Reorganising Power In Indonesia

A new and distinctive analysis of the dramatic fall of Soeharto, the last of the great Cold-War capitalist dictators, and of the struggles that reshape the institutions and systems of power and wealth in Indonesia.

A new and distinctive analysis of the dramatic fall of Soeharto, the last of the great Cold-War capitalist dictators, and of the struggles that reshape the institutions and systems of power and wealth in Indonesia.

Beyond Oligarchy is a collection of essays by leading scholars of contemporary Indonesian politics and society, each addressing effects of material inequality on political power and contestation in democratic Indonesia. The contributors assess how critical concepts in the study of politics—oligarchy, inequality, power, democracy, and others—can be used to characterize the Indonesian case, and in turn, how the Indonesian experience informs conceptual and analytical debates in political science and related disciplines. In bringing together experts from around the world to engage with these themes, Beyond Oligarchy reclaims a tradition of focused intellectual debate across scholarly communities in Indonesian studies. The collapse of Indonesia's New Order has proven a critical juncture in Indonesian political studies, launching new analyses about the drivers of regime change and the character of Indonesian democracy. It has also prompted a new groundswell of theoretical reflection among Indonesianists on concepts such as representation, competition, power, and inequality. As such, the onset of Indonesia’s second democratic period represents more than just new point of departure for comparative analyses of Indonesia as a democratizing state; it has also served as a catalyst for theoretical and conceptual development.

The premise of Social Science and Power in Indonesia is that the role and development of social sciences in Indonesia over the past fifty years are inextricably related to the shifting requirements of power. What is researched and what is not, which frameworks achieve paradigmatic status while others are marginalized, and which kinds of social scientists become influential while others are ignored are all matters of power. These and other important themes and issues are critically explored by some of Indonesia's foremost social scientists in this seminal work.

This book offers a comprehensive examination of spatial and environmental governance in contemporary Bali. In the era of decentralisation, Bali's eight district governments and one municipality acquired a strong sense of authority to extract revenues from within their territorial borders while disregarding the impacts beyond them which has exacerbated environmental, cultural and institutional issues. These issues are addressed through reorganising space. In reality, however, such re-organisation has predominantly been in order to provide space for tourism investments and market expansion. The outcomes of reorganising space are in fact shaped by the dynamics of power that interface with increasingly complex legal and institutional structures. These complex structures provide more arenas for vested interests to manoeuvre, but at the same time provide different forms of legitimacy for local forces to challenge the dominant process. The book demonstrates the mechanisms through which social actors mobilise legal-institutional arrangements to advance their interests.

The disintegration of Indonesia's New Order regime in 1998 and the fall of Soeharto put an end to the crude forms of centralised authoritarianism and economic protectionism that allowed large Chinese conglomerates to dom- inate Indonesia's private sector. Contrary to all expectations, most of the major capitalist groups, though damaged considerably by the Asian Crisis, managed to cope with the ensuing monumental political and economic changes, and now thrive again albeit within a new democratic environment. In this book Christian Chua assesses the state of capital before, during, and after the financial and political crisis of 1997/1998 and analyses the changing relationships between business and the state in Indonesia. Using a distinct perspective that combines cultural and structural approaches on Chinese big business with exclusive material derived from interviews with some of Indonesia’s major business leaders, Chua identifies the strategies employed by tycoons to adapt their corporations to the post-authoritarian regime and provides a unique insight into how state-business relationships in Indonesia have evolved since the crisis. Chinese Big Business in Indonesia is the first major analysis of capital in Indonesia since the fall of Soeharto, and will be of interest to graduate students and scholars of political economy, political sociology, economics and business administration as well as to practitioners having to do with Southeast Asian business and politics.

This book analyzes the overall effect of American primacy on social and political conflicts in Asia, discussing how the post-Cold War American agenda does not promote democratization in the region, in contradiction to one of the major proclaimed aims of the proponents of the Pax Americana. This team of renowned scholars argue that the US agenda can strengthen anti-democratic impulses in Asian societies, exacerbating and complicating existing domestic conflicts and struggles. Empire and Neoliberalism in Asia also examines how the requirements of the War on Terror intersect with, and reinforce, those of transnationalized sections of American capital. Drawing on country case studies, this multidisciplinary book looks at the ramifications of the American Empire for the Asian region and will appeal to anyone interested in Asian politics, international relations, political economy, development studies and sociology.

In a novel approach to the field of Islamic politics, this provocative new study compares the evolution of Islamic populism in Indonesia, the country with the largest Muslim population in the world, to the Middle East. Utilising approaches from historical sociology and political economy, Vedi R. Hadiz argues that competing strands of Islamic politics can be understood as the product of contemporary struggles over power, material resources and the result of conflict across a variety of social and historical contexts. Drawing from detailed case studies across the Middle East and Southeast Asia, the book engages with broader theoretical questions about political change in the context of socio-economic transformations and presents an innovative, comparative framework to shed new light on the diverse trajectories of Islamic politics in the modern world.