Democratising Indonesia: The Challenges of Civil Society in the Era of Reformasi (review)

By its very nature, civil society is an extremely difficult topic for any researcher. It poses the problem of defining, selecting and limiting the objects of analysis, with a myriad of non-governmental groups trying to leave their mark on politics and society. The task becomes even more difficult when the country under scrutiny is Indonesia, which since President Soeharto's downfall has lost count of the number of NGOs in the capital, as well as in the provinces, districts, sub-districts and villages. These civil society groups are not only active in a wide spectrum of fields, ranging from political advocacy to health issues and community development, but they also have highly diverse goals and interests. In her book, Mikaela Nyman takes stock of Indonesia's civil society in the post-New Order era, trying to assess its role in the 1998 downfall of the New Order and the subsequent evolution of the democratic polity. In particular, Nyman focuses on three social movements that shaped civil society both in the late phase of the authoritarian regime and in the emerging democracy: the students, labour and women. The three chapters on these social movements form the core of the book, and they guide the author's general assessment of civil society in Indonesia.

The main argument of the book is an interesting one: the fragmentation of Indonesia's civil society movement does not only constitute a weakness, it is in fact its most important asset. The disorganized state of civil society made it impossible for Soeharto to completely suppress or co-opt it, allowing students, labour and women's groups to mobilize against the embattled president in 1997 and 1998. In the same vein, the disunity among non-governmental groups after 1998 has ensured that some organizations have continued to call for radical reform, refusing to follow the example of some of their counterparts who have been easily co-opted by political parties, state institutions or businesses. According to Nyman, the divisions within Indonesian civil society are an inherent feature of social movements, which only unite against a certain issue or regime (in this case, Soeharto), but then find it difficult to cooperate on day-to-day problems of governance and democratic reform. Thus Nyman submits that Indonesia's civil society movement needs to find ways of fostering effective cooperation among its various elements without undermining the very heterogeneity that has prevented it from co-optation.

While the author presents her main thesis in a sufficiently convincing fashion, the book is marred by a large number of methodological, analytical and empirical problems. First of all, Nyman spent little time in Indonesia, interviewing only a total of seventeen NGO figures during two months of fieldwork. What is more, the interviewees were not key figures in their respective movements, but often rather marginal participants — so marginal, in fact, that sometimes Nyman does not even mention their full names, like in the case of a certain "Ibu Titin" (p. 137). In addition, Nyman was rather unselective in the use of her limited interview material, quoting her interviewees in excessive length and in a disturbingly repetitive manner. In most cases, the author shies away from guiding the reader through the interview material, which often appears redundant. Accordingly, many typical NGO platitudes and phrases find entry into the book, and Nyman herself at the end tends to uncritically repeat some of the slogans that her interviewees offered her ("All stakeholders need to gain a deeper appreciation of the rights and obligations of the state and its citizens in a modern democracy, and make it work in the Indonesian context", p. 205). Even when one of her interview partners complained that the people had recklessly "exchanged" reform for democracy (p. 179), Nyman did not comment on this obviously nonsensical assessment.

The biggest problem of the book, however, is its sloppiness as far as the treatment of historical and political facts are concerned. It certainly does not...