The Military in Research on Indonesian Politics

Abstract

The general direction of research on Indonesian politics has come under severe criticism at least twice. In 1964 Harry J. Benda charged that students have essentially presented us “highly sophisticated and persuasive answers to an intrinsically mistaken, or irrelevant, question.” Castigating what he sees as a general approach to explain Indonesian politics on the premise of “What is wrong with Indonesia?,” he concludes that “perhaps our basic error all along has been to examine Indonesia with Western eyes; or, to be more precise and more generous, with eyes that, though increasingly trained to see things Indonesian, have continued to look at them selectively, in accordance with preconceived Western models.”