post-Suharto Era Research Articles

Sufi Islam and the nation state: Darul Arkam movement in the post Suharto era of Indonesia

<p>Modernity as a global phenomenon has been the most driving matter, said<br />those scholars of modernity, that potentially threat the existent of tradition<br />and religion. Both would vanish once the project of secularism accomplishes.<br />However, since the global modernity, whether represented by secular state,<br />nation state, and democracy, failed to fulfil its promises, tradition and religions<br />in general have reemerged to be likely a new device employed by their<br />adherents to express their grievances and discontents. In such regard, recent<br />Islamic movements promoting the slogan of “back to the authentic Islam”<br />can be a better example to examine the relationship between modernity and<br />religion. Accordingly, the paper, based on my field research, would discuss<br />the role of religion in modern era as represented by Darul Arkam, an Islamic<br />spiritual maternity or Tarekat (Thar6iqa, Arabic) in Indonesia after the collapse<br />of Suharto’s military regime in 1998. Originally, the movement of Darul<br />Arkam came into being in Malaysia as a spiritually-social-urban Muslim organization.<br />How did its leaders understand Islam in regard to changing social<br />and political situation and how did they combine economic and religious<br />activities will be the main topics of the paper, together with their views on<br />contemporary issues related to Islam and politics after Soeharto era.</p><p>Modernitas sebagai sebuah fenomena global merupakan faktor paling<br />berpengaruh, demikian para teoritis moderisme menyatakan, terhadap<br />keberadaan tradisi dan agama. Kedua unsur ini akan lenyap seiring dengan<br />dengan keberhasilan yang dicapai oleh proyek sekularisme yang berlangsung<br />secara global. Namun demikian, sejak gerakan modernisme, yang diwakili antara<br />lain oleh konsep negara sekuler, negara bangsa, dan demokrasi, dianggap telah<br />gagal memenuhi janji-janjinya, tradisi dan agama secara umum kembali menjadi<br />media untuk mengungkapkan kekecewaan mereka terhadap kegagalan dan<br />akibat-akibat yang ditimbulkan oleh modernism. Pada situasi ketidak puasaan<br />ini, gereakan-gerakan Islam dewasa ini yang mempropagandakan gagasan<br />“kembali kepada Islam yang otentik” dapat menjadi sebuah contoh yang tepat<br />untuk menganalisa hubungan kekinian anatara modernitas dan agama.<br />Berdasarkan riset lapangan, tulisan ini akan memaparkan peran koumintas<br />agama, yang diwakili oleh organisasi Darul Arkam, sebuah perkumpulan yang<br />diikat oleh rasa persaudaran Muslim atau biasa dikenal dengan tarekat, di Indonesia<br />paska jatuhnya kekuasaan Presidean Soeharto pada 1998. Darul Arkam<br />sendiri merupakan organisasi komunitas Muslim urban yang muncul pertama<br />kali di Malaysia. Bagaimana pemimpin Darul Arkam memahami ajaran Islam<br />dalam situasi sosial-politik yang tengah berubah di Indonesia dan bagaimana<br />mereka menggabungkan antara aktifitas keagamaan dan ekonomi akan menjadi<br />pembahasan pokok tulisan ini, selain respon mereka terhadap isu-isu yang<br />berkembang di era reformasi.</p><p> </p>

Shaping Shiʿa Identities in Contemporary Indonesia between Local Tradition and Foreign Orthodoxy

This article reflects on the impact of transnational flows of students, pilgrims, and literature from Iran to Indonesia on the shaping of Shiʿa Islam in Indonesia since 1979, with a focus on the post-Suharto era (1998–2012) and the performance of ʿ Āshūrāʾ commemorative rituals. Since the early days of its Islamization, Southeast Asia has featured several literary and ritual practices rooted in a combination of Islamic and local traditions; most notable are those expressing patterns of pre-sectarian devotion towards the ahl al-bayt – drawing a parallel with Marshall Hodgson’s framework of ʿAlid piety (1955). Based on ethnographic and archival research, the author suggests that in the decades following the Iranian revolution some of these practices were abandoned in favour of a paradigm of devotion promoted by the Islamic Republic of Iran. The polarization of practices, and the relationship between organizations representative of these two approaches, is illustrated through an analysis of the performative means used to represent the tragedy of Karbala during ʿĀshūrāʾ events in Bandung, Bengkulu (West Sumatra), and Jakarta in 2011. In Bandung the play “Tragedi Karbala” was performed by a Sundanese theatrical group staging a local text; in Bengkulu the traditional Festival Tabot took place following a pattern determined by the Indonesian Ministry of Education and Culture in the early 1970s but now under the sponsorship of the Iranian Embassy; the Jakarta event featured a taʿziya troupe brought from Iran by the Embassy’s cultural office.

From Patronage Machine to Partisan Melee: Subnational Corruption and the Evolution of the Indonesian Party System

The party system in Indonesia has expanded in the post-Suharto era. With each successive election, voters have spread their support across a wider array of parties. This has occurred despite deliberate institutional tweaks designed to consolidate the system by privileging large parties. Why has the party system expanded despite increasing institutional incentives to consolidate? This article places party system change in a broader context of decentralization and corruption. The decentralization and deconcentration of political power has opened multiple avenues for voters and elites to access state resources. Whereas major parties were expected to dominate resources in the immediate aftermath of the transition, changes to the formal and informal institutions eroded their control over the state. This has caused previously consolidated subnational party systems to fracture. The argument is demonstrated using narrative and newly constructed cross-district datasets. The paper develops the concept of rent opportunities, defined as the ability to access and abuse state resources. Party system expansion has been greatest in areas with high rent opportunities, where both voters and elites are particularly motivated by the competition for state resources. In these areas, characterized by large state sectors, the formerly authoritarian party (Golkar) initially won large electoral victories due, in part, to its control over patronage. As Golkar lost its ability to monopolize resources, the party system fractured. Voting for small parties surged and the party machine was replaced by a partisan melee. My argument exposes the limits of institutional engineering and underlines the formative role corruption has had on the evolution of Indonesia’s party system.

HUI YEW-FOONG. Strangers at Home: History and Subjectivity among the Chinese Communities of West Kalimantan, Indonesia. Leiden: Koninklijke Brill NV, 2011, xvi+342p.

Strangers at Home: History and Subjectivity among the Chinese Communities of West Kalimantan, Indonesia HUI YEW-FOONG Leiden: Koninklijke Brill NV, 2011, xvi+342p.Hui Yew-Foong has written a highly nuanced ethnographic monograph on how the Chinese of West Kalimantan, Indonesia, negotiate their stranger-subjectivity with their host locale. author begins with a two-chapter section, Looking for in a Foreign Land, by performing a dual- task: reconstructing the of the Chinese community in West Kalimantan during the Japanese Occupation (1942-45) and the Sukarno years (1945-65) in light of the emergence of post-Suharto era local Chinese historical narratives, while at the same time deconstructing the narrativity of these recent Chinese histories.Chapter two reconstructs the of a hitherto unnoticed (e.g. in Heidhues 2003) anti- Japanese underground organization, the West Borneo Anti-Japanese Alliance (??????? ?), an organization that has a big place in the aforementioned post-Suharto historical narratives. Alliance was organized by a group of progressive Chinese sojourners in the region, and they carried out low-level tactical resistance during the Occupation. Alliance's leaders were exe- cuted together with, according to one estimate, some 3,000 other community leaders, half of whom were Chinese, on trumped up charges of conspiring to overthrow the Japanese (p.55). Hui argues that although their tactical resistance meant little to overall wartime strategy, and probably had direct connection with the alleged plot leading to the Japanese massacre, framing . . . [their resis- tance] in close proximity to the force of death during the Occupation dissimulates the helplessness of the Chinese communities (p. 63). This serves as an important signpost for the narrators' memory of subsequent events in the post-war years.Chapter three examines the histories of the struggle between the pro-Guomindang (Republic of China, ROC) and pro-Chinese Communist (People's Republic of China, PRC) factions of the Chinese community between 1945 and 1965. As most ethnic Chinese remained Chinese citizens in the early Indonesian years, intra-communal politics continued to be divided along Chinese polit- ical lines. But what remains to be explained is the overwhelming support for the PRC during the 1950s and 1960s. According to an Indonesian survey in 1957, some 25,125 (72%) students went to pro-PRC schools while 9,792 (28%) attended Catholic or pro-ROC schools (p. 84). Hui argues that the memory of anti-Japanese resistance and the common experience of the massacre led the Chinese to shed their previous dialect-group divisions, and to throw in their lot with the newly established PRC. Examining the popular progressive plays and songs from the period, he finds that they have no resonance with the everyday lives of the Chinese in West Kalimantan who sang them, but they nevertheless resonate within the imagination of the singers (p. 97). This reso- nance, argues Hui, stems from the convergence of two desires-identification with the idiom of origin, and identification with the force of history (p. 105).Chapter four, The New (Dis)order: Making Strangers at Home looks into the Narratives of Violence surrounding the memories of the Suharto regime's mass expulsion of the Chinese from the West Kalimantan countryside in 1967. From October to December 1967, in a bid to flush out communist guerillas in the region, the military instigated local Dayaks to evict between 50,000 and 117,000 rural Chinese to the cities. Between a few hundred to two to three thousand were estimated to have been killed in the process (p.131). Hui's is the first academic account to critically examine the Chinese experience of the event (see also Davidson 2008). Corroborating Davidson's findings that the Dayaks were instigated to issue eviction orders first, and kill where the Chinese failed to comply, Chapter four uses personal interviews and narratives published in the post-Suharto Chinese press to confirm that the Chinese were indeed given a day to a week's notice to leave their homes before the massacring bands arrived. …

State disintegration and power politics in post-Suharto Indonesia

This article illustrates how discourses on ‘state fragility’ have been instrumentalised by the Indonesian military in order to consolidate its political and economic power after the fall of Suharto. In the wake of Indonesia’s transition to democracy violent conflicts escalated in East Timor, Aceh, Papua, the Moluccas and Sulawesi. Most notably East Timor’s successful secession spawned fears over the potential ‘balkanisation’ of Indonesia. In this context the Indonesian military, which had been shunned for its involvement in Suharto’s New Order, managed to re-establish itself as the ‘guardian of the nation’. Based on fieldwork in Indonesia, the article describes how post-9/11 discourses over a potential break-up of Indonesia were used by the Indonesian military to reconsolidate its power in the post-Suharto era. The research findings illustrate that, against the looming threat of state disintegration, attempts to revoke the military’s prerogatives have either failed or have been aborted during the planning stages.

Book Review: Yumi Kitamura, Re-Creating Culture of Chinese Indonesians in the Post-Suharto Era (in Japanese)

Book Review: Yumi Kitamura, <i>Re-Creating Culture of Chinese Indonesians in the Post-Suharto Era</i> (in Japanese)

SONJA VAN WICHELEN. Religion, Politics and Gender in Indonesia: Disputing the Muslim Body. New York: Routledge, 2010, xxvi+154p.

Religion, Politics and Gender in Indonesia: Disputing the Body SONJA VAN WICHELEN New York: Routledge, 2010, xxvi+154p.Democratization and are the two most important developments that are shaping and influencing the socio-political landscape of Post-Suharto Indonesia. As the biggest majority country in the world, Indonesia is considered by many to have undergone a successful transition from authoritarian to democratic governance despite some limitations. A new democratic process has also witnessed the growth of Islam in Indonesia. It is generally understood that contemporary Indonesian Islam in the post-Suharto era has shown a decline in political Islam (as indicated by the weakening of Islamic political parties). However, to borrow a term, Islamization is showing signs of progression (Ota et al. 2010, 5). This is clearly indicated by an increase in the publication of Islamic books, the popularity of veiling, a lively discussion of women's rights, the emergence of a new generation of Islamic preachers, the growing attention accorded to the Islamic banking system, and the commodification of Islam.This book was written in the context of the progressively changing democratization and Islamization, in which Islam has gradually moved to the center stage of Indonesian society and shaped its sphere. Sonja van Wichelen notes how these two important developments, along with globalization (pp. xiii-xv), have enabled vibrant debates on social-cultural issues, Islam, gender, and politics to flourish and subsequently involve various actors with different ideologies. This book originated from a PhD thesis submitted to the Amsterdam School for Social Science Research (ASSR), the Netherlands, and builds on the author's criticism of the current state of scholarship on Islam and democracy, which she believes has mainly dealt with a debate on the compatibility of Islam with liberal democracy. Sonja tries to go beyond the classical debate. By using gender politics as a tool of analysis, she investigates how Muslims are making Islam compatible with democracy and negotiating their religiosity in the sphere and within the nation-state (p. xiii). Although media analysis is the main research method used, she has also gathered data through fieldwork and interviews with more than 60 Muslims and women's organization activists collected over three periods (2003, 2004, 2005) adding up to a total of 12 months, mostly in Java (p. xxiii).Media analysis is an important research method in this book. Sonja presents an empirical analysis of debates on Islam and gender, focusing on four cases in post-Suharto Indonesia (all mass-mediated through print and electronic media). These were the female presidency, the manifestation of new veiling practices, the pro-polygamy campaign, and the contestation over sexualities. Discourse analysis encompasses three analytical levels, namely, representation, discursive context, and social practices. These are used in this book to understand and analyze the four cases (p. xxiv). Throughout the six chapters, the book develops the argument that public debates on Islam and gender in contemporary Indonesia only partially concern religion and more often refer to shifting moral conceptions of the masculine and feminine body in its intersections with new class dynamics, national identity and global consumerism (p. xv).While the book presents interesting facts on, and assessments of, the debates on gender and Islam in contemporary Indonesia, it would have been better if the author had also addressed the following points. First, in delineating the context of the study in Chapter 1's democratization Muslim Politics and Democratization, it would have been more useful if the author had clearly and thoroughly mentioned some fundamental socio-political features earlier on in the book. For example, the book did not adequately address the phenomenon of the growing practice of veiling among female high school and university student followers of the Tarbiyah (education) movement as an example of the explicit impact of Tarbiyah movement that emerged on university campuses since 1970s (p. …

Transformation of Indonesia’s Foreign Policy in the Post-Suharto Era

Transformation of Indonesia’s Foreign Policy in the Post-Suharto Era

ポスト・スハルト期インドネシアのリベラル・イスラームの展開(第三部会,研究報告,第七十一回学術大会)

ポスト・スハルト期インドネシアのリベラル・イスラームの展開(第三部会,研究報告,第七十一回学術大会)

The Parman Economy: Post-Authoritarian Shifts in the Off-Budget Economy of Indonesia’s Security Institutions

More than an alternative source of revenue, ABRI’s (Angkatan Bersenjata Republik Indonesia, Indonesian National Armed Forces) off-budget economy was an index of the army’s political clout. Those Indonesians who owned and controlled capital, principally the politically vulnerable ethnic Chinese, rushed to form joint enterprises with military generals during the New Order to “secure” their businesses. These enterprises formed the backbone of a vast off-budget economy, ostensibly justified as an alternative revenue source in the face of state budget deficiencies. In the post-Suharto era, there has been a shift in power, and the police have emerged as the principle providers of “security.” This article examines the police’s off-budget economy and looks at the questions raised by persistent police budgetary shortfalls to chart the emergent dynamics between Indonesian capital and security forces, identified here as the “parman economy.”

Still the Natural Government Party? Challenges and Opportunities for Golkar Ahead of the 2014 Election

After decades of hegemonic rule during the New Order, the Golkar Party entered the post-Suharto era with the self-perception of being a natural part of the government. Two relatively successful elections in 1999 and 2004 reinforced this perception among the party faithful, but the disappointing results of the 2009 election have demonstrated that Golkar now faces serious challenges if it wants to retain its strong position in the Indonesian party system. This article assesses some of these challenges against the background of ongoing institutional reform in Indonesia, contentious personal ambitions of key political actors and wide-ranging socio-political transformations in the Indonesian electorate. Particular attention is paid to Golkar's linkages with society, its organizational development and its functions within the broader political system. It is argued that Golkar's main challenges lie in its difficulties in attracting new members and supporters, its eroding institutional infrastructure and its limited capacity to articulate societal interests and fulfil other basic democratic functions. However, the article concludes by emphasizing that Golkar has a genuine chance of regaining some of the ground lost in recent years if it tackles at least some of the challenges outlined.

Housing the Margin: Perumahan Rakyat and the Future Urban Form of Jakarta

Housing the Margin:Perumahan Rakyat and the Future Urban Form of Jakarta Abidin Kusno1 (bio) On May 19, 2009, Minister of Housing M. Yusuf As'yari (2004-09) hosted the second National Congress of Housing and Settlement (Kongres Nasional Perumahan Rakyat II) at the Hotel Bidakara, Jakarta.2 Attended by some fifteen hundred people from various parts of Indonesia, the Second Congress is considered a milestone in the history of Indonesian housing and promised "a new era" for Indonesian housing and settlement.3 While looking ahead, the Second Congress also made a connection with the very first congress on housing, which was held more than half a century earlier, in 1950, when the newly independent country was feeling its way through decolonization and trying to provide housing for its population, the rakyat. The 2009 congress closed with a declaration that: [End Page 23] We, participants of the National Congress of Housing and Settlement II, 2009, are heirs of the 1950 Congress of People's Housing, which declared housing as the responsibility of the state. We feel responsible to implement the 1945 Constitution (Undang Undang Dasar, UUD 45) and the Human Rights Law (Undang Undang tentang HAM), which declare that everyone has the right to live well, materially and spiritually, and to settle in a house with a good and healthy environment.4 The official publication of the Ministry of Housing, Inforum, also started its report on the 2009 Congress with a quotation from Mohammad Hatta, the first vice president of Indonesia, who opened the 1950 Congress on Healthy Housing for People (Kongres Perumahan Rakjat Sehat), where the term perumahan rakyat (people's housing) was perhaps first coined by the newly independent state. "Indeed, our goal [to provide housing for everyone] won't be realized in two years. It won't be fully completed in ten or twenty years. However, in forty years or in half a century, we will be able to fulfill our wish, if we are committed and make the effort with confidence."5 The optimism demonstrated in 1950 to provide housing for everyone within fifty years inspired those attending the 2009 Congress to keep the housing mission going. The symbolic reference to the early years of independence by participants in the 2009 Congress seems to turn a blind eye on Suharto's New Order regime (1966-98), during which era a series of national workshops (known as lokakarya nasional) on housing were periodically held. By evoking the notion of kongres (rather than lokakarya), the 2009 meeting set up an identity of its own, one that reconnects its mission to that of the 1950s, while dissociating itself from the housing policy of the New Order.6 The break with the recent past seems ironic, for most of the order of things today could be said to have been already shaped during the Suharto years. The claim to have initiated a new era may be ironic, but it is not entirely bogus. The post-Suharto era is, indeed, different from what preceded it. The notion of rakyat, at least, is easily mobilized today to fashion the new era, so, with the 2009 Congress, one might imagine a shift in the strategy to provide housing for the poor. Several new initiatives, indeed, were proclaimed by the Second Congress, some of which are clearly a departure from those of the New Order. For instance, housing is now considered a human right, rather than simply a human need for shelter, as was assumed by the New Order.7 Oswar Mungkasa, from the National Planning Board [End Page 24] (Badan Perencanaan dan Pembangunan Nasional-Bappenas), explains in his contribution to Inforum that the UUD 1945 already contained the principle of a right to housing for everyone, but it needs to be more specific in its formulation.8 According to Mungkasa, the meaning of hak rumah tinggal (the right to live in a house) as stipulated in the 1945 constitution can be extended to give a sense of hak perumahan (the right to housing). Such broadening of the meaning would allow Indonesia to conform to chapter 11 of the UN's International Covenant on Economic and Social Rights, which defines the right to...

Cosmopolitan Muslim Intellectuals and the Mediation of Cultural Islam in Indonesia

Carool Kersten’s article describes how Indonesia plays a key role in connecting East and Southeast Asia with the Middle East and the rest of the world. Aside from progress in scholarly research on the historicity of these relations, Kersten analyzes contemporary developments. As the largest Muslim nation in the world, Indonesia has positioned itself in the vanguard of ASEAN as the main architect of the region’s relations with other parts of Asia, the Islamic world and the West, while simultaneously avoiding overtly political Islamic agendas, relying instead on a notion of ‘cultural’ or 'civil Islam.' This article discusses the alternative discourse of civil or cultural Islam developed by a cosmopolitan Indonesian Muslim intelligentsia who was given a space by the consecutive regimes following the ousting of Sukarno. Kersten identifies this uniquely Indonesian Islamic discourse as the outcome of the compounded efforts of three generations of Muslim intellectuals, loyal to the Pancasila ideology and embracing the slogan ‘Islam Yes! Islamic Party: No!’ In defiance of the growing antagonism following the re-emergence of Islamic political parties in the post-Suharto era, also the youngest generation of ‘liberal’ and ‘post-traditional’ Muslims continue to give shape to this cosmopolitan Islam.

Private Law and Public Power: Tangled Threads in Indonesian Land Regulation

Adat terminologies and concepts have thus re-emerged significantly in the post-Suharto era. Yet, it is quite clear that these terms now operate in a dramatically different social and political setting from earlier colonial contexts. At the end of the New Order period, over 200 million Indonesians competed for land and natural resources in the shadow of a corrupt developmentalist State, not a van Vollenhovenesque environment of autonomous communities and localised adat. Moreover, after 1999 - when much of the wild re-claiming of land was justified on the basis of - the adat asserted by claimants and activists was certainly not the same as that described by van Vollenhoven in his Adatrechtbundels (45 volumes) and Pandechten van het Adatrecht (10 volumes). As a number of studies have noted, this new adat movement in reformasi Indonesia is not so much a detailed classificatory scheme for discerning organic private law rules, but a broad and unruly vehicle for regionalism, ethnicity, elitism and localised manoeuvering over access to land and natural resources (Acciaioli 2002; 2005; Davidson 2005; Klinken 2005; Li 2003; 2005; McCarthy 2004).How are these changes to be analysed? How should lawyers deconstruct and adapt their own analytical frameworks so as to understand both the past and present, and accommodate the future of Indonesian law reform? What new concepts and languages are required to understand and improve the current wave of Indonesian legal reform? This chapter discusses these questions through an account of the three historical phases of land and natural resource regulation in Indonesia. Particular emphasis is placed on themes of continuity and change in the current phase. The primary argument is that while many issues and concepts remain the same, including fundamental uncertainty as to the relationship between public power and private law, dramatic changes in social and political conditions have created new pluralist structures that significantly challenge existing analytical frameworks.

The middle class and morality politics in the envisioning of the nation in post-Suharto Indonesia

The essay examines the growth of politics of morality in post-Suharto Indonesia by linking it to the genealogy and characteristics of the Indonesian middle class, especially during the New Order period, without reducing the issue to primordialism or Islamic revivalism. Instead, it tries to address the issue by looking into the internal contradiction of the Indonesian middle class, whose identity and definition remain murky and muddled. A survey of some key thoughts proposed by several leading scholars regarding Indonesian national culture, nationalism, and middle class is offered in order to better understand the link between the middle class and its vision of national culture, and how morality politics emerges as a new, dominant factor in the formation of such a vision. This essay focuses on the development that has taken place during the post-Suharto era, which began with the Reformasi in 1998 that witnessed the demise of the New Order's domination, and how various elements of the middle class reacted in different ways to social and cultural issues emerging in post-Suharto Indonesia, revealing the complexity and heterogeneity in the moral and political views of the group.

Runaway city: Jakarta Bay, the pioneer and the last frontier

This essay deals with the theme of city and nation by looking at the recent history of city branding and the mega waterfront project on the north coast of Jakarta. It offers a political geography of Jakarta and teases out the environmental exhaustion of the city and the critique of ecological movements, which begin to constitute a new stage in environmental consciousness for the post-Suharto era.

Styling the Revolution

This article explores the changes to urban political culture in Jakarta, Indonesia, from 1998 to the present. By tracing the contributions of youth activists, and middle-class university students in particular, to the production of the street as a political and public space, the author demonstrates to what extent the democratized post-Suharto era naturalizes the place of youth in nationalist politics. Central to this inquiry of youth identity formation is the elision of class and gender as analytical categories. Student movements in 1998 and after have relied on a specific masculine style that draws on both the authenticity of nationalist historical narratives and the street as the domain of the People, and in the process masks potentially contentious class and gender differences among progressive activists.

Talk of Corruption in Eastern Indonesian Communities: Reactions to Local Government in the Post-Suharto Reform Era

AbstractEastern Indonesia, most notably Nusa Tenggara Timor province, has been frequently referred to as the poorest region in Indonesia and claims have recently been made that it is the most corrupt as well. The spread of corruption in the post-Suharto period, with the introduction of regional autonomy and decentralisation, has often been commented on; but what is corruption? How do people define it? This paper uses an anthropological lens on corruption to suggest that with the spread of ideas of ‘good governance’ and ‘democracy’, one significant way that local communities in NTT province engage with the state and define corruption is as an abuse of power and non-consultation with the populace. This has become particularly acute with the government belief that new investment opportunities in the reform era will become a road to development and prosperity for local communities, who are, however, seen to be unable to provide for themselves or seek their own ways out of poverty. Several regional governments in NTT province have taken advantage of new laws put into effect in the reform era to award mining concessions to domestic and foreign mining companies. A swell of protest has arisen across the province, however, and an increasing critique of poor government and corrupt practices focuses on these mining contracts.

Introduction Eastern Indonesia under Reform: The Global, the National and the Local

AbstractThe boundaries of what has constituted “Eastern Indonesia” have shifted depending on the historical, cultural, political, or economic context. We review various ways that Eastern Indonesia has been understood, to overview the different ways of delineating and approaching this fascinating part of Indonesia in order to introduce this special issue. The intention of this special issue, however, is not to attempt to clearly define Eastern Indonesia once and for all, but to open up via these various historical and contemporary concerns with Eastern Indonesia, new ways of grappling with this region in the present Post-Suharto era. The current social and political transformations offer a great deal of opportunity to reflect on the way global and national flows of people, money, notions of governance and religious ideas, are so crucial to understanding and making sense of the current dynamics in the region. By focusing our attention on how these global and national influences intersect with the local, we want to bring out how they are appropriated and manipulated by local communities; at the same time they may undermine and transform what is taking place at the local level.

Expressing Islam: Religious Life and Politics in Indonesia * Edited by GREG FEALY and SALLY WHITE

Muslim culture and politics in Indonesia have always been diverse. In the 1950s and early 1960s, the country endured armed Islamist revolts, while also nurturing the rise of the largest communist party in the non-communist world (destroyed in the bloodshed of 1965–6). In the 1980s and 1990s, the leaders of the country’s largest mass-based Muslim organizations, the Muhammadiyah (25 million supporters) and the Nahdlatul Ulama (35 million), supported efforts to bring about a transition from President Suharto’s authoritarian rule. In the years since Suharto’s ouster in May 1998, the results of three rounds of parliamentary elections have been remarkable for their centre-of-the-road moderation. During the first five years of the post-Suharto transition, however, the country was also racked by terrorist bombings, Muslim–Christian violence, and Islamist vigilantism. These incidents led many foreign observers to wonder whether Indonesia was about to relinquish its reputation as a centre for Islamic moderation. It was against this backdrop that the contributors to this volume came together at the Australian National University (ANU) in September 2007 to examine the ‘myriad ways in which Islam impacts on daily life in Indonesia’ (p. xi). Since the early 1980s, the ANU has held an annual Indonesia Update conference, bringing together scholars from diverse disciplines to review some aspect of Indonesian development over the prior year. The focus on Islam at the 2007 meeting created a setting for the largest conference on Islam in Indonesia since the fall of Suharto. As the editors explain in their introduction, the conference aimed to go beyond the security concerns of journalistic accounts of Indonesia and highlight the diversity of Islam in the post-Suharto era.