The volume Indonesia at the Crossroads is edited and written by Asian academics and practitioners based in Indonesia, Japan, and South Korea. The authors review Indonesian society, economy, governance, and security of the past 20 years since the 1998 democratization until 2019 just before the COVID-19 pandemic.
The volume is characterized by its attempt to de-westernize scholarly knowledge and perceptions of Indonesia. It examines contemporary Indonesia from Asian perspectives – more precisely Indonesian, Japanese, and Korean perspectives – derived from each country's academic environment surrounding Indonesian studies. The academic environment in Asia is different from that of the West, which has faced “the crisis of Indonesian studies in universities” (p. 4). Western academia is, therefore, required to “show (and claim) their contributions to international audiences in order to maintain funding for Indonesian studies in their universities” (pp. 4–5). In contrast, Indonesia, Japan, and probably South Korea have domestic demand for knowledge of Indonesia and have a certain critical mass of academic and general readerships who have basic knowledge of the country. In Japan, for instance, Indonesia is one of the most important Southeast Asian countries in terms of economics and international relations (p. 5). Asian scholars are thus relatively free to publish books and articles on a variety of topics about Indonesia in their own national language for their domestic readers, and discuss topics in-depth, empirically, practically, and theoretically.
In this Asian context, the volume highlights “the need to advance discussions and various forms of collaboration among researchers of Indonesia” in Asia (p. 6) and seeks to contribute to the development of the study of Indonesia as multi-disciplinary, “not limited to theoretical discussions, and inclusive of practical and mundane issues” (p. 7). It is not an exaggeration to say that the authors’ standpoint in this volume is closer to people's everyday lives in Indonesia rather than theory-oriented mainstream academia.
The volume comprises twelve chapters, discussing wide-ranging topics on Indonesia. Part I on “Governance and Social Dynamics” includes the governance of ethnic diversity (chapter 1), the urban landscape in Yogyakarta (chapter 2), violence against the minority Shia community in Madura (chapter 3), and the post-1998 state's approach to Papua (chapter 4). Part 2 on “Paths to Equality” includes results of the decentralization program in the education sector (chapter 5), poverty in the metropolitan area (chapter 6), agrarian policy and its impact on rural areas (chapter 7), and fiscal policy and infrastructure development (chapter 8). Part 3 on “Structural Challenges” comprises anti-corruption reform and its results (chapter 9), the state's human rights practices (chapter 10), the relationship between the state and private security providers (chapter 11), and the intelligence reform (chapter 12). The authors discuss how democratization and decentralization has “changed the structure of the Indonesian state and affected the daily lives of its citizens, to what extent Indonesia's economy has developed” and “how certain issues continue to exist despite the institutional changes and the relative freedom Indonesians now have” (p. 21).
The editors’ concluding remarks comment that this volume “does not propose a single common view based on a certain theoretical perspective when examining Indonesia's transformation” (p. 394). The first chapter by Thung, however, provides a discussion framework, which many authors in this volume unconsciously share and follow in their own chapters. Thung's chapter discusses the governance of ethnic diversity. In particular, the government adopted Western-rooted principles to underpin its multiculturalism policy, despite its unsuitability for Indonesia's intricate ethnic and religious diversity. Referring to Neumannova (Reference Neumannova2007), she argues that policies for multiculturalism are inclined to “promote the cultural or religious rights of particular groups” (p. 33), which poses a risk of creating divisions among citizens and leads to “the formation of ‘differentiated citizens’” (ibid). She then describes the Indonesia situation where people “must always weigh Javanese majority preferences against non-Javanese minority interests” (p. 50) resulting from the historical dominance of Java and Java-centric (particularly Jakarta-centric) knowledge production – such as educational materials, market strategies, and government policies – in post-independence Indonesia. She underlines the importance of “discarding the political lenses that rigidly set upon majority-minority divisions, and instead, work[ing] toward finding ways to ensure equality of being and becoming diverse Indonesians” (p. 51).
This feature of Java (or Jakarta)-centric knowledge production is also discerned in Indonesian studies, particularly in the social sciences. More researchers and scholars have focused on Java compared to the so-called Outer Islands. In this sense, this volume tries to decentralize/diversify the geographical scope of research in the study of Indonesia. No chapter is allocated for a Jakarta-oriented narrative of national politics and economy. Although some chapters focus on the central government's policy and governance because those policies are made there (chapter 8 on fiscal policy and infrastructure development, chapter 9 on corruption and anti-corruption, and chapter 12 on the intelligence reform), many other chapters focus on local situations out of Jakarta. They include Yogyakarta (chapter 2), Madura (chapter 3), Papua (chapter 4), district-level data of education and regional disparities (chapter 5), a metropolitan area not as a center but a marginalized area (chapter 6), a district-level analysis in rural Java (chapter 7), human rights court cases in various regions (chapter 10), and case studies of Banten, Madura, Bali, and Bandung (chapter 11). In addition, while examining the central government's policies and governance, the ninth and twelfth chapters, respectively, dig into the perspective of NGOs and the Indonesian intelligence community, which provides more diversified viewpoints of actors at the national level.
It may be pointless to discuss the weakness of this volume from a theory-oriented scholarly viewpoint because many chapters attempt to provide an alternate approach to challenge and compensate for some lack of practicality in mainstream academic tendencies and theories, which have been mostly derived from Western experiences and perspectives. Western-rooted scholarly ideas have pervasively dominated all academic fields and, as Thung points out in her chapter, sometimes have adversely affected policy making and policy discourses in non-Western countries.
The reviewer suggests three points the volume could have added to advance their intellectual project of improving the study of Indonesia from Asian perspectives. Firstly, it could further demonstrate the diversity of Indonesians by equally including Asian scholars and practitioners focusing on the Outer Islands such as Sumatra, Sulawesi, Kalimantan, and Eastern Indonesia. The volume succeeded in showing an alternate approach vis-a-vis Jakarta-oriented knowledge production, but is still not out of the ambit of the Java-dominated study of Indonesia. Providing more case studies of areas other than Java could lend more weight to the volume's standpoint.
Secondly, the volume could elucidate the purpose of its intellectual endeavor more clearly by adding an introductory section at the beginning of each part (parts 1, 2 and 3), summarizing a gap in perception between a dominant narrative in academia (or mainstream media and policy discourse in Jakarta) and people's lives on the ground. Readers could then easily identify the role of each chapter in filling this gap by providing diverse, local-oriented empirical research results. Some chapters do provide such introductory parts but confined to their respective individual topics. Having a short introduction in each part could further enhance the coherence of the authors’ approach. This could help each chapter underline the importance of the practicality and suitability for Indonesia's reality in their analyses. Then, the volume may lead some theory-oriented academia, both in Asia and in the West, to reconsider their role and impact on society and people in the region they research.
Lastly, although the target readers of this volume may not be necessary academia, some lack of citation and typographical errors should be improved. Such technical errors may weaken the chapters’ value despite their daring attempt to de-westernize/diversify academic knowledge and perception in the study of Indonesia. Setting this matter aside, the volume represents a new phase for Asian scholars and practitioners, breaking down the communication barriers between Asian and Western-oriented perspectives by publishing in the English language, and finding ways to ensure equality between them in the study of Indonesia.
