Ian Douglas Wilson

Security is a significant structuring force in Indonesian cities, with public and private security practices having multiple and overlapping implications for the daily lives of residents. These range from the patchworks of social segregation produced by privately securitised spaces of middle and upper-class residential enclaves, through to the daily existential challenges of securing access to essential resources such as housing, space and livelihood faced by the urban poor. Many sources of insecurity for residents, from the ubiquitous to public order regimes and the police, are also at the same time frequently guarantors of security. As such security, and its governance, acts as a reflection of and a catalyst for social, economic, and political divisions and interests. The paper explores the dynamics of political contestation over urban security governance in Jakarta, Indonesia’s largest urban centre, emphasising the blurred lines between private and public security regimes.  It does so via an analysis of the relational dynamics between militias and kampung neighbourhoods in Jakarta, highlighting tensions between ormas as hired enforcers of powerful clients, but also as highly dependent upon community approval. It also considers the growth in popularity of private security providers among the cities upper middle-classes, and the anti-democratic reconfiguration of urban public-private space.

Democracy is spatial by nature. Cities make possible, inhibit, or prevent different types of democratic practice, representation, and change. Street-based politics in Jakarta, such as for example, have driven some of the most significant changes of modern Indonesian history, from the student-led demonstrations of 1998 to the mass protests of the 212 movement. Similarly, proximity to state power has been crucial to civil society’s ability to provide advocacy and governmental oversight. The stark socio-economic contradictions of Jakarta and its perennial woes such as flooding, and congestion generate political tensions that challenge elite-preferred images of the nation and the veracity of narratives of development and modernisation. As such the capital has not just been the nations symbolic centre, but also a crucial spatial setting for Indonesian democratic praxis; a heterogenous and often chaotic space of mobilisation, contestation, conflict and advocacy. Nusantara represents, in this respect, more than a symbolic repositioning of the nation’s centre but a potentially significant shift in the spatial practice of democracy itself as an outcome of the disentangling of national government from a ‘nation in microcosm’ megacity. This poses important questions regarding how the new capital will re-spatialise relationships between institutional and non-institutional democracy, particularly within a broader context of democratic regression. Technocratic ‘smart cities’, for example, have been argued as inherently exclusionary and anti-democratic, whereas isolated purpose-built capital cities are often associated with increased corruption. Drawing on theories of cities as spaces of democratic practice and reflecting on the experiences of purpose-built capitals Brasillia, Putrajaya and Naypyidaw, this paper will consider the impacts, challenges and outcomes the moving of the capital from Jakarta to Nusantara may have for the spatial practice of democracy.

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...

This chapter explains the form, content and operation of poor people’s politics in Southeast Asia. Because their basic needs are barely met within prevailing social structures, the poor must act constantly to shore up the resource strategies and social relations they depend on to survive. Their politics reflects this: it rarely challenges prevailing power relations and is more often concerned to make immediate gains—until threats and or opportunities are such that they act more disruptively to challenge the status quo. These features and dimensions of poor people’s politics are illustrated in two case studies of informal settlers’ responses to their forced evictions, in Jakarta and Metro Manila.

This chapter explains that the urban poor played a significant role in the protests that brought down Suharto. Then, after 1998, some organizations emerged that supported the urban poor in their efforts to reform their local communities. But there was no coherent movement during the New Order, nor has there been since. Instead, the urban poor have had to look after themselves, engaging in the politics of the everyday and using defensive forms of action to protect their gains and respond to impending threats. The most significant change since democratization has been the recognition of the urban poor as a voting constituency. Nevertheless, in the absence of a political party with a particular and demonstrated interest in the politics of the poor, activism in support of the urban poor remains fragmented and confined primarily to individual rather than collective action.