In Activist Archives Doreen Lee tells the origins, experiences, and legacy of the radical Indonesian student movement that helped end the thirty-two-year dictatorship in May 1998. Lee situates the revolt as the most recent manifestation of student activists claiming a political and historical inheritance passed down by earlier generations of politicized youth. Combining historical and ethnographic analysis of "Generation 98," Lee offers rich depictions of the generational structures, nationalist sentiments, and organizational and private spaces that bound these activists together. She examines the ways the movement shaped new and youthful ways of looking, seeing, and being—found in archival documents from the 1980s and 1990s; the connections between politics and place; narratives of state violence; activists' experimental lifestyles; and the uneven development of democratic politics on and off the street. Lee illuminates how the interaction between official history, collective memory, and performance came to define youth citizenship and resistance in Indonesia’s transition to the post-Suharto present. 

 

When and why do democratic political actors change the electoral rules, particularly regarding who is included in a country’s political representation? The incidences of these major electoral reforms have been on the rise since 1980.

Electoral Reform and the Fate of New Democracies argues that elite inexperience may constrain self-interest and lead elites to undertake incremental approaches to reform, aiding the process of democratic consolidation. Using a multimethods approach, the book examines three consecutive periods of reform in Indonesia, the world’s largest Muslim majority country and third largest democracy, between 1999 and 2014. Each case study provides an in-depth process tracing of the negotiations leading to new reforms, including key actors in the legislature, domestic civil society, international experts, and government bureaucrats. A series of counterfactual analyses assess the impact the reforms had on actual election outcomes, versus the possible alternative outcomes of different reform options discussed during negotiations. With a comparative analysis of nine cases of iterated reform processes in other new democracies, the book confirms the lessons from the Indonesian case and highlights key lessons for scholars and electoral engineers.

Eben Kirksey first went to West Papua, the Indonesian-controlled half of New Guinea, as an exchange student in 1998. His later study of West Papua's resistance to the Indonesian occupiers and the forces of globalization morphed as he discovered that collaboration, rather than resistance, was the primary strategy of this dynamic social movement. Accompanying indigenous activists to Washington, London, and the offices of the oil giant BP, Kirksey saw the revolutionaries' knack for getting inside institutions of power and building coalitions with unlikely allies, including many Indonesians. He discovered that the West Papuans' pragmatic activism was based on visions of dramatic transformations on coming horizons, of a future in which they would give away their natural resources in grand humanitarian gestures, rather than watch their homeland be drained of timber, gold, copper, and natural gas. During a lengthy, brutal occupation, West Papuans have harbored a messianic spirit and channeled it in surprising directions. Kirksey studied West Papua's movement for freedom while a broad-based popular uprising gained traction from 1998 until 2008. Blending ethnographic research with indigenous parables, historical accounts, and narratives of his own experiences, he argues that seeking freedom in entangled worlds requires negotiating complex interdependencies.

In an important social change, female Muslim political leaders in Java have enjoyed considerable success in direct local elections following the fall of Suharto in Indonesia. Indonesian Women and Local Politics shows that Islam, gender, and social networks have been decisive in their political victories. Islamic ideas concerning female leadership provide a strong religious foundation for their political campaigns. However, their approach to women's issues shows that female leaders do not necessarily adopt a woman's perspectives when formulating policies. This new trend of Muslim women in politics will continue to shape the growth and direction of democratization in local politics in post-Suharto Indonesia and will color future discourse on gender, politics, and Islam in contemporary Southeast Asia.

Indonesia’s democratic political parties developed rapidly after the end of the New Order era (1966–1998). Based on extensive fieldwork, this book provides a new and necessary perspective on the activities, administration, and membership of the local branches of four large parties. The author also addresses why some political parties in Indonesia have managed to strengthen their institutional base while others have failed to do the same. A significant contribution to understanding grassroots party organization in Indonesia, this timely volume provides insight into the state of parties in advance of the 2014 elections. 

The decades-long rule of President Suharto in Indonesia was ended by violent protests throughout the country in the spring of 1998. Following Suharto’s resignation, Indonesia successfully made the transition from an authoritarian state to a democracy, and this book explores the effects of that transformation on Islamic political organizations in Indonesia, which, for the first time in forty years, were legally allowed to campaign and promote their agenda. The contributors to this book consider the effects of these changes on the influence of orthodoxy and radicalism in Indonesian life and politics, the status of women, and the fate of religious minorities.

B. J. Habibie may have served the shortest term of any of Indonesia’s presidents, but his push for decentralization would affect the country for decades. Habibie came to power in 1998 and immediately set to work restructuring the government. He gave local districts more power, allowing them to elect their own leaders and create their own bylaws. After years of authoritarian rule, these reforms were meant to return power to the people. But that led to local governments engaging in bureaucratic and political conflict with the central government over control of valuable natural resources and the distribution of the revenue they generated. Decentralization became the most important political economic development in Indonesia of the past thirty years.
Networked Business and Politics in Decentralizing Indonesia evaluates three cases of deep-seated political conflict and intrigue including central government, local governments, and multinational companies. It looks at how the structure of the national political economy has changed as the result of local politicians becoming involved in disputes with the national government over control of natural resources. It also analyzes how these changes will affect the distribution of wealth in the country as well as Indonesia’s evolving democratic politics and modes of governance.

In A New Criminal Type in Jakarta, James T. Siegel studies the dependence of Indonesia’s post-1965 government on the ubiquitous presence of what he calls criminality, an ensemble of imagined forces within its society that is poised to tear it apart. Siegel, a foremost authority on Indonesia, interprets Suharto’s New Order—in powerful contrast to Sukarno’s Old Order—and shows a cultural and political life in Jakarta controlled by a repressive regime that has created new ideas among its population about crime, ghosts, fear, and national identity.
Examining the links between the concept of criminality and scandal, rumor, fear, and the state, Siegel analyzes daily life in Jakarta through the seemingly disparate but strongly connected elements of family life, gossip, and sensationalist journalism. He offers close analysis of the preoccupation with crime in Pos Kota (a newspaper directed toward the lower classes) and the middle-class magazine Tempo. Because criminal activity has been a sensationalized preoccupation in Jakarta’s news venues and among its people, criminality, according to Siegel, has pervaded the identities of its ordinary citizens. Siegel examines how and why the government, fearing revolution and in an attempt to assert power, has made criminality itself a disturbing rationalization for the spectacular massacre of the people it calls criminals—many of whom were never accused of particular crimes. A New Criminal Type in Jakarta reveals that Indonesians—once united by Sukarno’s revolutionary proclamations in the name of “the people”—are now, lacking any other unifying element, united through their identification with the criminal and through a “nationalization of death” that has emerged with Suharto’s strong counter-revolutionary measures.
A provocative introduction to contemporary Indonesia, this book will engage those interested in Southeast Asian studies, anthropology, history, political science, postcolonial studies, public culture, and cultural studies generally.