00074918.2015.1111792

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Bulletin of Indonesian Economic Studies

ISSN: 0007-4918 (Print) 1472-7234 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/cbie20

Beyond Oligarchy: Wealth, Power, and

Contemporary Indonesian Politics

Yuki Fukuoka

To cite this article: Yuki Fukuoka (2015) Beyond Oligarchy: Wealth, Power, and Contemporary Indonesian Politics, Bulletin of Indonesian Economic Studies, 51:3, 480-482, DOI:

10.1080/00074918.2015.1111792

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00074918.2015.1111792

Published online: 29 Nov 2015.

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480 Book Reviews

On the other hand, Sukarno’s economic nationalism, which aimed for food self-suficiency for Indonesia, was not entirely unjustiied. Van der Eng describes how

donors channelled much of their aid in the form of food, which nicely served their interests by disposing of food surpluses but had the predictable consequence of

disturbing Indonesia’s food market.

In sum, this book offers a valuable overview of the development options and dilemmas of Indonesia in the 1950s and the early 1960s, during its transition from a colonial to a postcolonial economy. In a way, this narrow framework makes this book more coherent than it would have been had it adopted a longue durée per-spective, which the editors admit is absent in most contributions. In fact, only 3 of the 17 contributions deal exclusively with the colonial period. I nonetheless think that scholars working on the economic history of Indonesia should not neglect the longue durée; important questions relating to social inequalities, demography,

ecology, and migration, for example, all beneit from a broader temporal frame -work. What also deserves greater prominence is the comparative ambition, which I found only in the contributions by Hal Hill (chapter 3) and Frankema, although I grant that several contributors—among whom Anne Booth not the least—have published excellent comparative work elsewhere.

Rather than as a critique of this volume, my observations should be read as

desiderata for the coming years of this prospering ield of economic history. The

editors deserve credit for offering the reader a preview of fascinating new research questions about the 1950s and 1960s that promise an important cross-fertilisation between economics, history, and development studies.

Ulbe Bosma

International Institute of Social History

Beyond Oligarchy: Wealth, Power, and Contemporary Indonesian Politics.

Edited by Michele Ford and Thomas B. Pepinsky. Ithaca, NY:

Cornell University Press, 2014. Pp. x + 178. Paperback: $23.95.

‘Oligarchy’ has been the key word in the analysis of Indonesia’s now not-so-new

democracy. A number of scholars, most notably Jeffrey Winters, Vedi Hadiz, and Richard Robison, have argued that democratisation, which began with the fall of Soeharto in 1998, has changed the form of Indonesian politics without eliminating oligarchic rule. Their works, largely informed by political economy in the British

and European tradition, have inspired many Indonesianists while at the same time attracting ierce criticisms—particularly from those informed by the plural -ist tradition, who have argued that Indonesia has made a steady transition to a greater democracy but is still crippled by structural problems. For a long time, lit-tle productive engagement has occurred between these camps, which essentially constitute parallel universes.

It is against this backdrop that Beyond Oligarchy, which brings together leading

scholars in the ield, makes a welcome attempt to move past the dichotomy that

has characterised the literature. This book is an essential read, not only for new

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Book Reviews 481

students of Indonesian politics, for whom it will provide an essence of important

debates in the last decade or so, but also for established scholars, who will ind

it useful in taking stock of the current state of the literature and exploring future directions of Indonesian political studies.

This book encourages those from parallel universes to engage with each other and, in doing so, highlights the main points of agreement and disagreement

among them. It identiies, for example, a general consensus that Indonesian oli -garchs, nurtured under the old regime, have remained disproportionately

power-ful in the post-Soeharto era. Edward Aspinall, a leading scholar of the pluralist

camp, accepts the proposition that ‘material inequality produces political

inequal-ity’ and does not question that ‘oligarchs are disproportionately powerful actors’ (p. 120). Marcus Mietzner similarly acknowledges the continued signiicance of

the oligarchic power structure, stating that ‘Winters, Robison and Hadiz deserve credit for highlighting an important feature of Indonesian politics and political

affairs in post-authoritarian states more generally’ (p. 116).

Disagreements emerge as one begins to move away from macro-level analyses and look more closely at particular dimensions of Indonesian politics. Mietzner

(chapter 5) and Michael Buehler (chapter 8), for example, point out that Indonesia’s

ruling elites have more diverse backgrounds, motivations, and sources of power than the oligarchy thesis assumes, whereas Aspinall and Teri L. Caraway and

Michele Ford (chapter 7) emphasise the need to take ‘politics from below’ more

seriously. In the meantime, Pepinsky (chapter 4) and R. William Liddle (chapter

3) propose more dynamic analytical models to make sense of speciic political

outcomes that the oligarchy thesis tends to obscure. To be sure, these criticisms do not necessarily invalidate the oligarchy thesis, as most of them are directed at issues the thesis was not meant to address. Still, they highlight important political dynamics to which scholars of oligarchy have not given adequate attention, and invite researchers to move beyond a heavy focus on the rich few in search of a more nuanced understanding of Indonesian politics.

Reading this volume, one might get the impression, however, that scholars of oligarchy do not respond adequately to the challenges posed by the pluralist camp. This is particularly so with chapter 2, by Hadiz and Robison, who respond

to criticisms with a general denial of the broader transformative signiicance of non-oligarchic forces, which some readers might ind unsatisfying. For example,

on the important debate over the role of agency in the liberal transformation of Indonesian politics, Hadiz and Robison simply dismiss the possibility by stating that ‘the oligarchy thesis rejects the liberal pluralist idea that individuals may sim-ply accumulate resources by virtue of the voluntary exercise of individual skills,

including that of leadership’ (p. 40). Yet none of the contributors is making such a simplistic assumption. Even Liddle, who proposes the most agency-focused per -spective, acknowledges the importance of specifying ‘the factors constraining and

facilitating actions by individuals and groups’ (p. 60).

Every student of Indonesian politics would agree that Indonesia’s power

structure is highly skewed in favour of a small number of oligarchic elites. But the political impact of such a power structure has not necessarily been uniform. Indeed, oligarchs have experienced different degrees of success in maintaining and expanding their hold of power, the analysis of which deserves greater schol-arly attention. This book encouraged its contributors to step outside the ‘division

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482 Book Reviews

of labour’ in Indonesian political studies, and it is unfortunate that scholars of

oligarchy did not fully respond to the challenge.

Yuki Fukuoka

Embassy of Japan in Malaysia

Indonesia’s Rise: Seeking Regional and Global Roles. By Vibhanshu Shekhar. New Delhi: Indian Council of World Affairs and

Pentagon Press, 2015. Pp. xiii + 205. Paperback: $65.95.

Research on China, India, Brazil, and Russia as rising powers is abundant, but few academic works look at emerging powers beyond those countries. Indonesia, in particular, is often overlooked. From an investment and business perspective, Indonesia can be considered an emerging power, but there is little discussion of

how Indonesia’s economic proile inluences its rising prominence on the global

stage. This book is therefore an important contribution to the emerging-powers

discourse, and a useful companion to Amitav Acharya’s Indonesia Matters: Asia’s

Emerging Democratic Power (2014).

The book’s strong point is its ability to correlate domestic and systemic lev -els of analysis. Whereas Acharya used constructivism in attempting to explain

Indonesia’s rise, Shekhar uses neoclassical realism, which incorporates multilevel variables in analysing a state’s foreign policy. Gideon Rose (1998), who postulated

the idea of neoclassical realism, has argued that the main motivator of a

coun-try’s foreign policy is its relative position in the international system, especially in

terms of its material capabilities (p. 146). Yet Rose acknowledges that the relation between material power and foreign policy is complicated, ambiguous, and able to be explained only by embodying domestic factors.

Shekhar believes that the debates over rising power tend to focus on the systemic

level, where a particular country’s rise results from changes to the international

system. He argues that the dynamics of domestic politics within rising powers are

also key determinants in shaping the policies and behaviours of these countries. On Indonesia’s rise, he suggests that ‘while the domestic transformation has strength

-ened the country’s capability and international image, international changes have offered opportunities for Jakarta’s regional and global projections’ (p. 23).

On the domestic level, Shekhar recognises that Indonesia’s high economic growth and democratic consolidation since reformasi have helped to raise Indonesia’s pro

-ile regionally and globally. Nevertheless, the author is pessimistic about long-term projections of Indonesia’s rise, given the country suffers from inadequate infrastruc -ture, widespread corruption, a lack of religious freedom, and weak multiparty

gov-ernance. From a systemic perspective, Shekhar underlines that Indonesia’s rising diplomatic, economic, and political proiles correlate with current events at regional

and global levels. In chapter 2, for instance, he argues that the rise of some pow-ers—most importantly, China—and the forming of relations between rising and established powers have resulted in complex diplomacy practices in Asia. These

practices could lead to intense rivalries among Paciic and global powers.