Continuity and Change after Indonesia’s Reforms: Contributions to an Ongoing Assessment ed. by Max Lane (review)

This edited volume on politics in Indonesia comprises ten competently composed empirical chapters that in the main offer informed overviews of key developments in the country’s evolving political landscape. Some chapters are relatively comprehensive in so far as they cover the period since Soeharto’s 1998 resignation, while others focus more narrowly on Joko “Jokowi” Widodo’s (first) presidency (2014–19). The papers on which this collection is based were first presented at a conference held in Singapore in March 2018, and the resulting volume was published in early 2019, so readers should not expect analyses of the caustic 2019 presidential campaign (or its results and bloody aftermath).

There seems to be no clear guiding principle that informs the way the book’s chapters are organized, which perhaps reflects the rather ad-hoc fashion, according to the volume’s editor, Max Lane, in which the participants were chosen for the conference, beyond the majority being Indonesian (vii–viii). Yet a close reading of the chapters does reveal some interesting commonalities across the assessments. Below I briefly review the chapters as they pertain to what I see as three thematic groups.

The first cluster concerns developments regarding Indonesia’s political parties. We begin with Fionna’s informative and extensive overview of the country’s parties and its party system in the democratic era. Fionna, who is the author of an excellent book on these topics,¹ strives to balance positive and negative evaluations. The latter are the predominant mode through which parties tend to be analyzed, with popular critiques pertaining to their weak ideological bases and their declining ability to secure voter loyalty. Yet Fionna notes that these problems similarly plague parties in other young democracies, suggesting that these issues which Indonesia’s parties face are not sui generis to the country and thus might not necessarily be of their own making. Next, Mas’udi’s chapter zeroes in on the changing bases of political legitimacy in current Indonesia. Mas’udi astutely highlights the mounting tension between two modes of legitimacy-making: the traditional variant wherein parties lend candidates legitimacy and the nascent trend of generating legitimacy based on the performance of individual candidates. He sees the rise of President Jokowi as exemplary of this dialectic. Agustino’s chapter places the problem of Indonesia’s unceasing political corruption on the escalating and exorbitant costs of campaigning. This dynamic in turn necessitates that winners recoup their investments while in office in ways that typically run afoul of the law. Finally, in a chapter written by the most experienced scholar among the volume’s Indonesian contributors, Cornelis Lay explores how the new rich who can afford to run these pricey campaigns are being produced by local systems of capital accumulation. Contractors in particular are infiltrating local party branches and thus are altering the course of party development as they replace the New Order-based elites who have aged and whose prominence has faded from view.

The second theme to which I believe some chapters belong involves politics beyond political parties, that is, political movements. The first skillful chapter in this group seizes on the rise of Islamist organizations in post-New Order Indonesia. In it Alvian focuses on the dilemmas that many of these groups have encountered along two axes. The first is how they view democracy and, specifically, competitive party elections. Some have expressed more willingness to embrace them, others less so. The second axis constitutes one’s position vis-à-vis the state, or how closely should one’s organization approach the state strategically or distance itself from it. The second chapter on non-party movements is Chauvel’s look at recent developments in Indonesia’s troubled, easternmost island of Papua. A longtime observer of eastern Indonesia, Chauvel exhibits how a young generation of Papuans less interested in traditional guerilla warfare is changing the dynamics of the pro-independence movement in ways...