2018 Indonesia Study Group
21 December. Greg Fealy (ANU). Apocalypticism, radicalisation and jihadism: Exploring the impact of ‘End of world’ discourses on Indonesian Islamism
When two pro-ISIS families launched suicide bombings on Surabaya churches and police facilities in May 2018, killing 28 people, they were not primarily driven by a desire to support the faltering Islamic State in Syria and Iraq or fellow jihadists who had recently rioted in a police detention centre in Jakarta. They had come to believe that the world would soon end when a meteor crashed into the planet, blanketing the earth in a ruinous cloud of smoke. This calamity would precipitate the descent to earth of the Mahdi (Saviour) who would defeat Islam’s foes, leading to the Day of Judgement. The jihadist families were convinced that if they didn’t act quickly, events would overtake them and their chance of going to heaven would be lost. This seminar surveyed Indonesia’s apocalyptic discourses and explore the multiple effects this has on Muslim audiences, of which the Surabaya bombings have been by far the most extreme. I was particularly interested in how End Time narratives can both comfort but also deeply unsettle their devotees, in the worst cases creating a sense of fractured reality and time compression, like an accelerating metronome, impelling them into violent actions.
Greg Fealy is Head of the Department of Political and Social Change, ANU. He gained his PhD from Monash University in 1998 with a study of the history of Nahdlatul Ulama. He is the co-author of Joining the Caravan? The Middle East, Islamism and Indonesia, Radical Islam and Terrorism in Indonesia and Zealous Democrats: Islamism and Democracy in Egypt, Indonesia and Turkey. He is also co-editor of Soeharto’s New Order and it’s Legacy, Expressing Islam: Religious Life and Politics in Indonesia, Voices of Islam in Southeast Asia: A Contemporary Sourcebook.
11 December. Adhy Aman (International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance), Hasyim Asyari (General Elections Commission of Indonesia - KPU) & Fritz Siregar (Elections Supervisory Agency - Bawaslu). The road to Indonesia’s 2019 legislative and presidential elections
On 17 April 2019, Indonesia will hold simultaneous elections for the presidency, legislatures at the national, provincial and district levels, and also the Regional Representative Council (DPD). These will be the most complex elections in the nation’s history. It will be the first time that presidential and legislative elections are held at the same time and the likely impact of parallel campaigning is much debated among scholars. Similarly, the role of social media, the use of religious and ethnic sentiment, as well as economic growth and inequality, are likely to feature prominently in the long campaign. In this seminar, two pivotal officials in organising and monitoring the elections, as well as a leading observer and advisor on electoral developments in Indonesia presented on the preparations for and challenges of the elections, and also discussed regulatory reforms.
The panel comprised:
Adhy Aman, Senior Program Manager International, IDEA
Topic: Diverging political trends affecting voter choice in the build-up to the 2019 presidential and legislative elections in Indonesia
Hasyim Asyari, Indonesian General Elections Commission (KPU) Commissioner
Topic: The role of the Indonesian Elections Commission
Fritz Siregar, Bawaslu (Indonesian Electoral Supervisory Body)
Topic: The important role of Bawaslu in supervising Indonesia’s elections
This was a joint seminar between ANU Indonesia Project and the Department of Political and Social Change.
21 November. Terry Hull (ANU). Institutional renewal and family planning in Indonesia
Once hailed as an unparalleled success story at a time the world struggled with the challenge of rapid population growth, Indonesia’s Family Planning program is now regarded as lethargic, if not dead in the water. A younger generation of administrators is taking a critical look at the efforts to revive New Order style activities in villages and districts. At the peak of the bureaucratic hierarchy new policies and legal interventions have left the organogram with empty boxes and confusing procedures to “bid” for senior appointments. On a report titled “Revitalising the Family Planning Program”, Terry Hull and Henry Mosley outlined some key recommendations on the program that were related to fertility stall, contraceptive prevalence rate stalling, contraceptive mix narrowing and need to integrate BKKBN with MOH in both logistical and service delivery. Evidence that DHS surveys had overstated fertility rates was ignored by bureaucrats who wanted to justify continued high budgets for BKKBN. The fertility rates were actually falling while the proposal to integrate advocacy and services is resisted on all sides.
Terry Hull is an Emeritus Professor at the School of Demography, Research School of Social Sciences, Australian National University. He was President of the Asian Population Association for the period 2013-2015 and from 2015-2018 serves on the APA Council as the Immediate Past President. Since 2001 he has been on the International Steering Committee of the Asia Pacific Conference on Reproductive and Sexual Health and Rights. Before retirement in 2013 he was Professor of Demography in the Australian Demographic and Social Research Institute (ADSRI — now the School of Demography) and Adjunct Professor of the National Centre for Epidemiology and Population Health (NCEPH). In the latter position, he held the JC Caldwell Chair in Population, Health and Development.
31 October. Chris Hoy (ANU). How do Indonesian’s perceptions of inequality shape their support for redistribution? Evidence form a randomised control trial
Using a randomized control trial, we tested whether information about inequality and people’s position in the national income distribution has an effect on their concern about inequality and what they want the government to do about it. Our survey of over 3700 Indonesians showed that there is widespread concern about inequality and support for redistribution. The top three policies respondents would like the President to prioritize to reduce inequality, is creating more jobs, fighting corruption and increasing social protection. Informing people about the level of national inequality tends to increase their concern about inequality, however this rarely changes their support for redistribution. In fact, this information lowered people’s support for social protection and increased their desire for the government to create jobs and boost the minimum wage. Telling people that they are richer than other Indonesians lowers their support for redistribution and increases their desire for taxes to be reduced. Yet when people are told they are poorer than other Indonesians this has no effect.
Chris Hoy is a PhD Candidate in Economics at the Crawford School of Public Policy, Australian National University (ANU). He is also a part-time lecturer and consultant for the World Bank, Asian Development Bank and a number of other organisations. He has worked for over ten years in the international development sector including as a researcher with the Overseas Development Institute (ODI) and an economist for UNICEF Uganda, the Australian Aid Program and the Australian Treasury. Chris hold a Masters of International and Development Economics from Yale University and First Class Honours degree from the University of Sydney.
26 September. Prema-chandra Athukorala (ANU). Joining global production networks: has Indonesia missed the boat?
Breakup of the production processes of an ever-increasing array of products into vertically-separated stages/tasks carried out in several countries (‘global production sharing’) has been the prime mover of the dramatic shift in manufacturing exports from developed to developing countries in recent decades.
The purpose of this seminar was to discuss, from a comparative East Asian perspective, Indonesia’s experience with exploiting opportunities for export-oriented industrialisation created by this phenomenon. It aimed to address, inter alia, the following issues: How Indonesian manufacturing fits into global production sharing compared to China and other emerging East Asian economies? What explains Indonesia’s lacklustre relative performance? Has Indonesia ‘missed the boat’ or is there still room for regaining the lost grounds? What are the implications of the so-called ‘fourth industrialisation revolution’ (‘Industry 4.0’) for this policy debate?
8 August. Hefrizal Handra (Andalas University). Can village funds reduce poverty in Indonesia?
In 2015, the Indonesian Government rolled a new scheme of transfer called ‘Village Fund’, based on the Law 6/2014 (known as the Village Law). The scheme requires the Central Government to allocate funding of at least 10 per cent on top of inter-governmental transfers to provinces and districts. The objective is to help the village governments finance development, community empowerment and other social activities at the regional level. It is expected to reduce infrastructure gaps between rural and urban areas, increase the access of rural population to local services, and finally improve social welfare and reduce poverty in rural areas. Since it involves a big amount of money, this program marked the beginning of what is known as the ‘second wave of fiscal decentralisation’. The fund has increased every year and reached Rp 60 trillion in 2018.
In this paper, I discussed the implementation of this Village Fund program and its impact on social welfare and poverty eradication in rural Indonesia. In particular, I examined (1) the formula of village fund allocation and its distribution by region as well as by districts, (2) how the village fund is actually allocated and utilized, and (3) the extent to which the village fund affects poverty and welfare of rural people.
The findings suggested that the way village funds have been allocated and distributed has so far been ineffective in alleviating poverty in rural areas. Although the BPS data shows that 60 per cent of poor households live in rural areas and 50 per cent of them work in the agriculture sector, I find that increasing the funds to rural areas has no correlation with a reduction in rural poverty. This is likely due to the fact that the funds are mainly directed towards village infrastructure development that may not directly provide access to decent work for poor households in rural areas.
Hefrizal Handra is a senior lecturer at Faculty of Economics, Andalas University, Indonesia.
1 August. Sharyn Graham Davies (Auckland University of Technology). Pretty, pure and pious: policing women in Indonesia
Indonesia’s policewomen were rarely in public (or even police) consciousness prior to 2013. Yet the succeeding five years saw an explosion in visibility. Public furore concerning forced virginity testing of recruits, national debate over permitting women to veil on duty, and social media sites consumed with beauty concomitantly propelled policewomen into the limelight. I drew on these three examples to illustrate how various forms of power are levelled precisely at the borders of a woman’s body, what I framed as bio-borders. I focused on three bio-borders: hymens, veils, and beauty. Drawing on Franck Billé’s work on skin and geopolitical boundaries, I analysed these bio-borders as sites where Indonesia’s neoliberal moral authority is asserted and contested. As an enforcer of state law, a policewoman’s virginity, purity and appearance signifies Indonesia’s moral standing and mandates overt surveillance and control. Policewomen thus undergo intense daily moral labour to conform to expectations. As good moral ephemeral citizens showcasing Indonesia’s public face, policewomen: feel unable to contest forced virginity testing; are empowered to demand the right to wear the veil on duty; and are complicit in accepting (and enjoying) beauty as a recruitment requirement while simultaneously expressing regret that they are judged on appearance.
Sharyn Graham Davies is Associate Professor in the School of Social Sciences and Public Policy at Auckland University of Technology, New Zealand. Sharyn has been researching gender and sexuality for two decades, with a primary focus on Indonesia. Sharyn has published a number of articles and books on this topic including Challenging Gender Norms in Indonesia (Thomson Wadsworth, 2007) and Gender Diversity in Indonesia (Routledge, 2011). Sharyn is also co-editor, with Linda Bennett, of the volume Sex and Sexualities in Contemporary Indonesia (Routledge, 2015). This latter book won both the 2015 Ruth Benedict prize awarded by the American Anthropology Association and the 2017 International Convention of Asian Scholars award. In 2014 Sharyn was Leverhulme Visiting Professor at Cambridge University and in 2017 was Visiting Professor at Peking University. In July 2018 Sharyn was Sabbatical Visitor at Sydney Southeast Asia Centre.
2 July. Chris Manning (ANU). Employment and labour markets in Indonesia: main findings on ADB book, twists under Jokowi and some policy dilemmas
This seminar presented some key findings of a recently published ADB book entitled Indonesia: enhancing productivity through quality jobs, discusses several new developments on these issues under Jokowi, and raised some policy dilemmas in the field. The book investigates both the longstanding challenge of providing better jobs for low productivity workers in agriculture and the informal sector and new challenges to prepare the workforce for new jobs in the digital and increasingly automated economy. Supply side pressures have moderated somewhat while job creation has been steady, despite slow jobs growth in manufacturing since the Asian Financial Crisis. On the bright side, many more educated females are now working in higher productivity jobs in modern services, even though overall participation rates have stalled. Urbanisation is associated with improved wages and a productivity bonus from more education especially in medium sized cities, while the low quality of schooling has some unfortunate implications for improvements in productivity. The labour reforms of 2003-2005 sought to provide better protection for workers than during the Suharto era but some regulations have had the opposite effect. Under Jokowi, the employment record has improved and wages have grown faster but not all workers have benefited, and the outcome of more intensive public investments in skills is uncertain. Policy dilemmas in labour policy relate to separating out economic from social objectives and being transparent on the economic costs and benefits of different interventions, which is a particularly difficult in regard to benefits from long-term investments in human capital.
28 June. Mari Pangestu (ANU Indonesia Project Thee Kian Wie Distinguished Professor and Universitas Indonesia). Indonesia and the technological disruption
20 June. Jessica Melvin (The University of Sydney). The army and the Indonesian genocide: mechanics of mass murder
As Indonesia commemorates twenty years since the fall of the New Order military dictatorship, it is worth remembering that the foundation myth of the regime and the post-New Order state remains stubbornly in place. Not only has there yet to be an historical reckoning of the brutal mass killings that swept the country in 1965-66, there has yet to be an historical reckoning of how the military came to power. The Indonesian genocide files- 3,000 pages of previously classified documents produced by the Indonesian military during the time of the genocide that I discovered during research for The Army and the Indonesian Genocide: Mechanics of Mass Murder- explain, in the military’s own words, how the military initiated and implemented the 1965-66 mass killing as a deliberate national campaign. This presentation examined the orders and chains of command recorded in these documents. It proposed that in order to make a clean break with New Order propaganda is necessary to turn this propaganda on its head.
Jess Melvin is Postdoctoral Associate with the Sydney Southeast Asia Centre at the University of Sydney. She completed her PhD, Mechanics of Mass Murder: How the Indonesian Military Initiated and Implemented the Indonesian Genocide, the Case of Aceh at the University of Melbourne in 2015. She was Rice Faculty Fellow in Southeast Asian Studies and Postdoctoral Associate in Genocide Studies at Yale University in 2016-2017.
13 June. Annie Pohlman (The University of Queensland). Survivor testimonies of torture and mapping incidents of violence during the New Order
Torture remains an endemic crime perpetrated with impunity in Indonesia. This research attempts to map the spread and evolution of torture during the New Order regime (1966–1998) in order to understand how this violence was normalised. The project will map what forms of torture were used, when, and in which contexts across the archipelago and throughout the 33 years of the regime.
To achieve this, the project combines a nested quantitative analysis within a larger qualitative, oral history-based study. The project is based on a large dataset of survivor and witness testimonies and reports about experiences of torture during the regime. Due to the volume of these reports, the qualitative textual content analysis common within oral history-based research was insufficient to analyse the more than 6000 (and growing) cases. In order to trace larger patterns within this dataset, descriptive statistics are used to map the locations and timing of incidents of torture, in order to establish broad patterns of incidents over time.
The research discusses the preliminary findings of these descriptive statistical analyses and reflect on their usefulness to support the textual analysis of these testimonies.
Dr Annie Pohlman is a Senior Lecturer in Indonesian studies in the School of Languages and Cultures, The University of Queensland, St Lucia, Australia. She is author of Women, Sexual Violence and the Indonesian Killings of 1965-1966 (2015) and co-editor of Genocide and Mass Atrocities in Asia (2013) and The Indonesian Genocide of 1965: Causes, Dynamics and Legacies (2018). She is currently completing a co-authored book on mutilation and symbolic violence during the genocides in Indonesia, Rwanda and Bosnia. Her current research programme involves mapping incidents of torture throughout the New Order period (1966–1998) in Indonesia, in order to understand how this violence was normalised.
30 May. Putu Geniki (The University of Oxford). Who really are the poor? Measuring poverty with multiple dimensions
The trend in poverty is a litmus test of the social quality of economic systems; a poverty measure provides a basis to evaluate the effectiveness of welfare policies and acts as a powerful instrument to focus policy makers’ attention on the living conditions of the poor. Discontent with uni-dimensional measures of poverty reflects widespread agreement that poverty is a multifaceted phenomenon, encompassing deprivations along multiple dimensions.
In developing these multidimensional measures, however, there exists substantial debate on how to conceptualize and select the multiple facets of poverty to be included within measurement. Talking of existing multidimensional measures, Ravallion (2012) points toward the arbitrariness in the selection of measure components; Nolan and Whelan (2011) argue that current applications of multidimensional poverty measurement are more often than not ‘rather ad hoc’.
This paper addresses these challenges. It first establishes that poverty is indeed multidimensional and then presents arguments as to which dimensions and indicators should be included within a multidimensional measure and how they should be weighed against each other. Natih will illustrate the application of my proposed method using a Delphi case study of Bogor City, West Java. Compared to existing methods of gathering opinions on multidimensional-poverty-measure components, such as the Focus Group Discussion, anonymity within the Delphi method offers the advantage of preventing professional status and high position from forcing judgments in certain directions.
Results from the exercise confirm that poverty is indeed a multidimensional phenomenon and that the condition of poverty is best described using a ‘dashboard’ measure, which encompasses five dimensions: (1) education, (2) health and safety, (3) asset ownership and employment, (4) environment and adequate living arrangements, and (5) family planning.
Natih discussed the importance of weights assigned to these dimensions. Significant differences were found when comparing components stated as important within the Bogor City Delphi results, with components of existing uni and multidimensional measures. These differences may lead to contrasts in how measures identify both the size and composition of the poor. Natih concluded that the sole use of existing uni- or multidimensional measures without additional consideration of context-specific measures, may lead to potential mismatch and misidentification of the poor; thus hindering the effectiveness of poverty alleviation and targeting policies.
Putu Geniki Lavinia Natih graduated from the Faculty of Economics, University of Indonesia. She has an MPhil in Development Studies from Oxford University and was then in the final stages of her PhD, also at Oxford University.
9 May. Kathryn Robinson (ANU). Can formalisation of Adat Law protect community rights? The case of the Orang Asli Sorowako and the Dongi and the Sorowako Nickel Project
Claims against the widespread dispossession of village lands, which were very common under the New Order, continue to emerge in connection with land extensive investment projects, including infrastructure. The organization AMAN, which emerged as a champion of those dispossessed under the New Order, has had considerable political success under the Jokowi presidency in championing rights in terms of the rubric (masyarakat adat) rights, which has emerged as a translation of the global concept of ‘indigenous rights’ found in international instruments such as the UN Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous peoples. Francesca Merlan (2009) has noted that this “geocultural category” presumes a world collectivity of “indigenous peoples” in contrast to their various “others.
Drawing on the histories of the peoples who regard themselves as the original landowners of the concession area of Sorowako nickel project in South Sulawesi, the presentation asked how well identities framed primarily in terms of this global discourse, and primarily in cultural terms can provide a remedy for adverse dispossession? Further, can the current trend to formalization–through certification of land rights claimed through the idiom of adat/indigenous rights–protect land-based livelihoods? What are the risks to the livelihoods and rights of groups not ‘recognised’ as masyarakat adat/indigenous?
Kathryn Robinson has followed developments in Sorowako from her original doctoral fieldwork in the 1970s until the present (with a current ARC Discovery project investigating long term impacts).
18 April. Anthony Reid (ANU). Djakarta in 1952-53: a moment of nation-building optimism
10 April. Philips J. Vermonte (CSIS). Patterns of political party coalition in the upcoming 2018 regional elections in Indonesia
The upcoming 2018 regional elections is the second leg of the newly-implemented simultaneous regional elections in Indonesia. The first leg took place in 2017 in 101 regional governments including the provincial, district and city levels. The upcoming regional elections includes 171 regional governments ranging from elections for governors, districts heads and mayors.
These elections are seen as the prelude to the 2019 presidential and legislative elections that will also be conducted simultaneously. They are also of electoral importance as they will involve approximately 160 million voters across the regions, only about 30 million voters away from the total number of eligible voters in the 2019 presidential and legislative elections. One of several consequences of the adoption of simultaneous mode of election is that it forces political parties to form a coalition before the elections take place given the election law requires certain threshold to be fulfilled by political parties to nominate their candidates.
The presentation addressed three questions. First, do we see consistent and sustainable patterns in the coalition formation among political parties in the 2018 regional elections? Second, how much of this coalition pattern can be explained by the results of the past 2014 presidential and legislative elections and by their electoral strategies for the 2019 elections? Third, what do they tell us about the nature of party and electoral reforms in Indonesia?
Philips Vermonte is the Executive Director of the Centre for Strategic and International Studies in Jakarta. He received his PhD in Political Science at Northern Illinois University, Dekalb, USA in 2012. Dr Vermonte is an expert in political affairs. His interests include comparative politics, non-traditional security issues in Southeast Asia, Indonesia’s foreign policy and conflict studies.
28 March. Ida Aju P. Resosudarmo (ANU). Reinvigorating Indonesia’s land reform: social forestry and implications for people and forests
One of the Indonesian government’s programs to reduce inequality is land reform. It has set up an ambitious target of redistributing ownership and control over nearly 22 million hectares of land, or equivalent to 12 per cent of the country’s land area, by 2019. Three quarters of this grand scheme is to occur in the Forest Zone (kawasan hutan). Reform consists of two components: redistribution and certification of land ownership, referred to as TORA, and redistribution of access to forest lands, or Social Forestry. The restructuring of control over land, and of forest land, is important as it is not only a source of wealth, but critically, livelihoods for many people. There are 25 thousand villages in and around the kawasan hutan, with an estimated 10 million people living in poverty. The situation is exacerbated by continued dwindling of forest resources, both in quantity and quality. This research focuses on Social Forestry and only limitedly discusses TORA in so far as it concerns the kawasan hutan. It examines the dynamics of Social Forestry and its potential implications for people and forests, with a case study of Central Kalimantan. There are clearly positive elements that give hope to move forward. However, as experienced by other countries undergoing land reform and Indonesia’s track record in previous similar attempts, enormous challenges remain.
7 March. Rainer Heufers (Center for Indonesian Policy Analysis) & Arianto Patunru (ANU). Indonesia’s anachronistic insistence on national food security
The definition of food security was initially based on the notion that a country maintains access to enough food to meet dietary energy requirements. This changed when Amartya Sen showed that in general, food shortages are not a problem of availability but of accessibility for households on lower income levels. The ensuing redefinition of food security progressed from the concept of national food security to that of individual food security. While the international expert community continuously evolved the food security paradigm in the theoretical sphere, Indonesia stuck to the old paradigm as it had become a key component of the political economy. Subsequent governments including the current presidency of Joko Widodo have maintained the political objective of national food security. This has undermined individual food security, which mostly affects the lower-income groups that spend a proportionally higher amount of their income on food. In this seminar we will argue that despite experiences during the world food crisis of 2007/08, when dramatic price increases appeared to legitimize a national self-sufficiency policy, opening up to international food trade would improve Indonesia’s individual food security significantly. We will discuss how the continued and anachronistic insistence on national food security is still the paradigm that dominates the national discourse on food trade in Indonesia. This comes at the expense of individual food security and does critical harm to lower-income households.
Rainer Heufers is the co-founder and Executive Director of the Center for Indonesian Policy Studies (CIPS) in Jakarta.
Arianto Patunru is a member of the ANU Indonesia Project and an advisor to CIPS.
5 March. Solahuddin (Universitas Indonesia; Institute for the Policy Analysis of Conflict). How dangerous are Indonesian ISIS returnees and deportees?
In the aftermath of defeats of ISIS in Syria-Iraq and Marawi, concerns have been raised about fighters and their families, including some 600 Indonesians who were with ISIS in the Middle East, coming back and conducting terror attacks at home.
Indonesia has experience with returnees from overseas training coming home and becoming involved in terrorism. About 42 of the 300 Indonesians who trained on the Afghanistan-Pakistan border from 1985 to 1994 – known as 'Afghan alumni' – became involved in terrorism after their return. About 50 'Moro alumni' who trained in Mindanao became terrorists, as well as at least two 'Kashmir alumni' who trained with Laskar-e-Taiba in 2001. In this seminar, Solahudin assessed the danger of Indonesian returnees from Syria-Iraq and the Philippines.
Solahudin is Research Associate, Center for Terrorism & Social Conflict Studies, Faculty of Psychology, Universitas Indonesia and Co-Director, Institute for the Policy Analysis of Conflict (IPAC). His book on the Indonesian jihadi movement, translated as *The Roots of Terrorism in Indonesia*, is an Indonesian bestseller and has generated widespread discussion in that country among the media, academic and religious communities. He is also a former Secretary General of the Alliance of Independent Journalists (AJI) from 2001 to 2003. His advocacy in cases of violence against journalists includes successfully acting as a mediator in the release of two Belgian journalists held hostage in Papua in 2001. He was also a member of the mediation team that negotiated the release of one of the Indonesian journalists held by the Free Aceh Movement in 2004. In February-March 2018, Solahudin is a Faculty of Arts Indonesia Initiative visitor at the Asia Institute, The University of Melbourne.
21 February. Diego Fossati (Griffith University). Anti-Sinicism and support for foreign investment in Indonesia
According to many observers of Indonesian politics and society, anti-Chinese sentiments are on the rise. While the scholarly literature on the subject is extensive, we lack accurate data on the extent of anti-Sinicism in the Indonesian mass public and its variation across various population segments. Furthermore, our knowledge of the implications of anti-Chinese prejudice for how people conceptualise and evaluate public policy is limited. In this presentation, I addressed these open questions by leveraging on a national survey commissioned by ISEAS-Yusof Ishak Institute. I started by presenting a novel approach to measuring anti-Chinese prejudice in public opinion, which found overall high levels of prejudice toward this ethnic minority. I then analysed how such prejudice is associated with sociodemographic variables and various attitudinal factors, such as preferences over the role of Islam in public affairs and support for democracy. In the second part of the talk, I presented results from a survey experiment designed to measure the effect of anti-Sinicism on policy preferences on foreign investment, an area in which Chinese Indonesians have historically played a prominent role. Implications were discussed with reference to current debates on democratic consolidation in Indonesia.
Diego Fossati is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Griffith Asia Institute and the Centre for Governance and Public Policy at Griffith University in Brisbane, Australia, and an Associate Fellow at the ISEAS-Yusof Ishak Institute in Singapore. He works on democratisation, political behavior and development in young democracies, with an empirical focus on Indonesia and Southeast Asia. He was trained in political science at Cornell University, where he completed doctoral studies in 2016. His work has been published in international peer-reviewed journals such as World Development, European Journal of Political Research, Journal of Contemporary Asia, Journal of East Asian Studies, and Contemporary Southeast Asia. He is currently working on a research project investigating how social identities shape policy preferences.
14 February. Ian Coxhead (University of Wisconsin-Madison). Survey of recent developments in Indonesia
This seminar previewed the author’s forthcoming Survey of Recent Developments, with Rashesh Shrestha, in the Bulletin of Indonesian Economic Studies.
Indonesia’s recent resource export boom was unusual in that exports of agricultural products, especially palm oil, played a leading role. Mineral resource booms mainly benefit corporations and government, but gains from an agricultural boom should be more widely dispersed, including farm households and lower-skilled workers. The reality, however, is more nuanced. Household spending rose during the boom but was accompanied by sharply rising inequality and sluggish real wage growth, and there are reasons to doubt that private savings have risen so as to sustain consumption when commodity prices recede. This raises questions about whether the boom will yield substantial and lasting benefits for current and future generations. The capacity to lock in gains depends on factor and product markets whose operation is influenced by policy. Currently healthy global economic conditions present policymakers with an opportunity to take stock and look ahead, with an eye to optimal development policy settings.
7 February. Andrey Damaledo (ANU). Citizens, migrants and the new trans-nationalism among Indonesians in Timor-Leste
The relationship between Indonesia and East Timor changed dramatically in 1999 when a majority of the East Timor population voted to reject the status of Special Autonomy within Indonesia. But since mid-2003 both countries have officially engaged in trade to boost the exchange of goods and services. This engagement has so far been satisfactory with a total trade value of USD217 million in 2015, a significant increase from USD30.69 million in 2006. This paper explores the transnational trade network and its patterns among Indonesians in Timor-Leste. In particular, I discuss the channels by which Indonesians and East Timorese engage one another, including the networks they use to rebuild their relationships and forge new ones following the violent and destructive separation in 1999. I argue that an understanding of such a channels exemplify the case that national boundaries between Indonesia and Timor-Leste are now less fixed and more porous than they first appear, as increasing numbers continue to negotiate their lives and families between two countries.
Andrey Damaledo holds a PhD in Anthropology (ANU, 2016) and is currently completing a monograph on displacement, belonging and citizenship among former East Timorese refugees in West Timor. Andrey was the recipient of the Ann Bates Prize 2017 for the best thesis in Indonesian studies at ANU. This paper is based on new research project on Indonesian migrants in Timor-Leste, funded by the ANU Indonesia Project-SMERU Research Institute Research Grants program. In addition to academic scholarship Andrey has years of experience in the Indonesian public sector. Andrey is a senior social development planner at the Regional Development Planning Agency (BAPPEDA) in Indonesia’s Province of East Nusa Tenggara.