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…

Introduction Police and social forces " The blue in green: " a short history of Indonesian policing The social power of post-colonial militaries Polri and the seesaw political economy of regime change Conclusion Reader's Guide Why are joint police-military operations so prevalent in post-authoritarian Indonesia? In this case study, we examine how joint police-military policing operations are a product of Indonesia's long and contested colonial and postcolonial history over policing. We explore how a Western analytical lens can obscure the " problem " of police-military operations, that is the underlying political economy dynamics that bring coveted rents to Indonesia's security institutions, despite the dangers they present for ordinary people. By drilling down into the political economy dynamics of policing, we can explore questions about how in post-colonial contexts we conceptually approach policing and the security institutions that implement it.

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...

In Indonesia, the persistence of illegal logging has long been attributed to corrupt networks involving powerful brokers, private sector entrepreneurs, and local political heads. But how do these networks function, who participates in them, and whose interests do they serve? We apply social network analysis to map a corrupt network that operated in Pelalawan, Riau province, to study how such networks are constructed and how they might ultimately be disrupted...

This chapter explains why, despite some major regime transformations including democratisation, Southeast Asian polities continue to be dominated by oligarchies and place severe limits on political participation and contestation. Using a “Modes of Participation” framework, which builds on the Murdoch School, it draws attention to the legacies of Cold War authoritarianism and state-led development in creating profoundly unequal social power relations, which are institutionalised in ways that shape and limit socio-political contestation. Nonetheless, capitalism’s dynamic, conflictual nature ensures that Southeast Asia’s oligarchs continually face challenges of political management, often manifesting as struggles over political institutions. The framework explains the outcome of these struggles, illustrated with two brief case studies from Singapore and Indonesia.