which to judge those twenty years. Here the assessment is on the whole positive. In Southeast Asia generally, democracy is by no means the only game in town (think of Vietnam). Many of those that did make the leap have run aground (think of Thailand's military and the Philippines' Duterte). But in Indonesia elections have now been routinely held hundreds of times, the press is free, violence is generally low, and confidence is high. On closer inspection, though, Indonesian democracy is fraught with problems. The rule of law remains weak. Vote-buying is rampant and out in the open. In 2014 Indonesians very nearly elected a retired general as president who openly said democracy was un-Indonesian.

2005

Although Indonesia has the fourth largest population in the world, its history is still relatively unfamiliar and understudied. Adrian Vickers takes the reader on a journey across the social and political landscape of modern Indonesia, starting with the country's origins under the Dutch in the early twentieth century, and the subsequent anti-colonial revolution which led to independence in 1949. Thereafter the spotlight is on the 1950s, a crucial period in the formation of Indonesia as a new nation, which was followed by the Sukarno years, and the anti-Communist massacres of the 1960s when General Suharto took over as president. The concluding chapters chart the fall of Suharto's New Order after thirty-two years in power, and the subsequent political and religious turmoil which culminated in the Bali bombings in 2002. Drawing on insights from literature, art and anthropology, Vickers portrays a complex and resilient people struggling out of a troubled past.