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15200 results in ISEAS-Yusof Ishak Institute

Page 149 of 760

  • 8 - Drifting towards Dynamic Equilibrium: Indonesia's South China Sea Policy under Yudhoyono

    • By Evan A. Laksmana, senior researcher with the Centre for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) in Jakarta (Indonesia) and visiting fellow at the National Bureau of Asian Research (NBR) in Seattle (USA).
  • Edited by Siwage Dharma Negara, Deasy Simandjuntak, Ulla Fionna
  • Book:
    Aspirations with Limitations
    Published by:
    ISEAS–Yusof Ishak Institute
    Published online:
    08 June 2019
    Print publication:
    29 June 2018, pp 153-175

  • Summary

    This chapter examines Indonesia's South China Sea policy under President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono. For much of his administration (2004–14), Indonesia held on to three interrelated policy concepts: non-claimant, honest broker, and confidence-builder. Indonesia is a non-claimant as it does not stake a claim in the disputed waters of the Spratlys. Indonesia maintained a non-claimant status because China has yet to clarify publicly its infamous “nine-dash line” map. In the absence of such clarification, Jakarta has not acknowledged that any maritime boundary dispute with Beijing exists — which has allowed Indonesia to exploit the hydrocarbon and marine resources of the Natunas’ exclusive economic zones (EEZs). Ambiguity over the nine-dash line thus seemingly benefited both China and Indonesia. A non-claimant position has further allowed Indonesia to play the role of an “honest broker” among the claimants. Indonesia has played that role by becoming a confidence-builder seeking to peacefully manage, rather than legally resolve, the disputes through multilateral mechanisms to achieve a “dynamic equilibrium”. A dynamic equilibrium is when regional countries would work with others to build institutional mechanisms and architecture — with ASEAN playing a central role — where no power is dominant or excluded and all parties make up part of a web of mutually beneficial relationships.

    Taken as a whole, these policies were not the product of Yudhoyono's novel strategic insights. Instead, they are rooted in the broader historical and political contexts of Indonesia's overall approach to the South China Sea since the 1990s. Specifically, I argue that four dimensions of interests have shaped Indonesia's South China Sea policy for over two decades: (1) sovereignty and resources, (2) military and security, (3) Indonesia–China bilateral relations, and (4) ASEAN centrality and cohesion. Given these interests, Indonesia cannot afford to be an innocent bystander. Yet, as a non-claimant, Indonesia's options to actively engage the dispute are limited. Accordingly, it has relied on a combination of multilateral and diplomatic policies to manage the tension in the area and a series of unilateral steps to prepare for and hopefully prevent an all-out regional conflict. In international relations parlance, Indonesia as a non-claimant with strategic interests carefully combines “external institutional balancing” (engaging the claimants through ASEAN) and “domestic internal balancing” (improving domestic economic and national security institutions to deter or prevent regional conflicts) since the 1990s.

  • 3 - Indonesia's Diplomatic and Strategic Position under Yudhoyono

    • By John D. Ciorciari, Associate Professor at the Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy, University of Michigan, and Director of the International Policy Center.
  • Edited by Siwage Dharma Negara, Deasy Simandjuntak, Ulla Fionna
  • Book:
    Aspirations with Limitations
    Published by:
    ISEAS–Yusof Ishak Institute
    Published online:
    08 June 2019
    Print publication:
    29 June 2018, pp 33-59

  • Summary

    President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono came to office intent on consolidating Indonesia's transition to democracy and raising its profile on the international stage. Through an “all directions foreign policy” emphasizing the pursuit of “a million friends and zero enemies”, he sought to build a web of cooperative relationships that would help Indonesia project greater influence abroad, secure its neighbourhood and attract support for development at home. His foreign policy thus bore shades of both Sukarno's global aspirations and Suharto's low-key focus on regional stability and domestic growth.

    Yudhoyono aimed to position Indonesia favourably at multiple levels. Within the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), Yudhoyono sought a return to recognition of Indonesia as primus inter pares. He sought to exert leadership by guiding ASEAN's institutional evolution and mediating among feuding members. In the broader Indo-Pacific, the Yudhoyono administration pursued its goal of “dynamic equilibrium” by staking out a central position among major external powers and seeking to harness them to an inclusive ASEAN- centred regional order that would foster cooperation and prevent dominance by any single state. Globally, Yudhoyono endeavoured to raise Indonesia's profile and clout by positioning it as a bridge state between established and transitional democracies and between the Islamic world and the West.

    Meeting these objectives presented real challenges. The Yudhoyono administration struggled to reconcile omnidirectional amity with the friction that often accompanies decisive leadership. When Indonesia's local, regional and global goals came into tension, the administration lacked a clear framework for setting priorities. Unlike the concept of “concentric circles” developed during Suharto's New Order regime (Anwar 2014), Yudhoyono did not give consistent ontological priority to the inner (ASEAN) circle. Indeed, as Yudhoyono cast his gaze beyond the region, questions arose of whether ASEAN had been displaced as the long-espoused “cornerstone” of Indonesian foreign policy.

    Indonesia's domestic political transformation created foreign policy opportunities and additional challenges. Democratization helped Indonesia position itself as a leader of ASEAN's institutional reform and contributed to its appeal as a bridge state between liberal and authoritarian states and between Muslim-majority states and the West. However, Indonesia's more progressive foreign policy stirred resentment in some Southeast Asian capitals, and democratization made the policymaking process more complex at home, adding to the difficulty of formulating and implementing neatly calibrated foreign policy strategies.

Citizenship in Myanmar
  • Ways of Being in and from Burma
  • Edited by Ashley South, Marie Lall
  • Published by:
    ISEAS–Yusof Ishak Institute
    Published online:
    28 June 2018
    Print publication:
    13 December 2017
  • Myanmar is going through a period of profound and contested transition. The country has experienced widespread if sometimes uneven reforms, including the start of a peace process between the government and Myanmar Army, and some two dozen ethnic armed organizations, which had long been fighting for greater autonomy from the militarized and Burman-dominated state. This book brings together chapters by Burmese and foreign experts, and contributions from community and political leaders, who discuss the meaning of citizenship in Myanmar/Burma. The book explores citizenship in relation to three broad categories: issues of identity and conflict; debates around concepts and practices of citizenship; and inter- and intra-community issues, including Buddhist–Muslim relations. This is the first volume to address these issues, understanding and resolving which will be central to Myanmar's continued transition away from violence and authoritarianism.

Framing Asian Studies
  • Geopolitics and Institutions
  • Edited by Albert Tzeng, William L. Richter, Ekaterina Koldunova
  • Published by:
    ISEAS–Yusof Ishak Institute
    Published online:
    28 June 2018
    Print publication:
    12 November 2018
  • This book explores the interconnection between geopolitical context and the ways this context frames our knowledge about Asia, highlighting previously neglected cause–effect relations. It also examines how various knowledge institutions promote and shape Asian Studies. The authors seek to explain why Asian Studies and its subfields developed in the way they did, and what the implications of these transformations might be on intellectual and political understandings of Asia. The book not only builds on the current debates on the decolonization and de-imperialization of knowledge about Asia; it also proposes a more multifaceted view rather than just examining the impact of the West on the framing of Asian Studies.

  • Living on the Edge: Being Malay (and Bugis) in the Riau Islands

  • Andrew M. Carruthers
  • Book:
    Living on the Edge
    Published by:
    ISEAS–Yusof Ishak Institute
    Published online:
    12 February 2019
    Print publication:
    27 June 2018, pp vii-viii

  • Summary

    EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

  • • In Indonesia's Riau Islands Province — a place envisioned as a distinctly “Malay Province” upon its legal formation in 2002 — ethnic Malays are the proud heirs and custodians of a rich legacy associated with a once-sprawling Malay empire that stretched across present-day transnational borders from Indonesia, to Singapore, to Malaysia.

  • • Malays of Bugis descent have long played a disproportionately central role in the history (and the historiography or “history-telling”) of the region that now encompasses Indonesia's Riau Islands Province. While steadfastly “Malay”, members of this community readily acknowledge that their ethnically Bugis roots maintain an enduring historical and ideological salience in their everyday lives.

  • • However, transregional economic trends and rapid sociodemographic shift shaped by ongoing migration flows have led to feelings of “marginalization” (peminggiran) among the islands’ Malay-Bugis community.

  • • This has led them to claim that they are being gradually pushed to the literal and figurative “edges” of social life in the Riau Islands Province. Fears that a one-time ethnic “majority is becoming a minority” (mayoritas menjadi minoritas) have fuelled feelings of inter-ethnic resentment, and have shaped provincial government policies geared toward the “preservation” of Malay custom.

  • • While international focus continues to centre on Indonesia's Chinese-pribumi divide as diagnostic of Indonesian inter-ethnic and religious relations on edge, a grounded assessment of ethnicity in the Riau islands offers an alternative perspective on these important issues.

  • Foreword

  • Andrew M. Carruthers
  • Book:
    Living on the Edge
    Published by:
    ISEAS–Yusof Ishak Institute
    Published online:
    12 February 2019
    Print publication:
    27 June 2018, pp v-vi

  • Summary

    The economic, political, strategic and cultural dynamism in Southeast Asia has gained added relevance in recent years with the spectacular rise of giant economies in East and South Asia. This has drawn greater attention to the region and to the enhanced role it now plays in international relations and global economics.

    The sustained effort made by Southeast Asian nations since 1967 towards a peaceful and gradual integration of their economies has had indubitable success, and perhaps as a consequence of this, most of these countries are undergoing deep political and social changes domestically and are constructing innovative solutions to meet new international challenges. Big Power tensions continue to be played out in the neighbourhood despite the tradition of neutrality exercised by the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN).

    The Trends in Southeast Asia series acts as a platform for serious analyses by selected authors who are experts in their fields. It is aimed at encouraging policymakers and scholars to contemplate the diversity and dynamism of this exciting region.

  • Living on the Edge: Being Malay (and Bugis) in the Riau Islands

  • Andrew M. Carruthers
  • Book:
    Living on the Edge
    Published by:
    ISEAS–Yusof Ishak Institute
    Published online:
    12 February 2019
    Print publication:
    27 June 2018, pp 1-54

  • Summary

    INTRODUCTION: “LIKE BLACK AND WHITE PARTS OF THE EYE”

    In April 2008, and only six years following the legal formation and secession of Indonesia's Riau Islands Province (Provinsi Kepulauan Riau or KEPRI) from adjacent Riau Province, then Governor of Riau H.M. Rusli Zainal (2003–13) attended a meeting of the Kerukunan Keluarga Sulawesi Selatan (KKSS) or the “South Sulawesi Family Association” in Riau's provincial capital of Pekanbaru. The South Sulawesi Family Association is one of Indonesia's largest and most active ethno-regional associations, with members hailing from or tracing their roots to South Sulawesi, an east Indonesian province widely known as the ancestral homeland of Indonesia's Bugis people. Outnumbering that province's indigenous Makassarese, Mandar and Torajan peoples, South Sulawesi's Bugis people are historically renowned as much for their seafaring prowess as they are for the wanderlust that fuels their travels throughout Indonesia, Malaysia, and beyond in “search of good fortune” (Bugis: massappa’ dallé).

    The Riau Governor, a “Malay of Bugis ancestry” (Malay: Melayu keturunan Bugis), had been previously honoured by the ethno-regional association with the honorary “title” or gelar of Daeng Magguna. Roughly translatable to “he who is useful”, the title bestowed upon the Riau Governor by the association featured the Bugis-Makassar honorific “Daeng”, commonly given to Bugis-Makassar people of noble birth. Daeng is also a title whose meaning reverberates in the historical imaginary of Riau and Riau Islands Provinces, two places whose contemporary borders closely align with those of the once-sprawling Malay Sultanate that stretched from what we today call Indonesia, through Singapore, to Malaysia. Among Riau Islanders and their neighbours in Riau Province, the noble honorific Daeng is iconically associated with five legendary Bugis brothers — Daeng Parani, Daeng Marewah, Daeng Menambun, Daeng Celak, and Daeng Kemasi — whose involvement in the region changed the course of history across the Malay world in the early eighteenth century.

    Riau Governor H.M. Rusli Zainal (alias Daeng Magguna) used his April meeting with the South Sulawesi Family Association to thank them for their continuing support and involvement in Riau's everyday life, but also to ruminate on the ethno-historical linkages between the Bugis people and the region's indigenous, ethnically Malay community. “Both of these people since the beginning cannot be separated”, the Governor said.

  • Foreword

  • Leo Suryadinata
  • Book:
    Pancasila and the Challenge of Political Islam
    Published by:
    ISEAS–Yusof Ishak Institute
    Published online:
    12 February 2019
    Print publication:
    26 June 2018, pp v-vi

  • Summary

    The economic, political, strategic and cultural dynamism in Southeast Asia has gained added relevance in recent years with the spectacular rise of giant economies in East and South Asia. This has drawn greater attention to the region and to the enhanced role it now plays in international relations and global economics.

    The sustained effort made by Southeast Asian nations since 1967 towards a peaceful and gradual integration of their economies has had indubitable success, and perhaps as a consequence of this, most of these countries are undergoing deep political and social changes domestically and are constructing innovative solutions to meet new international challenges. Big Power tensions continue to be played out in the neighbourhood despite the tradition of neutrality exercised by the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN).

    TheTrends in Southeast Asiaseries acts as a platform for serious analyses by selected authors who are experts in their fields. It is aimed at encouraging policymakers and scholars to contemplate the diversity and dynamism of this exciting region.

  • Pancasila and the Challenge of Political Islam: Past and Present

  • Leo Suryadinata
  • Book:
    Pancasila and the Challenge of Political Islam
    Published by:
    ISEAS–Yusof Ishak Institute
    Published online:
    12 February 2019
    Print publication:
    26 June 2018, pp vii-viii

  • Summary

    EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

  • • Islam has become an important symbol in post-Suharto Indonesia, and political figures or parties feel they cannot afford to be seen to be against the religion or be considered unfriendly to it.

  • • Islamism emerges to challenge Pancasila (or cultural pluralism) again. Islamists already challenged Pancasila soon after Indonesian independence. But during that initial era under Sukarno, this challenge was already under control. Under Suharto, Pancasila as an ideology was effectively used to govern Indonesia, and political Islam was suppressed. However, Suharto began to co-opt Islamic political leaders during the last decade of his rule.

  • • Religious Islam grew significantly during the Suharto era and would gradually transform itself into political Islam after Suharto's fall. Nevertheless, the electoral strength of “Islamic political parties” remained relatively low.

  • • But since then, Islam has been used as an effective tool to undermine political rivals. The pluralists who are now in power continue to promote Pancasila, and combining with moderate Islamic organizations and through laws and regulations, have tried to hinder the further development of Islamist organizations.

  • • The future of Pancasila depends on whether the Indonesian government and other pluralist forces are able to control the Islamists and provide political stability and economic development in the country.

  • Pancasila and the Challenge of Political Islam: Past and Present

  • Leo Suryadinata
  • Book:
    Pancasila and the Challenge of Political Islam
    Published by:
    ISEAS–Yusof Ishak Institute
    Published online:
    12 February 2019
    Print publication:
    26 June 2018, pp 1-20

  • Summary

    INTRODUCTION

    On 10 July 2017, President Joko “Jokowi” Widodo promulgated the new “Mass Organizations Law” (Perppu no. 2/2017) that empowers the state to ban mass organizations opposed to Pancasila. A few days later, the Ministry of Home Affairs declared Hizbut Tahrir Indonesia (HTI, or Indonesian Liberation Organization), which promotes the establishment of a Caliphate (khilafa) or a theocratic Islamic State, illegal. In recent years, Indonesia has witnessed the rise of hardline Islam as a challenge to the state ideology Pancasila. There are worrying signs of religious intolerance. The indicators are: the winning of Arab-Muslim candidate Anies Baswedan over the Chinese-Christian candidate Basuki Tjahaja Purnama (better known as Ahok) in the Jakarta gubernatorial election on 9 May 2017; the harsh sentence passed on Ahok over the “blasphemy against Islam” case after the election; and General Gatot Nurmantyo's close association with hardline Muslim organizations.

    Despite 87 per cent of its total population being Muslim, Indonesia has been a “secular state” or a “Pancasila state” since independence in 1945. Pancasila means Five Principles, and was first initiated by Sukarno on 1 June 1945. It includes Belief in One Almighty God (Ketuhanan yang Maha Esa), Indonesian Unity, Internationalism, Democracy through Deliberation, and Social Justice for all People. This is a complex ideology, which does not only address the issue of religious pluralism but also democracy and social justice. Its inclusiveness and also ambiguity, has helped make it acceptable to most Indonesians.

    It appears that the first principle of Pancasila, “belief in one almighty god”, has become prominent. While “Ketuhanan yang Maha Esa” has been interpreted as belief in god, any god; and therefore does not have to be monotheistic phrase; some have interpreted it as “belief in one lordship”. In other words, they have felt that “monotheism”, not “polytheism” should be reflected in the recognized religions. During the New Order, many non-monotheist religions such as Buddhism, Hinduism and Confucianism had transformed themselves into apparent “monotheist” religions.

    Whatever the case, the principle in the Indonesian 1945 Constitution remains the guide for social and political behaviour. Clause 29 reads: (1) “The State is based on the principle of One Lordship (Negara Berdasarkan atas Ketuhanan yang Maha Esa); (2) The state guarantees the freedom of every person to profess his/her own religion and to worship in accordance with his/her own religion and belief.”

  • Indonesia and China's Belt and Road Initiatives: Perspectives, Issues and Prospects

  • Siwage Dharma Negara, Leo Suryadinata
  • Book:
    Indonesia and China's Belt and Road Initiatives
    Published by:
    ISEAS–Yusof Ishak Institute
    Published online:
    12 February 2019
    Print publication:
    18 June 2018, pp vii-viii

  • Summary

    EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

  • • For Indonesia, which is keen to accelerate its infrastructure development, Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) is seen as an opportunity to tap into China's huge financial resources and technological capability.

  • • There has however been no concrete BRI project agreed to between China and Indonesia so far. While China considers all projects, including infrastructure projects and economic interactions as part of BRI, Indonesia only considers those infrastructure projects initiated during the Xi Jinping period as BRI projects.

  • • Indonesia has offered several broad areas for cooperation under the BRI framework and carefully selected project locations to minimize political risk for the Joko Widodo government. But no agreements have been signed yet as China requires detailed project proposals from Indonesia, which it has apparently not received.

  • • What appears to hamper progress are four key issues: the perception of China's economic domination, the ethnic Chinese issue, the Natuna issue, and the mainland Chinese workers issue.

  • Indonesia and China's Belt and Road Initiatives: Perspectives, Issues and Prospects

  • Siwage Dharma Negara, Leo Suryadinata
  • Book:
    Indonesia and China's Belt and Road Initiatives
    Published by:
    ISEAS–Yusof Ishak Institute
    Published online:
    12 February 2019
    Print publication:
    18 June 2018, pp 1-41

  • Summary

    INTRODUCTION

    The Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) was first introduced by Chinese President Xi Jinping in October 2013. Initially, the proposal offers cooperation in infrastructure development covering the overland “Silk Road Economic Belt” and the sea-based “Maritime Silk Road”. Later the proposal has been extended to also cover non-infrastructure investment, including cultural ties and people-to-people exchanges. In recent years, BRI has become China's global banner for promoting its international position as the leader of open economic cooperation.

    For developing countries that are keen to accelerate their economic development, BRI is seen as an opportunity to tap into China's huge financial resources and technological capability. Specifically, for Indonesia, a country that is currently embarking on massive infrastructure development, BRI is considered a good alternative financing source. In fact, Indonesian President Joko “Jokowi” Widodo, was among the seven heads of state from ASEAN to attend the inaugural BRI Forum in May 2017. Jokowi mentioned then that he wanted to see how Indonesia could benefit from BRI cooperation, and after the BRI forum, Indonesia proposed a list of projects for cooperation under BRI.

    Despite this interest to participate in BRI, however, there is as yet no concrete BRI project agreed to between China and Indonesia. Also, both countries have different perceptions on what BRI projects are. While China considers all projects, including infrastructure projects and economic interactions as BRI projects, Indonesia only sees infrastructure projects started during the Xi Jinping period to be such. Since China perceives BRI cooperation as a totality of China–Indonesia economic interactions, this paper's discussion also touches on China's trade, investments, loans and tourism in/with Indonesia in order to provide a more complete picture.

    While there have been a large number of analyses with regard to BRI, including its potential geopolitics and geostrategic impacts on countries along the belt route, there is not much analysis regarding how the countries in the maritime silk route perceive BRI. This paper aims to fill this gap by examining how different stakeholders (state, business, media and society) perceive BRI. It explains Indonesia's key interests in BRI cooperation, describes the proposals from Indonesia, and assesses how BRI cooperation will affect relations between the two countries.

  • Foreword

  • Siwage Dharma Negara, Leo Suryadinata
  • Book:
    Indonesia and China's Belt and Road Initiatives
    Published by:
    ISEAS–Yusof Ishak Institute
    Published online:
    12 February 2019
    Print publication:
    18 June 2018, pp v-vi

  • Summary

    The economic, political, strategic and cultural dynamism in Southeast Asia has gained added relevance in recent years with the spectacular rise of giant economies in East and South Asia. This has drawn greater attention to the region and to the enhanced role it now plays in international relations and global economics.

    The sustained effort made by Southeast Asian nations since 1967 towards a peaceful and gradual integration of their economies has had indubitable success, and perhaps as a consequence of this, most of these countries are undergoing deep political and social changes domestically and are constructing innovative solutions to meet new international challenges. Big Power tensions continue to be played out in the neighbourhood despite the tradition of neutrality exercised by the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN).

    The Trends in Southeast Asia series acts as a platform for serious analyses by selected authors who are experts in their fields. It is aimed at encouraging policymakers and scholars to contemplate the diversity and dynamism of this exciting region.

  • 2 - Challenging geography: asserting economic sovereignty in a porous archipelago

  • from PART 1 - Globalisation, Nationalism and Sovereignty: the Indonesian Experience
    • By Anthony Reid, Former Professor of Southeast Asian History, Australian National University, Canberra; University of California, Los Angeles; and National University of Singapore, Singapore
  • Edited by Arianto A. Patunru, Mari Pangestu, M. Chatib Basri
  • Book:
    Indonesia in the New World
    Published by:
    ISEAS–Yusof Ishak Institute
    Published online:
    08 June 2019
    Print publication:
    30 May 2018, pp 17-34

  • Summary

    The world's largest archipelago, lying athwart one of the world's major trade arteries, is an unlikely location for a single mercantilist or protec¬tionist nation-state. The much smaller Caribbean provides the closest comparison to Indonesia in terms of tropical archipelagos that are highly accessible to world trade, but it is divided among 14 sovereignties, heirs to the world's contesting powers. Even other centres of world trade without an archipelagic character, such as the Middle East and the Low Countries of Europe, have been marked by a plurality of commercial city-states or autonomous cities, morphing into a variety of competing modern states.

    Throughout recorded history, the strategic location of the Malacca and Sunda Straits, and the alternation of monsoon winds carrying sailing ships between the Indian and Pacific Oceans, made the archipelago and pen-insula—Nusantara—a natural centre for mercantile city-states living by trade (Reid 2000). Its spices were the chief prize of the global maritime struggles of the fifteenth to seventeenth centuries, motivating explorers such as Christopher Columbus and Vasco da Gama to discover new sea routes to this part of the world. Despite the modern nationalist imaginings of the ancestral ‘empires’ of Sriwijaya and Majapahit, the fundamental reality of the region before 1650 was of multiple port-states competing to attract the world's traders. Yet somehow the idea of a state monopoly of trade developed very deep roots in this region, despite having to contend with a very different reality.

    This idea seems to have taken deepest root in Imperial China. The curious fiction that China needed no external trade meant that for lengthy periods before 1567 the only form of international exchange the Chinese court would accept as legal was that associated with the so-called tribute missions from a few ‘barbarian’ kingdoms that were able to play this game. Those that did play it successfully—from Sriwijaya in the seventh to eleventh centuries to Pasai (northern Sumatra) and Melaka in the fif¬teenth—gained a kind of theoretical monopoly over the lucrative trade with China. Indeed, Chinese court records make it appear as though the only legitimate traders were those from the tribute-sending polities.

  • 8 - Anti-globalisation, poverty and inequality in Indonesia

  • from PART 3 - Impact of and Response to Globalisation
    • By Arief Anshory Yusuf, Professor of Economics, Department of Economics, Padjadjaran University, Bandung; Visiting Fellow, Australian National University, Canberra; and Visiting Professor, King's College London, Peter Warr, John Crawford Professor of Agricultural Economics, Emeritus, and Director, Poverty Research Centre, Australian National University, Canberra
  • Edited by Arianto A. Patunru, Mari Pangestu, M. Chatib Basri
  • Book:
    Indonesia in the New World
    Published by:
    ISEAS–Yusof Ishak Institute
    Published online:
    08 June 2019
    Print publication:
    30 May 2018, pp 133-156

  • Summary

    The 1997–98 Asian financial crisis was a turning point for Indonesia, as it was for many other East Asian countries. In addition to the economic consequences, Indonesia experienced dramatic political change, including a transition to electoral democracy and far-reaching government decen¬tralisation. In the post-crisis period, the average growth rate of real GDP per capita has been only marginally lower than during the two decades preceding the crisis, but the rate of poverty reduction has slowed signifi¬cantly. Something seems to have happened to make growth substantially less effective in reducing poverty. Simultaneously, Indonesia has experi¬enced a huge increase in measured economic inequality. The slowdown in the rate of poverty reduction per unit of growth and the increase in inequality can be viewed as quantitative aspects of the same distributional phenomenon, in which different segments of the population recovered from the crisis at widely divergent rates. What caused this to happen?

    The present study marks the initial step in a research program in which the authors aim to explore competing hypotheses that might explain the change in the poverty–inequality nexus since the crisis. The hypothesis examined in this article relates to what we will call ‘anti-globalisation’: resistance to the increasing reliance on international trade that has been a characteristic of globalisation, with that resistance taking the form of tight¬ened restrictions on international trade. At the same time as inequality has increased in Indonesia, protectionism has also risen, both interna¬tionally and within Indonesia. We hypothesise that anti-globalisation has caused at least some of the slowdown in poverty reduction and increase in inequality. We will examine the extent to which the increase in protec¬tionism in the global economy, and within Indonesia itself, can explain the changes in economic outcomes experienced by different segments of the Indonesian population.

    First, we discuss in more depth the slowdown in poverty reduction and increase in inequality experienced in Indonesia since the financial crisis. We then provide more detail on the rise of protectionism, both in the international economy and within Indonesia. Next, we describe the economic model used to analyse the effects of protectionism on poverty and inequality. Finally, we summarise the results.

  • 13 - Globalisation, the role of the state and the rule of law: human trafficking in eastern Indonesia

  • from PART 4 - The Human Face of Globalisation
    • By Dominggus Elcid Li, Executive Director, Institute of Resource Governance and Social Change, Kupang
  • Edited by Arianto A. Patunru, Mari Pangestu, M. Chatib Basri
  • Book:
    Indonesia in the New World
    Published by:
    ISEAS–Yusof Ishak Institute
    Published online:
    08 June 2019
    Print publication:
    30 May 2018, pp 243-264

  • Summary

    HUMAN TRAFFICKING AND GLOBALISATION

    Human trafficking is a global phenomenon. Like flows of financial resources and traded goods and commodities, flows of people in the form of international migration are rising, thanks in part to better transporta¬tion and communications technology. Labour migration from rural or remote areas to the cities or to major centres of production is part of this phenomenon. For poor, rural workers, labour migration can offer a path out of poverty. But for those who are deceived into working in other coun-tries, it may represent the worst form of labour exploitation and hence is one of the dark sides of globalisation (Jones et al. 2007: 108).

    Globalisation can provide a road back to slavery if the movement of labour is not regulated, and if those regulations are not enforced. One form of exploitation of migrant labour is human trafficking. In Indo-nesia, human trafficking needs to be addressed not only through regional mechanisms such as ASEAN, but also though strategies to reduce social exclusion—because the most commonly targeted victims are the poor and those living on the margins of society.

    Law enforcement agencies have not been able to keep up with the criminal networks that have arisen to take advantage of the opportuni¬ties for human trafficking offered by globalisation. Castells (2010: 172) says that ‘global crime, the networking of powerful criminal organiza¬tions, and their associates, in shared activities throughout the planet, is a new phenomenon that profoundly affects international and national economies, politics, security, and, ultimately, societies at large’. The global criminal networks base their management and production functions in low-risk places where they can control the formal institutions of state (Castells 2010: 173). Surprisingly, this is the picture in certain parts of Indonesia today.

    This chapter analyses the impact of human trafficking based on find¬ings from East Nusa Tenggara, one of the poorest provinces in Indonesia. I argue that severe disparities between regions in Indonesia and lack of access to justice in peripheral areas have allowed human trafficking to take hold. Access is understood as ‘the match between societal commitment and institutional capacity to deliver rights and services and people's capac¬ity to benefit from those rights and services’ (De Jong and Rizvi 2008: 4).

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