Jacqui Baker

Prabowo Subianto, Indonesia’s president come 20 October, is many things. He is, at least for these last political moments, Indonesia’s defence minister in the second- term Joko Widodo government. He is a three- time loser of earlier presidential runs: first as Megawati Sukarnoputri’s vice- presidential candidate in 2009, and then in bruising campaigns in 2014 and 2019, against Jokowi. To Widodo, Prabowo is the torchbearer for his legacy, a political frenemy who is indebted to him for his 2024 electoral success. To tens of millions of young Indonesian voters, he is the cuddly, anointed successor of the beloved President Jokowi, with a penchant for daggy TikTok moves. To a cohort of voters with much longer memories, he is the veteran of a brutal and oppressive military who has devoted three decades of public life to weaponising agitation and extrajudicial violence in service of his own political ambitions…

In Indonesia, debates about police use of force occur in the absence of data, with empirical and theoretical consequences for how the problem of police shootings is framed and understood. This article makes a first contribution to addressing that absence by analysing the National Violence Monitoring System dataset for spatial and temporal patterns in police shooting rates across provinces from 2005 to 2014, the nine years prior to the first term of President Joko Widodo. It assesses the causal relationship between police shootings and officer perceptions of threat in the environments where they operated threat. For the period surveyed, it is found that while police shooting rates were comparatively low, police officers had a significant monopoly on firearm-related violence and operated in environments of low perceived threat. No causal relationship is found between police shootings and police perceptions of threat.

This article surveys the marquee events in the year ahead of Indonesia’s 2024 election, finding that the field of democratic political contestation has further narrowed due to the criminalisation of political opponents, the end of the campaign against corruption, the decline of judicial activism, political recentralisation and the collapse of national protest movements. Examined in totality, this article argues not only that Indonesia’s reformasi movement is dead as a salient political force, but also that today’s political elites seek to roll back many of its core achievements. While elites continue to support national elections, those in 2024 will occur in the context of a weakened opposition and heavy presidential interference in the coalition formation of key candidates. Why has democratic contestation, including by oppositional and protest movements, contracted so noticeably under the two-term Joko Widodo (Jokowi) presidency? The article proposes a structural contribution to the continuing debate about Indonesia’s democratic decline, arguing that Indonesia’s middle-income status under Jokowi has been accompanied by dramatic changes to the country’s socio-economic makeup. Importantly, Indonesia’s electorate is now dominated by a massive number of ‘precariously non-poor’ whose dream of social mobility lies in the provision of quality government services and changes to the structure of labour. This article suggests that the intractable political challenge of managing this group’s aspirations for economic security in a context of lagging reform has set in train the demobilisation of the opposition, the consolidation of President Jokowi’s ruling coalition and the curtailing of political contestation. The project of managing the political economy of the middle-income trap will continue to dominate Indonesia’s political future regardless of which coalition will triumph in 2024.

‘A new spring, and a new sound’, so begins a famous Dutch poem. Will the birds sing differently, as the poet wishes in the next line? BKI, now 178 years old—surely one of the longest-running journals of Southeast Asian studies in the world, and known around its original home, the KITLV (Royal Institute), as ‘the Old Dame’—starts 2022 with a remarkable new development. For this reason, the first issue of the year opens with an Editorial. After generations of sound and steady editing under the direction of two scholars, one in the role of Chief Editor and one as Managing Editor, from now on, BKI will be run by an expanded editorial team of seven scholars drawn both from the geographical region, Southeast Asia, and the disciplines in the humanities and social sciences that BKI is dedicated to examining...

In this beautifully penned and scrupulously researched book, Diana S. Kim returns our attention to the opium prohibition regimes of Southeast Asia. For an era so thoroughly picked over by generations of historians, Kim shows us there is still so much to learn, and indeed to unlearn, about what we know of colonial opium regimes. Few, she argues, have taken seriously the puzzle of how and why colonial states untethered themselves from the revenue generated by opium tax farms in Southeast Asia. Her research contributes to our understanding of this period by highlighting the role of local colonial administrators in reshaping and ultimately hastening the end of colonial opium regimes...

What kinds of states are financed by illicit monies? Does the source of state revenue matter for state formation? This article examines these questions in the context of democratizing Indonesia by analyzing licit and illicit sources of Indonesian police financing and the ways in which illicit practices of extraction and accumulation reshape the structure of the state. Budgetary revenues are both deficient and poorly organized by the Indonesian police (POLRI), continuing practices of fiscal maladministration and rent seeking that defined Suharto's New Order. This article demonstrates how this legacy continues within today's police by illustrating how on- and off-budget financing both resources police work and feeds centralized patron-clientalism through an ethics of “dirty-money” that ultimately sees rents flow upwards to police leadership. However, as Indonesia's neoliberal style democratization fragments centralized patronage into a shifting and unstable patron-clientalism, established patterns of rent accumulation and circulation and the moral-legal regimes that support them break down. In an uncertain environment, officers of all ranks canvass the political system, forming increasingly diverse networks that they hope will secure rents and their political future. Reworking Jean François Bayart's original use of the term, this, the author argues, is “the rhizome state.”

This article develops the idea of “dirty money states” by defining and exploring the problem of illicit state financing in Southeast Asia. Most diagnoses of Southeast Asia's flourishing illicit economies focus on the prevalence of corruption and the “decay” of the state, but the authors of this essay develop a more nuanced explanation by exploring how states cultivate and sustain themselves through illicit extraction. Drawing from emerging literature on states and criminality, as well as fiscal sociology, they develop a novel theoretical framing for the six country case studies that comprise this thematic issue. Each study – on Indonesia, Cambodia, Vietnam, Myanmar, East Timor, and the Philippines – examines empirically how illicit state financing works. Whether revenues derive from gold, timber, opium, aid agencies, or business interests, the authors identify consistent patterns in the nature and behavior of the state vis-à-vis illegally generated funds. These patterns encompass territorial dynamics and practices; the everyday social worlds of state actors and their entrepreneurial allies; and the paradoxical interplay between formal and informal realms. Ultimately the authors argue that illicit monies are fundamental to contemporary state building in the region, extending even to the delivery of public goods and services. These findings are potentially uncomfortable for scholars, governments and development practitioners, particularly because they challenge conventional ideas about how the strength and/or weakness of states might be understood in Southeast Asia. But they demand attention, since they are the product of an ambitious and unconventional research endeavor.

Once upon a time, not so long ago, I guess, I lived in a ramshackle house perched perilously on a bank of the Malang River. By day, I trekked to the city's outskirts to interview members of Laskar Jihad, the earliest and most notorious of the Islamic militias that burgeoned like wildflowers after the fall of Suharto. The young men wore white robes and cultivated patchy beards and waved their machetes to shrieks of "jihad." Malang nights, by contrast, were quiet, and I would slip out to the local internet café, which stayed open as long as there were glassy-eyed customers to patronize it. So I often found myself in the wee hours of the morning, tracing a potted path home along the accordion shutters of the city's Chinese shop-fronts. I would pick my way over the sleeping sex workers and rickshaw [becak] drivers and street children, whose tender bodies curled in slumber like the green tips of budding ferns. Then it would be a short dash across a bridge swallowed in darkness before I found my ragged purple door and darted in.