Journal of Contemporary Asia

Walker, Joshua

doi: 10.1080/00472336.2024.2449525pmid: N/A

Abstract This article argues that since 2019, a fraction of capital centred on three coal mining companies – Adaro Energy, Bumi Resources, and Indika Energy – has assumed leadership of Indonesia’s capitalist class. The spokesmen of this fraction of capital – Erick and Garibaldi Thohir, Rosan Roeslani, Arsjad Rasjid, Sandiaga Uno, Anindya Bakrie, Wishnu Wardhana, Muhammad Lutfi, and Agus Lasmono – have orchestrated political stability, shaped Indonesia’s national development strategy, and championed capital’s moral authority. The article develops this leading fraction of capital thesis through engagement with Marcus Mietzner’s 2023 book The Coalitions Presidents Make: Presidential Power and Its Limits in Democratic Indonesia. It extends Mietzner’s treatment of oligarchic power exercised in representation of the general interests of the capitalist class by tracing the enduring ties that bind a set of key oligarchs together. Once these ties are made visible, the individual efforts of these oligarchs to represent capital become legible as together constituting a fraction of capital’s coherent programme of class leadership. By providing an account of this programme of class leadership, the article helps explain Indonesian capitalism’s present dynamism.

Hadiz, Vedi R.

doi: 10.1080/00472336.2024.2311075pmid: N/A

Abstract The article links the literatures on Indonesian democracy, Islamic politics, and labour struggles through developments and contradictions in the sphere of ideology. It maintains that there is a continuing marginalisation of labour as a social force in Indonesia despite earlier victories in the democratic era. This marginalisation can be understood not just through the specific constellation of social power intrinsic to Indonesian capitalism but also to a related process of “religionisation,” characterised by the growing piety of Indonesian workers. Labour subordination has merged with the logic of the state ideology of Pancasila and with prevalent articulations of Islamic doctrine, posing internal obstacles to the growth of a robust labour movement. The analysis is based on recent fieldwork in the Javanese “heartland.”

Rakhmani, Inaya; Sakhiyya, Zulfa

doi: 10.1080/00472336.2023.2298449pmid: N/A

Abstract This article analyses the policy agendas and bureaucratic apparatuses that have shaped the norms and values directing knowledge production in neo-liberal Indonesia. It uses a Gramscian approach to hegemony to understand how knowledge, as power, is organised and imposed on workers. It unpacks the norms and values shaped during processes of neo-liberal capitalist reform, which are identified as knowledge imaginaries; or shared social systems that organise a field of knowledge commodities. Their mobilisation during material and discursive moments are crucial in the juncture between predatory and market interests that fundamentally benefit capital accumulation. It is argued that funding and policies serve as key apparatuses for knowledge elites to normalise and enforce notions of self-reliance, competitiveness, and entrepreneurship as common sense for their managers, which are exploitative for workers. Within the hegemony of knowledge capitalism, there are antagonisms and attempts to form alternative spaces of knowledge by using digital media. While merely leaving a dent on the surface of broader capitalist structures, its promotion of subversive ways of knowing remains no less meaningful in understanding the social positions of academic workers in an increasingly networked but fragmented neo-liberal social world.

Wijaya, Trissia

doi: 10.1080/00472336.2024.2378856pmid: N/A

Abstract The Jakarta–Bandung High-Speed Railway has been widely seen as China’s signature Belt and Road Initiative project in Indonesia. To date, there is scant analysis of how risk has been managed throughout the project’s life cycle or of the dynamics of power relationships – the conflicts and compromises made between coalitions of the capitalist and political classes – that are intrinsic to China–Indonesia infrastructure co-operation. This article fills this gap by investigating how Chinese companies have managed risks by building alliances with dominant socio-political forces and state capital in Indonesia – designated here as “ex post risk management.” To explore this ex post risk management, this article applies Gramscian state theory and brings the conceptualisation of risk and social forces into dialogue. It contends that the understanding of risk and risk management are contingent upon negotiated compromises between different social forces – state capital, internationalised state apparatuses, and industrial capital – that are bound via infrastructure financing and other ongoing industrial and construction projects in Indonesia. These interactive dynamics have resulted in the institutionalisation of risk through and within the state that derides the social foundation of Indonesia’s current infrastructure regime.

Peterson, Daniel; Bedner, Adriaan; Berenschot, Ward

doi: 10.1080/00472336.2024.2440855pmid: N/A

Abstract Under what conditions can courts function as a bulwark against land grabbing? In light of ongoing concerns about corporate land grabbing, studies disagree about how and whether courts can resolve resulting land conflicts. This article addresses this debate, examining how Indonesia’s legal system deals with conflicts between rural communities and palm oil companies. Relying on 18 court judgments, it explores the legal strategies of those communities and individuals threatened by dispossession that have opted to litigate, as well as the protracted nature of the appeals process and the typically formalistic nature of the courts’ verdicts. It is found that judges rarely rule on the merits of a case; rather, they adopt a formalist approach to the law, which prioritises strict procedural correctness. This prompts an argument that the primary obstacle to substantive judicial outcomes and resolutions where land disputes are litigated is not Indonesia’s uncertain land law regime, but the disconnect between the competencies of lawyers representing communities in court and the excessively formalist approach of the judiciary. A vicious cycle has emerged: as legal formalism and an ambiguous legal framework have encouraged judges to rule on procedural grounds, Indonesian land law is being denied a substantive body of jurisprudence.

Gellert, Paul K.

doi: 10.1080/00472336.2024.2442691pmid: N/A

Abstract Can legal remedies act as a line of defence against dispossession? Although the legal system in Indonesia very rarely yields the outcomes that scholars and activists seem to prefer, “The Perils of Legal Formalism,” in addressing widespread conflicts caused by the expansion of oil palm plantations, argues that it can. Yet, the political economy of Indonesia’s “extractive regime” has long relied on violent and legal dispossession. A Poulantzian Marxist analysis of law provides firmer ground for understanding the ineffectiveness of law by itself in reforming society. Peterson, Bedner, and Berenschot’s (2025) puzzlement at the formalistic decisions of Indonesian judges and incompetence of plaintiff lawyers representing displaced communities reveals their individualist, law-centric approach and a reluctance to abandon the liberal myths of rule of law and autonomy of the legal system from “the rest” of society. Optimistic reformist efforts may offer the veneer of legitimacy in rule of law while actually strengthening the extractive regime and the power of dominant actors who benefit from it. Against such wishful thinking, a rare case of effective mobilisation in West Sumatra illustrates how legal action can only be impactful if deployed in combination with power built over time by collective actors.

Peterson, Daniel; Bedner, Adriaan; Berenschot, Ward

doi: 10.1080/00472336.2024.2447563pmid: N/A

Ma, Ngok

doi: 10.1080/00472336.2023.2280710pmid: N/A

Abstract Research on contentious politics tends to overlook the significance of local elections in supporting social movements and democratisation. This article analyses how the pro-democracy opposition in Hong Kong had tried to use the institutional positions and resources of the District Councils, after their landslide victory in 2019, to support the Anti-Extradition Movement and push for grassroots democracy reforms. Through a study of meeting documents and interviews with councillors, this study recapitulates the state–opposition struggle around the grassroots reform initiatives in the District Councils in 2020–2021. Efforts to support the Anti-Extradition Movement, promote grassroots participation, reform public finance, and counter clientelism were short-lived and met with strong state resistance. Institutional constraints, internal struggles, and the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic severely limited the reform efforts. The study of this reform experience sheds light on the possibilities and limits of using local councils to support reforms and promote grassroots democracy in hybrid regime settings.

Singh, David

doi: 10.1080/00472336.2024.2376595pmid: N/A

Abstract Renewables in India are presented as modern technologies ensuring a pathway towards sustainable development and unlimited growth. But this story entails problematic land politics and the reconfiguration of space for resource frontiers’ expansion, local state formation, and ethno-religious authoritarian agendas: for the past 20 years, Kutch district of Gujarat state in Western India has experienced several waves of land liberalisation and industrialisation programmes, including wind power projects, but its proximity with Pakistan and the presence of Muslim pastoral populations on both sides of the border have also fostered Hindu nationalist movements since 1947. The development of wind energy projects in Western India follows traditional patterns of a regime of dispossession: a set of “inscription devices” assemble and disassemble land in a discursive, bureaucratic, and violent way and affix an official stamp of legality on damaging mechanisms of dispossession within a state-specific regime. But as wind projects move to borderland territories, their associated regime of dispossession aligns with long-term exclusive ethno-religious conceptions of space as Hindu. The unfolding land politics endorses the Bharatiya Janata Party’s electoral strategy to capture the remaining constituencies and co-opt minority leaders, while agents enforcing wind’s regime of dispossession see an opportunity to assert upper-caste Hindu supremacy.

Gunn, Geoffrey C.

doi: 10.1080/00472336.2024.2417429pmid: N/A

Abstract Studies on the Indonesian National Revolution in the Anglosphere have long been dominated by the Cornell University “school,” and with Dutch language studies mainly remaining untranslated. Under the long authoritarian rule of the military-dominated Suharto regime, the Leftist current in the revolution was written out of Indonesian-language works, just as military heroes were substituted. Nevertheless, the nation remained united around the August 17, 1945 proclamation of independence, made under Japanese auspices, outside of any formal decolonisation process, and with the Dutch going on to mount a full-scale militarised invasion of its former colony. The hard lines in national historiographies have proved resilient until recent times. Hence, Revolutionary Worlds: Local Perspectives and Dynamics During the Indonesian Independence War, 1945–1949 (Purwanto et al. 2023), a book that brings together Dutch and Indonesian scholars in English translation, is a welcome historiographical advance. It is an exemplar of a new shift in thinking facilitating a joint two-nation interrogation of violence during the revolution. The article seeks to evaluate the contribution this important book makes.