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  • Reconstructing the Archipelago
  • Sulfikar Amir (bio)

In June 1997 the Indonesian rupiah plunged dramatically against the US dollar. This currency decline did not cause an immediate mass panic, as the central government in Jakarta assured the public that the country, with its strong economic foundations, would not enter into a crisis. But, alas, the rupiah went into free fall only a few weeks later. Within several months the whole country was in deep turmoil, triggered by the unforgiving Asian financial crisis that had struck the whole region. Indonesia suffered the most, and its crisis entailed unpredictable political ramifications. Amid riots that saw parts of Jakarta burn, on 21 May 1998, President Suharto, the strongman of the authoritarian New Order regime, finally stepped down after ruling Indonesia for thirty-two years. This dramatic episode in Indonesian politics marked the start of the era of Reformasi, which paved the path to democracy.

Twenty years after being prostrated by turbulence in the global financial system, Indonesia is now emerging as a new economic powerhouse in Asia, having undergone massive transformations from what it had been under the New Order regime. Currently, Indonesia is the largest economy in Southeast Asia. With its soaring GDP it has even joined the G20, which comprises the world’s twenty largest economies. And while its economy has grown many times over with its further integration into global markets, Indonesia’s politics too has been remarkably transformed. Reformasi created a new sociopolitical environment whereby democratic principles became the rules of the game. For several years, democratic transitions brought about a wholesale change in the political landscape that took place from the central government in Jakarta all the way down to the district level countrywide. The authoritarian top-down style of governance is now a thing of the past, as liberal democracy is widely embraced. Having implemented political reforms, Indonesia now has one of the most complex electoral systems seen anywhere, in which all executive officers from the president and provincial governors down to district heads are elected through general elections. This renders Indonesia the third most populous democracy in the world after India and the United States.

Yet despite what seems to be a bright picture, we should not look through rose-colored glasses at all of the transformations that have occurred in Indonesia since the [End Page 1] fall of Suharto’s dictatorship, for some aspects of the economic and political changes have presented uneasy challenges and resulted in less satisfactory outcomes. The bottom line is that Indonesia’s transformations over the last twenty years are complex and marked by uncertainties that can be traced to the disparity of institutional and cultural conditions in society.

It is such complexity that attracts interested scholars to study how these massive social and political transformations have been carried out in response to the post–New Order environment. Indeed, explaining a country like Indonesia is not an easy job for any scholar to accomplish. For a start, Indonesia’s population is approximately 250 million people; it is the world’s largest Muslim population. The country is extremely large—the archipelago stretches for some 5,360 km, the same distance as New York to Anchorage, and is made up of around 17,000 islands, half of which are uninhabited. A culturally diverse nation, Indonesia has over two hundred ethnic groups living across the archipelago, each with its own language but all speaking a common language, Bahasa Indonesia. As a postcolonial nation, Indonesia as such did not exist before the Dutch came to the archipelago and claimed it as a colony. During the precolonial period, for centuries a number of major kingdoms ruled parts of what is now Indonesia. Under the Dutch rule modernity was introduced, and in the twentieth century the European concept of the nation-state was adopted by pro-independence movements that called for unity among all the peoples of the archipelago.

The study of modern Indonesia was pioneered by Western scholars intrigued by its history and culture. More specifically, the beginnings of this academic field saw a growing interest among American scholars who paid particular attention to revolution and nationalism, a political process that dates back to the late nineteenth...

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