I am back in Indonesia for a brief trip to meet with officials at various government and non-government agencies. As part of my first set of meetings, I met with officials from BPS, the Indonesian Central Statistics agency. On several…
Benedict Anderson has written a powerful essay that appears in the current edition of Asia-Pacific Journal entitled “Impunity and Reenactment: Reflections on the 1965 Massacre in Indonesia and its Legacy.” (I learned of it from Jeff Hadler, who just co-organized…
In any theoretical discussion of contemporary Indonesian democracy, the term “oligarchy” occupies a central role. It has been the subject of at least two very fine and influential books, Oligarchy and Reorganising Power. In a new paper (PDF), I contrast pluralism…
From my new essay up at Foreign Policy‘s Democracy Lab. To be sure, new Muslim democracies in Egypt and Tunisia face similar challenges as Indonesia did when it emerged from authoritarianism….but one major difference between Indonesia and its North African counterparts…
The disconnect between academic political science and real-world policy is a topic of some concern in current discussions of the purpose and future of political science. Dan Drezner has insisted that even the most technical political science (or narrowly for…
I wrote several months ago about a long-term project on the colonial origins of local economic governance in Java, and in particular, on the importance of ethnicity and colonial migration. The first substantial output of that project is now available….
I am part of a neat collective discussion of authoritarian legislatures over at Nate Jensen‘s blog. Nate emailed me a couple of weeks ago asking if I knew any good research on legislatures and policy outputs in Malaysia or Indonesia…
Today I had cause to think about a basic question for scholars of contemporary Indonesia. What is the mainstream explanation for policy outcomes in the local level? So, when a regency implements a good policy, or a bad policy, why…
As part of a long term, multi-paper project on decentralization and governance in Indonesia (see e.g. here and here), I am putting together some data on the social structure of colonial Java. I am most interested in colonial migration and…
Yesterday Cornell SEAP series welcomed a visiting scholar from the State University of Papua who presented on food insecurity in Papua on our weekly Brown Bag. The talk was grimly fascinating. Papua and West Papua, the two provinces at the eastern end…
