1

Challenges to authoritarianism in Indonesia

and Malaysia
Ariel Heryanto and Sumit K.Mandal

This book examines the emergent challenges to authoritarianism in Indonesia and

Malaysia, particularly during the 1990s. Women, public intellectuals, arts
workers, industrial workers, as well as environmental and Islamic activists, are
among the various social forces examined. These groups are not undifferentiated
units; neither do they exist nor operate in isolation. Each is studied in its complexity
and diversity both in form and strategies of action, and in relation to others.
Together, the chapters engage themselves with the discourses and practices of the
social actors in question in an effort to produce theoretically informed, empirically
rich, and nuanced analyses of oppositional politics. In conceptualizing political
tensions at the turn of the century, this book distinguishes itself from many others
on related themes by focusing on aspects of political dynamics beyond formal
political institutions and expressions of authoritarianism.
A polarity between authoritarianism at one extreme and democracy at the other
has been a dominant theme in various political analyses during the last half century
or so. Those with specific reference to countries in Southeast Asia are no
exception, whether authored by locals or foreigners. With various degrees of
explicitness, authoritarianism and democracy are assumed to be categories that
represent existing realities or constitute realistic concepts. Authoritarianism is
assumed to be uniformly disastrous and morally repulsive and democracy
universally good for all human kind. Within this dominant tradition, there is a
general belief that the main tasks of analysts are to measure how far different
societies in this region have been able to move away from authoritarianism towards
democracy; to identify what the impeding and facilitating factors are; and to
predict or explain how soon these societies can overcome their impediments and
advance towards attaining full democracy.1 While more than a few have expressed
dissatisfaction with such confining polarity,2 most preserve it with nuanced
modifications. Rarely do they challenge fundamentally the entire model. Thus
‘transition to democracy’ has been a stubbornly persistent theme well into the
twenty-first century (e.g. Johannen and Gomez 2001; Hara 2001; Frolic 2001).
This book does not privilege the authoritarianism/democracy polarity, or
confine its discussion to the grey areas between the two poles. The phrase
‘challenging authoritarianism’ in the title is inclusive of but not reducible to social
2 ARIEL HERYANTO AND SUMIT K.MANDAL

practices that subscribe to the cause of ‘democracy’. While acknowledging the

values of the familiar polarity, authors in this book see it as one—but neither the
only nor best—way of understanding power relations and political contestations
in the societies studied. Terms such as authoritarianism and democracy are
deployed without the presupposition that they are necessarily exclusive or
mutually negating. In addition, it should be stressed at the outset that while this
book is indebted to and critically engaged with the relevant theoretical literature,
it does not aim at providing a critique of any specific theoretical position or
constructing a new one. Rather, it favours nuanced empirical observations that
hopefully will help re-examine familiar theories in a new light.
Authoritarianism is understood broadly here as a set of diffuse relationships
both in the public and private spheres where the distribution of power is greatly
unbalanced but—despite appearances—is never totally concentrated on a single
person or group. Contrary to common wisdom, authoritarianism is not wholly
constituted by a coercive social order designed by a small elite and forced upon
suffering subjects without endorsement from the latter. In Southeast Asia for a
long time but most visibly during the 1970s and 1980s, a substantial proportion
of the population across nation-states appears to have helped enhance and even
enjoy, social relations and a political order that outsiders conveniently disparage
as ‘authoritarian’ in character (Stubbs 2001; Hadiz 2000b).3 Furthermore, taking
lessons from Joel Kahn (2001), one would suspect that this inclination is by no
means peculiarly Asian. Under similar circumstances others might well do
likewise. Like the term ‘democracy’, ‘authoritarianism’ is used here neither as a
static state of being, nor a formal system of governance that operates in a clearly
demarcated territory, space or institution.
It is curious that ‘democracy’ has managed to occupy such a hegemonic position
among so many Western analysts in the last few decades, when it was considered
suspect by the Western intelligentsia for a substantial period in its earlier history
(Arblaster 1994:7). If democracy does not appear to have found a fertile ground
in Asia, it would be a mistake, albeit a very common one, to ask what is wrong
with this or that Asian country. Equally problematic is the familiar question: is
Western-style liberal democracy universal and compatible with Asian cultures
(e.g. Antlöv and Ngo 2000). Democracy has not been universal either as a concept
or practice in the West. When the concept is imported to other social contexts it
is doubly complex. Unsurprisingly, like blue jeans, McDonald’s hamburgers or
Hollywood movies, democracy has been met with varied responses ranging from
enthusiasm to hostility. Many of these diverse responses may be equally well
founded (see Emmerson 2001 for illustrations).
Much scholarly and journalistic commentary identifies a new politics and
formative changes in the political cultures of Indonesia and Malaysia, espe cially
following the political ferment of 1998. This literature4 has typically relied on
conventional political and social analyses that tend to privilege party politics, elites
and state actors (e.g. Baker et al. 1999; Emmerson 1999; Budiman et al 1999;
Liddle 2001; Schwarz and Paris 1999). Among the few exceptions are Boudreau
 CHALLENGES TO AUTHORITARIANISM 3

(1999), Stubbs (2001), Hadiz (2000b) and Törnquist (2002). It is difficult to

envision the particular dynamism—not to be confused with fervour—and
significance of the subjects in question through such analyses. On the whole, we
hope this book will render more lucid the dynamics, politics and significance of
a range of extra-parliamentary actors, including their particular limitations and
struggles.
The book has three principal foci. First, it investigates the significance of the
challenges to authoritarianism in Indonesia and Malaysia. Second, each chapter
examines in detail the contexts and constraints of anti-authoritarian forces, thereby
giving consideration to both their problems and prospects. Third, the book offers
a comparative discussion of social actors in Malaysia and Indonesia rather than
the country-by-country approach taken by nearly all the existing work on the
subject. Although some of the chapters mainly focus on one of the nation-states,
without exception each comments on significant connections and contrasts
between the two. This chapter draws the broader picture of the issues at hand and
provides some necessary background information for readers who are less than
familiar with Indonesia and Malaysia.

Indonesia and Malaysia: political and social contexts

Indonesia and Malaysia are next-door neighbours that have much in common.
Since 1972 they have shared similar official or national languages, the variants of
Malay called Bahasa Indonesia and Bahasa Malaysia respectively. Islam is
mandatory among Malays, the majority ethnic group to which Malaysia’s
dominant political elite belongs. In Indonesia, the Javanese are numerically bigger
and politically more dominant than other ethnic groups—including ethnic Malays.
Indonesia has the fourth largest population in the world, and Islam is the faith of
around 90 per cent of the country’s population; it claims the world’s largest
Muslim population. Muslim communities in Indonesia, however, are far more
diverse and divided than their counterparts in Malaysia. This condition is due in
part to the syncretic inclinations of vernacular animism, Hinduism and Buddhism
that prevail on Java, Bali, and other islands.
Some of the important differences between Indonesia and Malaysia have their
origins in the transition from colonial rule to independence (in 1945 and 1957
respectively) when contrasting forms of authoritarianism were instituted in each
country.5 A variety of politically active groups emerged in strength soon after the
Second World War throughout the Southeast Asian region. Left wing political
movements and politics made much headway to be halted by the beginning of the
‘Cold War and the rise of US-sponsored anti-Communism and anti-neutralism’
(Hewison and Rodan 1996:53). In the British colony of Malaya, the war against
the Communist Party became an opportunity for the colonial power to eliminate
left wing political culture as a whole. Independent oppositional politics of all kinds
was crushed between 1948 and 1960, the period the British termed ‘the
Emergency’. As the Communist movement was smashed before the creation of
4 ARIEL HERYANTO AND SUMIT K.MANDAL

Malaysia, Benedict Anderson argues that the country ‘inherited (and later
improved on) the colonial regime’s draconian anti-subversion laws and steely
bureaucracy, but not the insurrection itself (Anderson 1998). As such, he observes
that Malaysia has had a ‘permanent authoritarian government’, a condition that
has ‘everything to do with a collective determination on the part of the Malay
ethnic group (52 per cent) to monopolize real political power in the face of the
large Chinese (35 per cent) and the smaller (10 per cent) Indian minorities’. Sheila
Nair offers further analysis that renders the complexity of the inter-ethnic compact
and its importance in the ruling elite’s claims to legitimacy (Nair 1999:91–3).
After gaining independence, Malaysia has been gradually transformed from an
exporter of agricultural products to an industrializing country, its authoritarianism
sustained mostly through legal measures. Since 1981, the country has assumed an
increasingly high profile in the international community under the leadership of
Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad and the multi-party ruling coalition, the
National Front (Barisan Nasional), led by him. UMNO (United Malays National
Organization), the mainly ethnic Malay party, is the dominant partner in this
coalition. As President of UMNO, Mahathir is understood to be the Prime Minister
of the country as well. In 1993, he appointed his protégé Anwar Ibrahim as the
Deputy Prime Minister, a post held by the latter until 1998.
Indonesia’s experience with communism differed from Malaysia in decisive
ways. Unlike in Malaysia, the Indonesian Communist Party participated freely in
electoral politics after independence. The Party was nevertheless held in suspicion
by the military, particularly as the former transformed itself into one of the four
leading contestants in the 1955 general elections. Unlike its counterpart in
Malaysia which survived into the early 1990s in the jungles on the northern border
with Thailand, it was eliminated under the aegis of Cold War politics after nearly
two decades of independence and by violent military means that left a lasting mark
on the country.
In the middle of the 1960s, segments of the military leaning to the ideological
right came to political prominence in direct confrontation with the Indonesian
Communist Party, the largest in the world outside China and the Soviet Union. In
1966, these officers helped accelerate the removal of the first President Sukarno,
with tacit assistance from the major powers of the Western bloc. Sukarno, an anti-
Western autocrat and champion of the Non-Aligned Movement, campaigned
against the formation of the Federation of Malaysia in 1963. Five years after
independence, Malaysia was to be reconstituted with the inclusion of three former
British colonies: Singapore, Sarawak and Sabah.6 Sukarno opposed the move
aggressively as he saw it as a project of Western neo-colonial interests.
Unsupportive of his efforts to undermine Malaysia, the Indonesian army pursued
its own agenda. The army took control of the government in 1966 following one
of the bloodiest massacres in modern history; around one million suspected
communists and their sympathizers were killed (see Heryanto 1999c). Following
the establishment in 1967 of the New Order, for 32 years formal political and
military power was highly centralized in the hands of one person, Retired General
 CHALLENGES TO AUTHORITARIANISM 5

Suharto. An ethnic Javanese who was inclined towards patrimonialism and

developmentalism, the second President was a master of the political manoeuvre.
Under Suharto, Indonesia was transformed into a haven for foreign investors
and domestic capitalist cronies. While the rule of law and the judiciary in Malaysia
enjoyed a good reputation until the late 1980s, Indonesia’s industrialization took
place with little or no commitment to building good and accountable governance,
respect for the rule of law, the separation of powers, and the protection of civil
life. As a number of the following chapters show, the contrasts in governance have
led to a relatively higher degree of confidence in the state among a variety of
Malaysian social actors than among their Indonesian counterparts (see especially
Chapters 3, 4 and 6). Fear, violence and corruption prevailed in Indonesia in
tandem with the official rhetoric of social harmony, consensus, religious virtues,
and familial values. Although Indonesia saw regular elections under Suharto, the
governing regulations and implementation of the elections undermined the
principles they stood for: people’s sovereignty and political accountability.
Besides the political and legal histories of the two countries, the politics of
ethnicity, particularly in relation to the variety of Chinese communities, deserves
some elaboration in the present discussion. Colonialism changed the historical,
social and cultural relationships of the diverse and dispersed Chinese communities
with the people of the region. In Malaysia under the British, poor Chinese migrated
in substantial numbers in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries
specifically to fill a variety of roles in the colonial economy. Today, Chinese
Malaysians constitute less than one third of the total population of over 20 million,
some of them hold a crucial role in the nation’s economy. On the whole, ethnic
Chinese communities are a strong non-majority political constituency.
Contemporary Malaysian political and institutional life is markedly divided by
ethnicity, more so than Indonesia. Colonial rule created the social and economic
conditions for the numbers of Chinese to swell in urban centres while confining
Malays largely to the rural areas. In the interest of social and economic equality,
the Malaysian government implemented the New Economic Policy (NEP; 1971–
90), an affirmative action measure designed to promote the participation of the
Bumiputera or ‘indigenous’ population (mainly ethnic Malay but in legal terms
not exclusively so) in the modern sectors of the nation-state. While the NEP may
be credited with advancing the interests of a broad cross-section of society, it also
sowed divisions as it became the instrument of the racialization practised by the
country’s ruling coalition (Mandal forthcoming).
As in Malaysia, the Chinese population in Indonesia increased substantially
under colonial rule, and they were funnelled into particular sectors of the economy
under the Dutch. Today, the business elite of the ethnic Chinese enjoy important
positions within the national economy, and share with other Indonesian elites some
degree of cronyism and collusion. Unlike the situation in Malaysia, however,
Chinese Indonesians, constituting less than 3 per cent of the population of nearly
230 million, had no political representation under the New Order, while their
cultural identities were declared undesirable. Chinese schools, languages, writings
6 ARIEL HERYANTO AND SUMIT K.MANDAL

and cultural practices were banned. Citizens of Chinese descent were required to
carry and present documentation beyond the ordinary to obtain public services.
Quotas were imposed on members of this ethnic group for entry into certain
professions and educational institutions. Although similar quotas have been in
place in Malaysia, they were implemented in New Order Indonesia without the
same political controls as its neighbour.
The social and political histories of Indonesia and Malaysia indicate differences
in the use of repressive powers in the two states. The New Order rose on the basis
of political violence and maintained its militarist rule by dealing with political
opposition in a brutal manner. The Malaysian state’s repression on the other hand
has been largely exercised through national security laws inherited from the
British. There was a time, especially before 1990, when Malaysia was perceived
as a more orderly state than their own country by Indonesians while the reverse
is true of Malaysians. In this connection the ‘regularized’ character of
authoritarianism in Malaysia is further examined in Kelly’s chapter. He discusses
an instance of political containment by law in the April 1998 amendment to the
Companies Act. As a result, bureaucrats were provided with greater power to
refuse the registration of organizations or close them down.
The Internal Security Act (ISA) is a more illuminating example of Malaysia’s
regularized authoritarianism, indeed one that was being considered by Suharto for
implementation in Indonesia.7 The Act is noted in several of the following
chapters, especially in Budianta’s discussion (Chapter 6) of the humanitarian
protests against it by Malaysian women. The ISA legalizes methods that amount
to orderly options to the ‘disappearances’ or ‘mysterious killings’ that were
brutally carried out by the New Order (see Bourchier 1990). It vests the state with
the lawful power to detain anyone without trial. This post-colonial refinement of
colonial laws has been used during several intra-elite political crises in order to
control dissenting intellectuals, artists, activists, and opposition party members.
One of the most wide-scale recent implementations of the Act occurred in 1987
when 106 people were detained without trial. Operasi Lallang as it was called is
noted in a number of the chapters as a key turning point whose impact, though
unequal to the repressive violence of the militarist New Order, was significant
within the Malaysian context. In Chapter 5 Othman characterizes the state’s
dependence on the Act to repress freedom of expression as its ‘ISA mentality’.

Reformasi politics
Similar to situations in South Korea and Thailand after 1997, Indonesia’s
economic crisis rapidly developed into political and moral crises of the incumbent
leadership, followed by a change in government. The extraparliamentary protests
that date back to the early 1990s gained momentum and became more forceful in
demanding the end of the New Order, the longest-lasting authoritarian regime of
the capitalist Western bloc. President Suharto eventually stepped down (some
argue that he only stepped aside) on 21 May 1998. The term Reformasi, ‘reform’,
 CHALLENGES TO AUTHORITARIANISM 7

became the most salient catchword for the largely unorganized millions of
Indonesians who demanded a change in government and a reversal of the
deteriorating social conditions, One dominant formulation of the evils of the day
was KKN, the abbreviation for Korupsi, Kolusi, Nepotisme (Corruption,
Collusion, Nepotism).
It should be noted at the outset that Reformasi has meant different things to
different people. In Chapter 2 Heryanto speculates that the term may have its
origins in the diplomatic talks between New Order officials and the IMF and World
Bank respectively. At this time, the term referred to Suharto’s compliance with
the conditions of the donor agencies’ bail-out package that included an end to
corruption, collusion and nepotism, a more radical meaning than typically
intended by the word Reformasi When the media accorded primacy to it,
oppositional actors (including those who preferred Revolusi to Reformasi) found
it difficult to avoid its use. The term was first introduced to Malaysians by Anwar
Ibrahim’s political camp around the middle of 1998—when political turmoil was
near its peak in Indonesia—in reference to calls for greater transparency in
government. In response, Mahathir attacked Anwar and his supporters later in the
year. In both countries then, Reformasi was the rallying cry of those who took to
the streets as well as many others, including the political and business elite.
Budianta suggests in Chapter 6 that the term is useful not as an analytical
framework but as a name for the ‘political, economic and social responses to a
multidimensional crisis that provided an outlet for previously repressed and
widespread demands for structural change’. Hers is a good working definition for
the diversity of forms and substance in Reformasi activism. The very open-
endedness of the term has been the source of its success, allowing disparate
oppositional groups to find in it something that spoke to their cause and thereby
galvanize their forces (Noor 1999).
In a series of fast-moving events that were not imaginable only a few years
earlier, both the Indonesian catch phrases ‘Reformasi’ and ‘KKN’ spread across
the Straits of Melaka and became the rallying cry of thousands of Malaysians,
mainly but not exclusively in the capital city of Kuala Lumpur, who demanded
an end to the long-standing leadership of Mahathir. Standing at the forefront of
these masses—largely unorganized and morally outraged citizens as in Indonesia
—was Anwar Ibrahim. Ironically, Anwar had been until then the Prime Minister’s
heir apparent.
There are many other similarities, connections and contrasts between the ways
events unfolded in Indonesia and Malaysia. For instance, the dramatic removal of
Suharto in May 1998 inevitably influenced the calls for Mahathir’s resignation
soon after he sacked Anwar. Transformed into a martyr, the latter became a
unifying icon and politically capable leader for the unorganized and angry masses.
Alongside the politically charged cries of ‘Reformasi’ and ‘KKN’, spectacular
images and dramatic narratives of militant and heroically audacious student
activists in violent confrontations with security forces were imported to Malaysia.
Likewise, the orchestrated anti-Chinese violence (some of the worst in many
8 ARIEL HERYANTO AND SUMIT K.MANDAL

decades) in Jakarta, Solo, and several other towns in Indonesia had a great impact
on the imagination of Malaysians. Chinese Malaysians were forced to contemplate
the fearful implications for Malaysia of the racialized atrocities in neighbouring
Indonesia (see Heryanto 1999a) that mobilized women activists (Chapter 6) and
led to the solidarity work in the arts community (Chapter 7).
Needless to say, the traffic in images, narratives, gossip, direct references, subtle
allusions and illusions in this Internet era was a lot more complex. Individuals and
groups took and mistook different elements of events in different ways for a wide
variety of reasons. However, it is worth exploring a few instances of ‘othering’
that provide insights into the relationships that have been imagined and developed
between Indonesians and Malaysians in recent years.

Othering
Post-structuralist and post-colonial writings have helped popularize the concept
of ‘Others’ and its derivative ‘othering’ in contemporary social sciences and the
humanities. A survey of the varied ways the terms have been deployed is neither
possible not necessary here. Suffice it to note how the concept can be relevant to
our discussion at hand. Othering, as used here, refers to a communicative act,
where a third party (real or perceived) is discursively constructed as a convenient
foil for the collective ‘Self’ of the speaking subjects. In such acts of othering, the
referents are usually silenced, excluded, or absent. The existence of Others is
recognized and taken seriously, but their identity is remoulded, mainly though not
always consciously to facilitate the assertion of the identity and interest of the Self
as the privileged, centred, or normalized subject(s). While it is obvious that the
term ‘othering’ carries negative overtones, it remains debatable whether or not all
discursive practices are guilty of some degree of othering.8
Unsurprisingly, othering has come to prominence in selected Asian countries
since the so-called ‘economic boom’ of the 1980s, in tandem with the invention
and propaganda of ‘Asian values’. As Pinches observes, ‘othering’ in Asian
countries constructs not only the particular imagined ‘West’ but fellow Asians as
well. He notes that ‘officials, national elites and rising middle classes have used
heightened levels and overtly nationalist forms of consumption as national status
claims vis-à-vis other countries and peoples in the region’ (Pinches 1999:31). This
observation works nicely in the case of Malaysia and Indonesia where the shaping
of mutual perceptions has played significant roles in domestic and regional politics.
Indonesians have been influenced by a romantic othering in the area of
managing ethnic tension and political and economic equity. In Indonesia, there
have been ideological nativists who look up to Malaysia’s NEP as the necessary
and desirable correction to Indonesia’s economic discrepancies for which the
economic power of ‘Chinese businessmen’ is often blamed. According to this
view, the government of Indonesia should impose further restrictions on ethnic
Chinese participation in the nation’s economy. Unsurprisingly, such a view finds
enthusiasts among the newly emerging and more independent business class of
 CHALLENGES TO AUTHORITARIANISM 9

pribumi (‘native’) ethnic groups who claim to have suffered from the New Order’s
cronyism and racial discrimination. At the same time, some Chinese Indonesians
claim Malaysia sets a good example by guaranteeing the ethnic minorities rightful
civil rights and political representation in state institutions, often overlooking the
context—the racially hierarchical party politics for instance—and the distinctive
historical conditions that enabled the NEP’s implementation in Malaysia.
More than a few Malay Malaysians consider Chinese Indonesians more
desirable, because they appear to be more considerate and patriotic, a condition
attributed to successful assimilation. Indeed, in the eyes of many Malaysians,
Chinese Indonesians—especially the youth who grew up under the New Order—
look, speak, and behave almost indistinguishably from the so-called pribumi
population. Their counterparts in Malaysia, on the other hand, preserve selected
Chinese cultural practices and traditions, though in localized forms. Malaysians
who find the character of Chinese Indonesian identity attractive nevertheless fail
to observe the coercive measures and censorship that made the ‘assimilation’ in
Indonesia possible.
‘Chineseness’ became a significant point of contention on the side of the anti-
authoritarian forces. On the one hand, Malaysian Reformasi activists regretted that
their fellow citizens of Chinese descent were not as politically active as those in
Indonesia in challenging authoritarianism in the streets. However, as we have
touched on already, these activists’ perceptions of Indonesia were not necessarily
grounded in social and political realities. Ethnicity was not the sole decisive factor
in determining the participation or level of involvement of citizens in the
Reformasi movements of either Indonesia or Malaysia. Opposition publications
in Malaysia mythologized the struggle in Indonesia precisely in ways that
Heryanto argues against in the next chapter. Hence such optimistic prognoses were
made as the prediction that UMNO would fall just like the Suharto political
machinery (Harakah 1999).
On the other hand, supporters of Mahathir depicted the anti-Chinese violence
from Indonesia as a threat to the success of the Malaysian state in maintaining
social and political order. Images and reports were reproduced in the mass media
that tended to intimidate the general public by hinting at the chaos the Reformasi
movement would lead to in Malaysia if Malaysians followed the example of
Indonesians by taking to the streets. In the months preceding the 1999 general
elections, for instance, government-controlled television stations ran ‘multi-
lingual and slickly produced long-form advertisements contrasting Malaysia’s
stable government and social conditions with riots, deaths and property destruction
in neighbouring Indonesia’ (Wong 2000:129). Narratives such as this served to
draw a contrast between barbaric Indonesian ‘rioters’ and the implied civilized
character of Malay Malaysians (namely the ruling party UMNO), aimed
particularly at the Chinese segments of the population.
Contrary to the political conservatism of the ASEAN compact, as exemplified
by its shared credo of non-interference in member states’ affairs, politics crossed
borders and became regionalized. This intensified at the height of the euphoria
10 ARIEL HERYANTO AND SUMIT K.MANDAL

surrounding Reformasi in 1998–9. News of Indonesian support for Anwar reached

Malaysians through the wire services, the opposition mass media and the Internet.
Adnan Buyung Nasution, the influential Jakarta lawyer and friend of Anwar,
criticized Mahathir in the international press, and acted as an observer at his
friend’s trial (AFP 1999). A photograph was circulated by an international news
agency of demonstrators at the Malaysian embassy in Jakarta with a large banner
carrying this message: ‘Mahathir=Soeharto’ (The Straits Times 1998). An
Indonesian publisher of Islam-oriented work released in Jakarta a translation of
Anwar’s book Asian Renaissance a few months after his arrest, including in it a
statement by the author after he was ousted from his post (Anwar 1998). Politics
became regionalized even further when Anwar stalwarts, hounded by Malaysian
security personnel, sought exile in Jakarta where they began to organize a political
comeback (Lopez 1998).
All in all, the political elite in Malaysia may have been genuinely scared by the
stories that they themselves encouraged and circulated concerning Indonesia.
There was much fear in the ruling elite that ‘Indonesian riots’ would visit them
when thousands of people marched through the streets of Kuala Lumpur on 20
September 1998 upon responding to the call by Anwar for a peaceful
demonstration. The country had not seen protests by such large numbers since the
student demonstrations that took place at the end of 1974, nearly a quarter of a
century earlier. The absence of mass demonstrations for so long may have been
reason enough for the government to be very concerned. According to the reports
of top officials, however, what the government most feared was a repeat in Kuala
Lumpur of the so-called ‘Jakarta riots’ of May and June of 1998 (for more see
Heryanto 1999a). The Inspector General of Police at the time, Rahim Noor,
observes as follows, implying a causal link it seems between the two cities:
‘Uppermost in our minds was not to allow the riots in Jakarta to spill over to KL
at all costs and a repeat of the riots and lootings which happened in Jakarta’ (Koshy
1999).
The veracity or accuracy of the admission by the head of the police force is not
as significant as the degree to which the othering of Indonesia was engendered by
the mass media allied to the government as well as opposed to it. The consequences
of the othering, however, were not necessarily predictable or in keeping with the
aims of either the government or oppositional groups. For instance, even as the
pro-government media attempted to instil a fear of Indonesia as the ‘other’, this
effort nevertheless advanced the possibility of imagining a transnational space.9
Consequently, an avenue was opened for individuals and social groups themselves
to make sense of the connections and contrasts between the political upheavals in
the two countries. As the chapters of this book reveal, the street protests of 1998
in Malaysia, indeed the Reformasi movement as whole, were linked in various
ways and at different levels to developments in Indonesia.
 CHALLENGES TO AUTHORITARIANISM 11

Studying Indonesia-Malaysia
Despite the compelling and long-standing connections, similarities, and
illuminating contrasts between Indonesia and Malaysia as cursorily outlined
above, there has been remarkably limited interest in them in the general public
discussion of the two countries and among scholarly observers. Comparative
scholarship on the two countries has been embarrassingly rare and usually falls
under the more general rubric of Southeast Asian studies. Indeed, when the work
towards this book was initially conceptualized in 1997, before the ‘economic
crisis’ which proved to be a historical watershed, it was not easy to advance a
rationale for a comparative study of Indonesia and Malaysia, Once the project got
off the ground in the latter part of 1997, the series of dramatic incidents then
unfolding in the two countries—and unexpected by many—made it seem as if
scholarship of this sort had always been necessary.
Just as this book project was initiated, a study on a closely related theme was
published, namely Syed Farid Alatas’ Democracy and Authoritarianism in
Indonesia and Malaysia (Alatas 1997). Alatas makes the important, fair and
accurate claim that ‘there has not been any comparative work done on the state in
Malaysia and Indonesia’ (Alatas 1997:150). In addressing the lacuna, Alatas’ work
deserves attention. His approach is, however, quite different in kind and style from
that pursued in this book. Highlighting these differences helps elucidate what this
book attempts to achieve and why.
Alatas’ book is evidently a product of serious research and analysis. Within the
terms it sets, it is a solid piece of scholarly work. It covers much ground and offers
many insights and important information. Unfortunately, history has been unkind
to this book. In less than a year of its publication, the societies it discusses changed
radically, thus undermining its primary arguments. Essentially, the book is a
comparative study of the causal historical factors that have made Malaysia a
‘democratic’ state and Indonesia an ‘authoritarian’ one (1997:2), Alatas argues
that three causal factors have been responsible for the formation of these two
different regime types, namely (a) the existence (in Indonesia) or absence (in
Malaysia) of armed struggle against the state; (b) the internal strength of the state
(in Malaysia, and the lack thereof in Indonesia); and (c) the high degree of cohesion
(in Malaysia) or division (in Indonesia) of the elite.
Alatas provides a review of the literature, discusses the various definitions of
what constitutes ‘democratic’ states, and delineates them in very formalistic terms
that reflect conventional social and political analyses (Alatas 1997:1). These terms
include the existence of fair and competitive elections, independent political
parties, civil society, and the separation of powers. Despite some qualifications
and admitted problems in designating Malaysia as a democracy, Alatas (1997:5)
maintains that one should not think that ‘democracy is merely façade’ in Malaysia.
One can take issue with the conceptualization of ‘democracy’ and other key
categories that Alatas adopts, as well as the extent to which Malaysia and Indonesia
fit into the dichotomous categories of democracy and authoritarianism
12 ARIEL HERYANTO AND SUMIT K.MANDAL

respectively. His main arguments about the three causal factors that determine the
character of a state along the democratic-authoritarian axis are well presented but
open to debate. Importantly, a critique or disagreement at a conceptual and abstract
level may not be necessary. The weakness of his arguments becomes clear when
we consider changes in Malaysia and Indonesia merely a few months following
the book’s publication in 1997, and more so after 1998. Indeed one fundamental
reservation that we have about Alatas’ work is its generalized, and consequently
reductionist, portrayal of the two countries compared, glossing over their
respective internal contradictions and histories. Even if we accept for a moment
the view that Malaysia was once democratic and Indonesia authoritarian for
historical reasons that Alatas offers, one wonders why the same historical factors
have generated very different political environments, and in some areas political
reversals, in both countries since 1998.
In several important areas in Indonesia, important reversals followed the end
of Suharto’s three decades of authoritarianism, rendering the familiar
‘authoritarian-versus-democracy’ categories more problematic. One of a few
obvious examples includes the general elections of 1999, the first accountable
effort to elect a new parliament since the 1955 elections. New electoral laws were
enforced, allowing forty-eight political parties to compete instead of the officially-
sanctioned three, as in the previous twenty-five years of the New Order. For the
first time various independent and volunteer groups from different walks of life
across the nation took part in unified efforts at monitoring the process and ensuring
the maximum possible degree of fair ness and accountability (more in Chapter 2).
To the surprise and relief of many, the elections were completed with a remarkably
minimal degree of violence in comparison with previous state-controlled elections
in the New Order era.
The role and dignity of the armed forces has plunged to a degree unimaginable
a few years earlier (see Bourchier 1999 for details). Due to the absence of a
majority vote and single party dominance in the new government, the military and
the New Order’s political party Golkar could not be totally liquidated. The military
still enjoys reserved seats in parliament, but their number was reduced to thirty-
eight from seventy-five. Public demands for a total removal of this privilege
continue to be heard well into 2002. With the loss of power and prestige in East
Timor, and subsequent threats of legal inquiries and prosecution for past crimes
and human rights violations, demoralization was rampant among the soldiers. To
make things worse, street protesters often inflicted abuse and violence against
passing military officers and their properties (vans, buildings and equipment)
during the volatile years of 1998–2000.
During the same period in rural areas hundreds of kilometres away from the
capital city, telecommunications networks and political tussles within the nation’s
elite, there have been regular reports of outrage unleashed against village chiefs
or local parliaments in a style and scale unseen in many decades (see e.g. Cohen
1999). Private businesses and professional as well as civic associations
mushroomed during the first two euphoric years of post-Suharto Indonesia. The
 CHALLENGES TO AUTHORITARIANISM 13

government dissolved the Department of Information that functioned for more

than three decades as the New Order’s machinery for propaganda and censorship.
The number of licensed print media increased to 1,687 in the year 2000 from
around 289 prior to 1998 (Heryanto and Adi 2002). Only several hundred of them
actually survived for more than one year. Many of the newly published media
organs became either the mouthpieces of new political parties and civic groups,
or retailers of gossip, superstitious pronouncements, and sensationalist materials
purveying violence and sex.
The above account is meant only to introduce new developments and highlight
core issues in the contemporary analyses of the two countries. The best, if implicit,
lesson we can draw from Alatas’ book is presented by himself in the penultimate
sentence of his concluding chapter: ‘Democratization in Indonesia and Malaysia
must always be in a state of flux and uncertainty’ (Alatas 1997:164). Put
differently, a study of social change in these countries, as elsewhere, including so-
called ‘democratization’ must recognize the messiness of the reality under
investigation. Such study requires flexibility and a dialectics of a scale greater
than often allowed in the familiar orthodoxy of positivist political science and
sociology. Diagrams, tables, conceptual definitions, taxonomic categories, and
jargon—all respectable and often desirable—in many scientifically inclined
approaches to the study of power and social relationships are often more satisfying
in the enhancement of established academic empires, and theorization in the
disciplines, than to the development of a critical intellectual practice (see also
Chapter 6).
The next section proceeds to a critical reflection of our own endeavours and
predicament. Alatas concluded his pioneering work on this note: ‘But, if rapid
development increases the stakes for the government, it also strengthens the
resolve of extra-bureaucratic forces to press on for democratic reforms’ (Alatas
1997:164). He ends where we begin.

Towards post-authoritarian societies

In contrast to Alatas’ focus on the so-called ‘state’, and the formal typology of
regime types along the ‘authoritarianism’ versus ‘democracy’ divide, all
contributors to this book focus their research on the complex and often
contradictory features of non-statist agencies, structures, practices and histories.
The agencies in focus include urban-based professionals, non-governmental
organizations (NGOs) and labour activists, religious communities and leadership,
and women’s groups, as well as socially engaged artists. The central questions
that all the ensuing chapters ask concern the constitution and history of these
agencies, the dynamics of their assets and liabilities, and their structural
relationships with those outside their immediate circles.
Questions of the state do not totally disappear in the picture, but they occupy
less than central positions. Underlying the decision to pursue these core questions
is the fundamental conviction and working framework that power and political
14 ARIEL HERYANTO AND SUMIT K.MANDAL

relationships do not reside, accumulate, or concentrate only within formal state

institutions or their officials. In other words, our endeavour does not avoid the
political in order to resort to ostensibly apolitical areas of inquiry or alternative
academic disciplines such as cultural anthropology and psychology. Rather, we
try to be as broad-minded as possible in accounting for the field and the workings
of power relations.
Understood broadly, authoritarianism, just like democracy, is not a state of
being or ‘system’ that operates in a clearly demarcated territory, space or
institution. Authoritarianism is understood here as a set of diffuse relationships
both in the public and private spheres, where power is never totally concentrated
on a single person or group—as it may occasionally appear— and without legal
or moral accountability to the public. By no means is this either uniquely Asian
or an exceptionalism. While the phenomenon may have broader validity, it is
particularly relevant in studies of post-colonial societies, Indonesia and Malaysia
included, where the modern nation-state is fairly novel and unevenly
institutionalized across the body politic.
Consequently, our research has yielded a series of in-depth, nuanced, and
polyphonic narratives of specific areas and issues rather than a consistent breadth
of inter-regional comparative analyses. In contrast to familiar political and
politico-economic analyses where democracy, development and authoritarianism
are most rigorously discussed, and where they acquire some of their dogmatic
senses, the current study seeks to investigate more qualitative and less tangible
dimensions of social phenomena. Instead of working with the given definitions
and decidedly taxonomic boxes of ‘authoritarianism’ and ‘democracy’, or seeking
alternatives between the two as well as desirable modifiers and designators (like
‘soft authoritarianism’ or ‘semi-democracy’), the chapters that follow assess and
comment on the qualities of authoritarian subjecthood, social relations, practices
and structures, as well as those of its democratic counterparts in today’s Malaysia
and Indonesia. These are things that are constantly, as Alatas puts it, in ‘a state of
flux and uncertainty’ (Alatas 1997:164).
This book does not offer a single answer to a single question. It asks several
but highly inter-related questions about the conditions of, possibility for, and
observable practices of challenging authoritarianism in Indonesia and Malaysia
in the late 1990s. It considers these questions from several angles and recognizes
the contrasts and connections between them. The questions raised in this book do
not come straightforwardly from the dominant discourses of social change in the
established social sciences and humanities in the West. While all contributors in
this collection are trained in the West, and continue to be engaged with global
intellectual exchanges, nearly all spent their formative years within the contexts
of the social transformations they analyse. Nearly all have had several years of
direct and active involvement with the organizations and activities they describe
in their chapters.
For these reasons this book is rare among its kind. The central questions it raises
and the answers it attempts to offer do not descend directly from the exogenous
 CHALLENGES TO AUTHORITARIANISM 15

logic and imperatives of academic production from outside the societies it studies.
Chapters in this book arise from years of personal practical engagements,
grounded analytical reflection, serious doubts, and a series of intellectual
dialogues with Western-based social sciences and humanities. It is an inductive
venture with a commitment to an open exploration that is full of uncertainties.
While each chapter makes the painful but necessary compromises of analysis and
reporting to be able to communicate effectively with some focus, each rejects easy
reductionism or succumbing to the high abstraction characteristic of hegemonic
global academic practices,
In keeping with the scholarly directions described above, Mary Louise Pratt
offers an illuminating critique of Western theory. She argues against its tendency
to generalize as this can reduce heterogeneity. Good theory is conventionally
‘understood as the ability to explain a maximum range of cases with a minimum
number of axioms’ (Pratt 1998:430). In place of this kind of theorizing, she offers
the approach of scholars studying new social movements in Latin America who
‘have been challenged to conceive of social formations as constituted by (rather
than in spite of) heterogeneity and to reconceive social bonding as constituted by
(rather than in spite of) difference’ (Pratt 1998:431). In the course of her argument,
she relates this alternative theoretical perspective to the very diversification of
academic knowledge itself.
Pratt suggests that the single most important task facing scholars is expanding
and deepening the idea of democracy when ‘neoliberal discourse has forcibly
emptied it of meaning, until the mere presence of elections remains its lone
defining characteristic’ (Pratt 1998:434). The perspective advanced here is echoed
by Budianta in her chapter in this book when she articulates—citing Chantal
Mouffe—democracy as a subversive discourse, and again by Mandal in the claims
made by working class social actors to the arts as an egalitarian social space. These
and other chapters in the book problematize democracy as a social process in
pluralist and heterogeneous terms through the study of a variety of social actors
within particular historical and social contexts.

Beyond the authoritarianism/democracy axis

As stated earlier, most comparative observations of Indonesia and Malaysia take
the form of partial and passing statements in works devoted to Southeast Asia as
a whole, or in collections of essays devoted to specific countries in the region. The
best work on the subject to date remains the seminal study by Harold Crouch
(1985).10 It is a structuralist analysis of the relationship between economic
development and political structure after Barrington Moore (1966) that establishes
the classical model for most studies of development and democracy in ‘Third
World’, ‘developing’, ‘post-colonial’, or ‘South’ countries.11 More recent works
of similar or related perspectives, including the rare collection of essays co-edited
by Hewison et al. (1993), have been critically and insightfully reviewed by Jacques
Bertrand (1998). Like the pioneering book by Alatas (1997), Bertrand’s essay falls
16 ARIEL HERYANTO AND SUMIT K.MANDAL

victim to the historic transformations that have been taking place in Indonesia and
Malaysia since 1998, rendering it outdated too quickly.
From the perspective of this book, what is missing from many conventional
politico-economic analyses is a consideration of the complex and dynamic
workings of power beyond formal institutions—especially the state apparatus.
Most of these studies are centred on the political elite and formal institutions. Of
late, attempts have been made with varying levels of success to move away from
the state and formal political institutions in order to examine the disparate pockets
of challenges to authoritarianism in Asia. These include Garry Rodan’s mostly
pessimistic edited collection (1996) and three more optimistic works, namely
Anders Uhlin on democratization in Indonesia (1997), Robert Hefner (2000), and
Krishna Sen and David Hill (2000). More immediately relevant and intellectually
challenging is Vincent Boudreau’s post-Reformasi analysis of Indonesian
democratization (1999), where the latter is compared rather disparagingly with
the people’s power movement in the Philippines which ended President Ferdinand
Marcos’ authoritarian rule in February 1986.
With few exceptions such as Boudreau (1999), societies in many of these
usually politico-economic analyses are portrayed as building blocks that are
reducible to a few definitions and conceptual frameworks. These societies are
dissected as if they must and will undergo a more or less unilineal trajectory from
underdevelopment to development, from tradition to modernity, from feudalism
to capitalism, from authoritarianism to democracy. Such analyses differ in
assessing the levels of failure or success of these societies to democratize and the
possible reasons, leading the analysts to suggest a variety of typologies.
Democracy is almost always assumed to be fundamentally unproblematic in
principle. It is also assumed to be achieved once and for all in the West without
any serious problems, and it is the best possible ideal for the rest of human history.
Empirical details and quantitative data are often constructed in abundance in an
objectivist style, as dictated by the chosen theoretical framework, and presented
in order to defend abstract arguments that are far-reaching in claims but too narrow
to accommodate the complexities of the phenomena they purport to describe. An
example of such comparative works on democratization in the countries under
study is Neher and Marlay (1995).
In several of these studies, one finds sophistication. However, not infrequently
it is the sophistication of conceptual abstractions and analyses that resonates in
mathematics, engineering, or chemistry—as if social entities and relations are
comparable to figures or chemical substances, accompanied by reductionism and
simplifications of social aspects that are considered given, unproblematic, or
insignificant from the chosen theoretical position.12 One target of such
reductionism and simplification is ‘culture’ while another is social ‘identity’. To
name but one poor outcome of such reductionism, we need only consider the scant
reflection informing the use of such terms as ‘race’ in reigning perspectives on
Malaysia. Typically, party political and socially-based notions of ‘race’ are taken
 CHALLENGES TO AUTHORITARIANISM 17

as unproblematic reflections of social and cultural realities in the country (Mandal

forthcoming).
Apparently these problems are not the failure of individual scholars, but
indicative of something more systematic. The ‘regnant’ paradigm in studies of
Southeast Asia has been largely resistant to change (McVey 1995) and mostly
focused on contributing to the success of modernization and nation-building. In
addition, we must also take into account the early and important observation of
the American political scientist Donald Emmerson (1984), who argued that
Southeast Asia is an externally constructed political entity that came to
prominence only around the Second World War (alongside the heavy presence of
the United States’ military as well as the prolific production of analyses by North
American political scientists). Academic studies from this formative period
largely take the nation-state and international relations as their main units of
analyses. Anthropological studies that have had a longer engagement with the
region, and have been more sensitive to the more vernacular, localized, intra-and
cross-national boundaries, were marginalized.
Our task is definitely not simply to bring back anthropological studies of the
past as Emmerson (1984) suggests, because ‘culture’ as understood and practised
in the regnant anthropological perspectives has been equally problematic (see
Kahn 1993:6–21). To put it crudely, formal categories such as ‘economy’,
‘politics’ and ‘culture’ have too often been reified to represent discrete social
relations. So often, when culture is inserted into such political analysis, it is
conceived to be a static, often essentialist, form or substance that belongs
exclusively to one definable community. In other words, this is a conception of
culture that does not exist in most contemporary works where culture is central
and problematized (for instance in contemporary cultural studies, post-
structuralism, and studies of the media and identity politics, to name a few).
Lisa Lowe and David Lloyd emphasize culture as a site that offers political
possibilities ‘when a cultural formation comes into contradiction with economic
or political logics that try to refunction it for exploitation or domination’ (Lowe
and Lloyd 1997:1). These authors posit the notion of the ‘social’ as a terrain where
the political, cultural and economic relate to each other. Such insight helps frame
the efforts in the chapters that follow to articulate the political ‘productivity’ of
non-traditional actors and actions. Both the Malaysian and Indonesian states have
articulated an official culture where economics, politics and culture have come to
be regarded as strictly separate domains. Many of the challenges to
authoritarianism analyzed in this book arise from the intersection of these
ostensibly separate domains, significantly in the conjuncture of the cultural and
the political. It is precisely this point of intersection that has mobilized some
scholars of Latin America ‘to draw attention to how social movements operate at
the interface of culture and politics’ (Alvarez et al. 1998:xi). Further, these
scholars ‘contest the often-made claim that the “political”significance of social
movements has receded with the return of formal, electoral democracy to much
of Latin America’. In keeping with Lowe and Lloyd, they articulate ‘how the
18 ARIEL HERYANTO AND SUMIT K.MANDAL

“cultural”struggles of social movements over meanings and representations are

deeply entangled with their struggles for rights and economic and political-
institutional power’.
In any case, the uses of culture in voluminous works under the rubric of
development studies and modernization, and more recently Asian miracles’, have
accentuated the so-called ‘culturalist approach’ to political change (e.g. Vatikiotis
1996; Antlöv and Ngo 2000). This approach, in turn, becomes too easy a target
for those more inclined towards positivism (e.g. Alatas 1997: 20–1). Meanwhile,
‘culture’ and ‘power’ as developed in ‘cultural studies’ appear to have minimal
dialogues, if any, with scholars of democratization and authoritarianism in
Indonesia and Malaysia. This book attempts to make a contribution to fill this gap.
13

Partly in reaction to Samuel Huntington’s controversial thesis of the ‘third wave

of democratization’ (1991), many students of democratization in the 1990s
strongly reject any temptations to assume any simple correlation between
economic growth and democratization. Similarly, they reject the notion that the
decline of an authoritarian regime will necessarily lead to durable democratization.
Despite this general tendency, studies of democratization in Southeast Asia to date
appear to fall short of the theoretical rigour and comparative perspectives of their
counterparts in Latin America and post-Communist Eastern Europe. Unlike the
majority of works on Southeast Asia that operate within the bipolar framework of
authoritarianism versus democracy and are preoccupied with types of regimes,
major studies on Latin America probe the more subtle and challenging questions
about the conditions and qualities of the processes toward consolidated democracy
(see Martz 1997).
This book was prepared with a broad view that questions of social change
generally and more specifically in Southeast Asia should not be reduced to
arguments about the types of authoritarianism or democratization. Neither should
we concentrate on the purely programmatic and predictive question of how
authoritarian trends and dispositions in Indonesia and Malaysia give way to more
democratic structures, agencies and practices. Such questions are indisputably
important and worth pursuing. Nevertheless, the admittedly dormant stage of
critical studies of political change in Indonesia and Malaysia suggests others. We
believe there are many other and equally important questions about social agents
and practices in predominantly authoritarian circumstances that lie beyond the
confines of formal political institutions and economic performance.
The foregoing suggests that two different major areas of enquiry demand more
serious attention. The first is a critical re-examination of the already hegemonic
concept of ‘democratization’. The other is a broader and more in-depth
ethnography of political agencies, practices and institutions beyond the historical
dominance of studies of ‘transition from authoritarianism to democracy’. Rodan
warns of the danger ‘that new forms of political organization and reconstitutions
of state-society relations which do not correspond with the liberal democratic
model will escape adequate identification and analysis’ (Rodan 1996:5).
 CHALLENGES TO AUTHORITARIANISM 19

Rendering the effectiveness, innovativeness and subtleties of the social actors in

question thus requires attention to nuanced discourses and practices to register
their political value. This book attempts a few exploratory steps in this direction.

The chapters
The next six chapters share a number of perspectives. Challenges and responses
to authoritarianism are presented in their variety. State and capital form both the
object and partial sites of resistance by democratic struggles, thus rendering
inevitable contradictions and predicaments. All the chapters discuss particular
social forces whose work is nonetheless nearly always in conjunction with a broad
range of individuals and groups. These chapters also show that authoritarianism
need not end with the removal of the autocrat in power—Suharto in this instance
—just as it may not be solely attributed to the same. Authoritarianism persists in
a variety of ways despite the greater mobility that is evident in certain areas such
as the increased freedom of expression in Indonesia after 1998. Several forms of
liberalization emerge as common phenomena following the fall of authoritarian
regimes, but they do not in themselves necessarily lead to the formation of long-
lasting democratization. The chapters consider in some depth how middle class
intellectuals, non-governmental actors, workers, Islamic activists, women and arts
workers respond to transitional political moments, and how they find themselves
entangled and disentangled with profound challenges, old and new. A brief
description of each helps in assessing the overall argument of the book.
In the following chapter, Heryanto shows that the middle classes need not
necessarily be dismissed—as many scholars believe—as oppositional social
actors. Given certain historical conditions, in this instance shaped by the early
stages of a rapid and large-scale expansion of industrialization, elements of
Indonesia’s middle classes can and have played important roles in the
democratization of politics and society. However, as Heryanto emphasizes, not
all their actions and values are inherent to the class; these are not only the result
of the selflessness and virtuosity by which journalists and academics have been
mythologized but the consequence of historical experiences. The key point made
in his chapter applies to the rest: industrialization under the authoritarian
governments of Indonesia and Malaysia has brought about distinct historical
conditions whose constraints and possibilities must be assessed anew in any
examination of social actors.
Kelly’s study of industrial zones peripheral to the national capitals shows how
much the history, social institutions and cultural orientations of an industrializing
locality shape the kind of civil society that is formed. Kelly compares NGOs in
two rather radically different contexts in terms of infrastructural development,
social composition, historical influences and interconnectedness with the world—
Penang in Malaysia and Batam in Indonesia. Yet both these geographical
peripheries to the capital have been areas of rapid industrial growth, attracted a
youthful work force from around the country, grown largely from foreign
20 ARIEL HERYANTO AND SUMIT K.MANDAL

investment, and importantly, gained economically as a result of state intervention

in facilitating the entry of global capital. However, the kind of authoritarian state
intervention in each case has been quite different. Kelly describes Penang as
administered by a bureaucratic authoritarianism with some localization of political
power. Batam on the other hand had been until the late 1990s under the centralized
and militaristic authoritarianism of the New Order. Kelly argues that there is little
uniformity in civil society formation as a consequence of industrialization. He
extrapolates from here that there is not necessarily a common sense to the
conceptualization of civil society as well as its relationship to ‘democracy’ or
‘development’ in this regard.
As Kelly observes for NGOs, Vedi R.Hadiz sees the trajectory of workers’
activism in no simple or predictable manner. Hadiz argues that the exclusion from
political life of labour—by employing militaristic force in Indonesia and by
institutional means in Malaysia—has made it difficult for workers to form a
cohesive and independent counterweight to the state in these countries. As a result,
he concludes that workers have not been well positioned to shape ‘the agenda of
the reform movement dominated by political actors organically unconnected to
the labour movement’. Importantly, his argument rests not on the exclusionary
practice of authoritarianism in one country alone but on the globalization process.
Although globalization’s consequences have been contradictory, multi-national
corporations have been able to press for restrictions on workers’ organizational
activities. Yet, transnational labour solidarities have been slow in the making.
Hadiz notes for instance the absence of efforts by Malaysian trade unionists to
defend the rights of Indonesian migrant workers. In the past, unofficial organizing
vehicles without clear structures were advantageous in dealing with state
repression, but Hadiz feels that it is unclear if these can develop into effective
institutions in the post-Suharto era. He concludes by emphasizing the need for
workers to develop ‘the capacity for self-organization’ in order to influence
society, politics and the economy.
Locating her analysis within complex political and structural constraints,
Norani Othman argues that the democratization of Islamic politics and society has
been at the forefront of the agenda of Muslim activists in Malaysia and Indonesia,
in keeping with post-colonial trends in Islamic countries worldwide. Her argument
is sensitive to the global currents in the politics of Islam that both states have been
forced to recognize and to which they have had to respond. Islamization in this
regard is part of a complex process of social change and not the adoption of an
ideological orientation alone. Othman argues that the response of the state to the
complex phenomenon of Islamization has been short-sighted. Specifically,
Mahathir invited Anwar to join the ruling cabinet to appease Islamic
organizational interests and initiated a number of policies that led to the
Islamization of laws and social practices. Given elite-led efforts to shape the
Islamization process, the democratization of Islamic politics and society appear
to lie in the same hands. While she believes that the Reformasi years have brought
to the forefront Islamic notions on democratic alternatives, it is unclear to her if
 CHALLENGES TO AUTHORITARIANISM 21

this development will shape the existing Islamic movements in the region in a
substantive and long-lasting manner.
In contrast with Othman’s Malaysia, Budianta sees women social actors in
Indonesia contributing vital challenges to the existing gendered character of social
relations as well as its divisive ethnic and religious tendencies. She argues that
efforts by women activists to broaden the social and class basis of participation
in political life—defined in novel and generous terms, has consequences far more
meaningful than the emergence of women leaders such as Megawati Sukarnoputri
in elite politics. While the rise in women’s activism during the Reformasi period
may have been plagued by problems of organizational cohesion, the
democratization of politics was advanced in significant ways. Budianta’s focus is
on the less structured women’s organizations that mobilized across different social
strata with increased vigour in response to the regional economic crisis and in
challenging authoritarianism. Individuals and groups of women both in Malaysia
and Indonesia were moved to act as a result of humanitarian concern following
the deleterious effects of the economic crisis as well as the long-standing state
violence, especially as it impinged on the bodies of women. Her work thus
reconfigures the political, and shows how women from different strata became
politicized in meaningful ways by such means as ‘milk politics’, when initially
they had been fearful or sceptical of women’s activist groups and ‘politics’. Given
this context, Budianta sees women’s activism as not feminist alone but as
democratic movements in themselves, hence her preference for the syncretic term
‘feminist democratic’ activism.
Mandal takes a broad-based approach in articulating the shape and substance
of the engagements of activist arts workers. He makes the claim that activist arts
workers cross many social boundaries—including class, religion, ethnicity, and
gender—and have been collectively, though not necessarily cooperatively,
producing significant aesthetic engagements with authoritarianism. Skilled in the
modulation of symbols, they work with other social actors in addressing the
inequities and repression under authoritarianism. To evaluate arts workers by some
measure of ‘direct’ oppositional productivity would be a mistake. Activist art
practices are shown through selected cases to be significant in developing critical
perspectives from below in engaging authoritarianism. More immediate to the
Reformasi movements, arts practices were critical in the lead up, crisis, transition,
and aftermath of political change through such actions as the repossession of public
space—a symbolic act of significance discussed in the chapter.
On the whole, the chapters support the idea that social analyses need to be broad
based, self-critical, sensitive to practices, and capable of representing difference
in order to be relevant. Reflecting the textured and differentiated social and
political sphere, the chapters of the book intersect and interrogate each other with
the hope that as a whole they provide a perspective on the dynamics and prospects
of the challenges to authoritarianism that have taken place and are emerging. In
different ways, these chapters also explore some of the fundamental limits that
such prospects will have to confront in the long term.
22 ARIEL HERYANTO AND SUMIT K.MANDAL

Notes

1 One respected scholar writes: ‘Indonesia is still a far cry from genuine democracy,
…But yet somewhere deep inside I am optimistic, especially since most people that
I talk to in Indonesia see the opportunities…the future of democracy in Indonesia
depends more upon how attractive and effective a new, more participatory,
democracy can be made to the people—especially the elite—and less on the
prevalence of certain “Asian”values’ (Antlöv 2000:221).
2 For a review, see a series of articles under the theme ‘Debating the Transition
Paradigm’ in Journal of Democracy, 13 (2), July 2002.
3 For a slightly different, but comparable, situation in Burma see Alamgir (1997); and
for China and Taiwan see Shi (2000).
4 By no means is this meant to be a survey of the literature. A few references are made
only for illustrative purposes. Even then, only those published after the eventful year
of 1998 and directly relevant to the issues under discussion are considered.
5 For a broader but brief history of Indonesia from about 5,000 years ago to the post-
Suharto period, see Cribb (1999). For a more comprehensive history of Indonesia,
see Ricklefs (1981). For Malaysia’s history, see Crouch (1996) and Milne and Mauzy
(1999).
6 Malaysia as it is known today was constituted only in 1965 with the inclusion of the
states of Sabah and Sarawak and the exclusion of Singapore.
7 Under President Suharto, the New Order state periodically used the Anti-Subversion
Law and ‘Defamation’ penal codes to detain and prosecute opposition figures (see
Heryanto 1993a). What distinguishes the use of this Law from Malaysia’s ISA is
the general absence of an attempt by New Order officials to present their cases with
legal credibility. Notwithstanding this difference of style, the effects of such state
repression in the two countries may not be that different, namely inculcating
widespread fear among the population. In response to the popular resentment towards
the Anti-Subversion Law, New Order officials contemplated revising it and crafting
something similar to the ISA of Malaysia (and Singapore). In 1999, partly in an
attempt to consolidate his power and legitimacy, President Habibie scrapped the
Anti-Subversion Law. However, to the dismay of many Reformasi-minded
Indonesians, in the same year a new set of laws was proposed, that gave considerable
power to the military and President to suppress internal and external threats in matters
affecting ‘state security’.
8 For an illuminating discussion of this, see R. Young (1990:1–20). ‘There has to be
some “other”—no master without a slave, no economic-political power without
exploitation, no dominant class without cattle under the yoke, no
“Frenchmen”without wogs, no Nazis without Jews…’ (Cixous, cited in R. Young
1990:2–3).
9 At least two highly innovative and original articles have explored problems of
identity politics as mediated by the globalized Internet in response to the 1998
violence in Indonesia, see Lochore (2000) and Tay (2000).
10 As this book went to press, the news about the publication of Case (2002) came to
our attention, but there was insufficient time to consider its relevance here.
11 According to such a perspective, social, economic and political change in the last
one or two hundred years follows ‘the reaction of [the] land-holding elites to the
 CHALLENGES TO AUTHORITARIANISM 23

prospects of agrarian commercialization’ (Crouch 1985:3) and industrialization. For

more, see Moore (1966).
12 Of course, most writings and academic genres are guilty of similar symbolic
violence. The difference, however, lies in the degree of explicit admission and
selfreflexivity incorporated in these activities.
13 Scholars of Thai democratization have engaged in more dialogues with
postmodernism, see for instance Tejapira (1996) and Callahan (1998).