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The end of authoritarian rule in 1998 ushered in an exhilarating but unsettled period of democratization in Indonesia. A more open political climate converged with a rapidly changing media landscape, yielding a vibrant and volatile public sphere within which Indonesians grappled with the possibilities and limits of democracy amid entrenched corruption, state violence, and rising forms of intolerance. In Demanding Images Karen Strassler theorizes image-events as political processes in which publicly circulating images become the material ground of struggles over the nation's past, present, and future. Considering photographs, posters, contemporary art, graffiti, selfies, memes, and other visual media, she argues that people increasingly engage with politics through acts of making, circulating, manipulating, and scrutinizing images. Demanding Images is both a closely observed account of Indonesia's turbulent democratic transition and a globally salient analysis of the work of images in the era of digital media and neoliberal democracy. Strassler reveals politics today to be an unruly enterprise profoundly shaped by the affective and evidentiary force of images.

Moving next to de facto independence, Yadav and Mukherjee bring together data from 103 democracies in the developing world, complemented by case studies of Brazil, India, and Indonesia. Honing in on the effects of electoral institutions, the authors find that, when faced with short time horizons, governments that operate in personal vote electoral systems are likely to increase de facto judicial independence whereas governments in party-centered systems are likely to reduce it.

Placing theories of ethnicity and religious pluralism in relation to theories of the state, Rita Smith Kipp in Dissociated Identities situates a particular Indonesian people, the Karo, in the modern world. What the state's policies on culture and religion mean to Karo women and men, who now live in cities throughout Indonesia as well as in their Sumatran homeland, becomes clear only by looking at the way Karo families and communities contend with religious pluralism, with the pull of tradition working against the wish to be "modern," and with the new wealth differences in their midst. Newly discrete facets of Karo selfhood -- ethnic, religious, and economic -- replicate in microcosm the political tensions of the nation-state, revealing both why the New Order has enjoyed great stability over almost three decades and the sources of disruption that may lie ahead.