Public Forum/2008 Annual Asian Studies Lecture: A decade of Indonesia's reformasi

Abstract

`A Decade of Indonesian Reformasi: The Winners and Losers'

Associate Professor Vedi R. Hadiz
Department of Sociology
National University of Singapore

With the possible exception of the Philippines, and due to recent developments in Thailand, Indonesia is arguably the most democratic country in Southeast Asia at present. That Indonesian democracy has flourished during a decade of reformasi following the unravelling of the Soeharto's stifling and rigid authoritarian New Order regime is an accomplishment of which Indonesians can be justifiably proud. However, what kind of democracy is Indonesia? Who has benefited the most from reformasi and who has benefited less? It is suggested here that due to the `uncompleted' nature of Indonesian reformasi ten years ago, old predatory interests nurtured under the previously existing authoritarian regime, both national and local, have subsequently been able to reposition themselves as reformers and democrats. Presiding over political parties, parliaments, and various institutions of governance, they have been able to largely maintain social ascendancy through such mechanisms as the deployment of money politics. Indeed, they have no use for a return to the old style authoritarianism from which they had initially emerged - and actually fear outbreaks of disorder that might legitimise military attempts to regain some of the power that they had lost earlier. On the other hand, social interests that had been suppressed during the long Soeharto era - including organised labour and the peasantry - remain marginalised even though they now enjoy much greater freedom to organise and to participate in social and political processes. That is one of the several paradoxes of a decade of Indonesian reformasi: the widening of political participation, including through electoral democracy, has not greatly enlarged the scope for more fundamental kinds of political contestation entailing empowerment of the marginalised as well as challenges to still dominant predatory interests.

Vedi Hadiz is Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology at the National University of Singapore. His research interests include industrialisation and social change, labour studies, social movements, Indonesian and Southeast Asian politics and society, civil society, and democratisation. He is the author of Workers and the State in New Order Indonesia, London, Routledge, 1997 (Indonesian language version, Jakarta, Gramedia, forthcoming 2007), and Reorganising Power in Indonesia: The Politics of Oligarchy in an Age of Markets (with Richard Robison), London, RoutledgeCurzon, 2004.

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