Abstract
Joining Pemuda Pancasila has been great for business. I now have over 100 staff, an expanding portfolio and owe a lot of it to them.” Heru pauses to sip his whisky on the rocks. “This ice is supplied by Pemuda Pancasila, best quality in Jakarta.” He was sitting in an upmarket bar in a five-star Jakarta hotel owned by a mid-ranking member of the paramilitary organization Pemuda Pancasila. The venue and its clientele, consisting largely of fashionable upper middle-class millennials, is seemingly far removed from the street-level thuggery or seedy “nightlife” with which many still associate the paramilitary group and others like it. In his late-twenties and an ethnic Chinese, Heru constitutes the changing face of Pemuda Pancasila, part of a younger generation of an old organization still synonymous for many with political gangsterism and the violent excesses of the New Order regime...