Ian Douglas Wilson

Commentators have often cited a deepening of identity-based social fault lines across Indonesia’s vast sociopolitical landscape. Yet the country has experienced little of the kinds of communal conflict or electoral turmoil of near neighbours in recent years. Drawing on observations of electoral politics in Jakarta, this article argues that top-down electoral polarization bears little resemblance to how identity and difference are experienced and utilized as pragmatic resources in the urban politics of the everyday. This dynamic helps to explain why the parameters of electoral polarization have dissipated post-election and failed to translate into deeper forms of societal-level conflict.

Indonesia’s regional elections scheduled for 27 November will be the largest in the nation’s history and the first to extend to all the country’s provinces, regencies and cities. A Constitutional Court ruling in August that significantly lowered candidate eligibility thresholds was opposed by the House of Representatives. However, it backed down from an attempt to legislate around the ruling after widespread public protest broke out. Large party coalitions have nonetheless operated to constrain the parameters of regional electoral contestation, blocking popular candidates and delivering an increase in single candidate no-contest elections. What is emerging is an increasingly opposition-free form of electoralism, in which local and sub-national political elites broker agreements around power and resource sharing.

• By the end of 2023, there will be 271 interim regional heads who are appointed rather than elected, accounting for more than half of the regional leadership posts throughout Indonesia.

• The legal basis of the interim leader appointment process has been contentious and subject to challenge, especially when some of the appointees have a substantial term in office before the next election, or when they execute significant policy changes.

• Critics argue that handpicked interim leaders are beholden to those who have appointed them and would use the advantages of incumbency to promote central government interests, and unfairly favour some stakeholders over others in the 2024 elections.

• The phenomenon of appointed interim leaders has intertwined with renewed questioning by political parties and elites of the legitimacy and future of regional elections with senior government ministers, among others, proposing a return to the political appointment of regional leaders and the ending of democratic elections.

This paper explores the conditions under which democratic decentralisation has contributed to pro-poor policy reform in Indonesia by examining the politics of health insurance for the poor in two Indonesian districts, Jembrana and Tabanan, both located in Bali. Governments in these districts have responded quite differently to the issue of health insurance for the poor since they gained primary responsibility for health policy as a result of Indonesia’s implementation of decentralisation in 2001. We argue that this variation has reflected differences in the nature of district heads’ political strategies — particularly the extent to which they have sought to develop a popular base among the poor — and that these in turn have reflected differences in their personal networks, alliances and constituencies. Comparative research suggests that pro-poor outcomes have only occurred in developing countries following democratic decentralisation when social-democratic political parties have secured power at the local level. In the Indonesian case, we suggest, political parties are not well defined in ideological and programmatic terms and tend to act as electoral vehicles for hire and mechanisms for the distribution of patronage, while local-level politics is increasingly dominated by the executive arm of government. Hence the pathway to pro-poor policy reform has been different — namely, via the emergence of local executives who pursue their interests and those of allies and backers via populist strategies with or without the support of parties.

Ethnic gang violence is often depicted as a clash between criminals pursuing instrumental advantage or as one between ideological fanatics pursuing collective nationalist, ethnolinguistic, or ethnoreligious rights. However, there is an apparent tension between the conceptualization of such violence as the rational self-interest of deprived individuals, and as the irrational fanaticism of anomic communities. The examination of one particular ethnic gang, the Betawi Brotherhood Forum which operates in Jakarta, Indonesia, indicates how both dimensions of violence coexist and interweave. The apparent analytical tension between individualistic pragmatism and collectivist moral absolutism is resolved by showing how the gang responds to their disillusionment with the state by constructing for themselves a "state proxy" role. This response is portrayed as based upon "ressentiment" - the "faulty rationality" which marginalized individuals adopt so as to translate their clashes of material self-interests into the moral conflict between stereotyped communities - the virtuous ethnic Us against the demonized ethnic Other.

This article examines the changing nature of organized violence in post-New Order Indonesia. The New Order regime, which ended with the overthrow of Suharto in 1998, employed violence as a central strategy for maintaining political control, both through the state apparatus and via state proxies: criminal and paramilitary groups acting in the state's behalf. In effect, violence and criminality were normalized as state practice. The collapse of the New Order and the resulting fragmentation of its patronage networks have prompted a decline in state-sponsored violence, but at the same time the number of non-state groups employing violence and intimidation as a political, social, and economic strategy has increased. This article looks at this phenomenon of the "democratization" and privatization of organized violence in post-New Order Indonesia via detailed case studies of a number of paramilitary and vigilante groups. While operating in a manner similar to organized crime gangs, each group articulates an ideology that legitimizes the use of force via appeals to ethnicity, class, and religious affiliation. Violence is also justified as an act of necessary rectification rather than direct opposition, in a situation where the state is considered to have failed in providing fundamentals such as security, justice, and employment.