Aspinall - Patronage and Clientelism

Critical Asian Studies
ISSN: 1467-2715 (Print) 1472-6033 (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rcra20
A NATION IN FRAGMENTS
Edward Aspinall
To cite this article: Edward Aspinall (2013) A NATION IN FRAGMENTS, Critical Asian Studies,
45:1, 27-54, DOI: 10.1080/14672715.2013.758820
To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/14672715.2013.758820
Published online: 28 Jan 2013.
Submit your article to this journal
Article views: 2371
Citing articles: 60 View citing articles
Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at

https://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=rcra20
Critical Asian Studies
45:1 (2013), 27–54
Aspinall / Nation in Fragments
A NATION IN FRAGMENTS
Patronage and Neoliberalism
in Contemporary Indonesia
Edward Aspinall
ABSTRACT: Scholars of Indonesia are still searching for ways to characterize the or-
dering principles of the new post-Suharto politics. In the 1950s and 1960s, Clifford
Geertz’s notion of aliran (stream) politics captured central features of Indonesian
political life. In the 1970s and 1980s, the state took center stage, with scholars see-
ing the New Order state as standing above society, depoliticizing and reordering it.
Since reform began in 1998, these analyses are clearly no longer adequate, but
scholars have yet to find persuasive alternatives. This article offers one attempt to di-
agnose the fundamentals of political organization in contemporary Indonesia. It
starts by emphasizing the organizational fragmentation that characterizes much
contemporary political life. It seeks the origins of this fragmentation in two sources:
the ubiquity of patronage distribution as a means of cementing political affiliations
and the broader neoliberal model of economic, social, and cultural life in which
patronage distribution is increasingly embedded. These two forces are often por-
trayed as being incompatible, but in practice they are frequently intertwined. This
argument is first substantiated by reference to the project (Indonesian: proyek), a
mechanism for distributing economic resources that is pervasive in Indonesia. The
proyek formally adheres to the expectations of transparency and competition asso-
ciated with neoliberalism, but is also a major source of patronage. Proyek-hunting
drives much of the fragmentation in contemporary Indonesian political and social
organization. The argument is then illustrated with examples drawn from four
spheres: state structures, political parties, non-governmental organizations and Is-
lamic politics.
How might we characterize the fundamental ordering principles of contempo-

rary Indonesian politics? This article attempts to do so by emphasizing the
pattern of organizational fragmentation that permeates virtually every sphere of
ISSN 1467-2715 print/1472-6033 online / 01 / 00027–28 ©2013 BCAS, Inc. DOI: 10.1080/14672715.2013.758820
Indonesian political life. From political parties to the world of organized Islam,
from ethnic associations and even sporting federations to the basic structures of
the state, the dominant pattern and trend in contemporary Indonesia is toward
dispersion of political and economic power and competition between rival
bodies that are ideologically similar. I contend here that this sociopolitical for-
mation has its deepest roots in two sources. The first is the continuing
importance of patronage distribution for organizing political life and mediating
class relations in the country. Here, patronage is defined as a material resource
disbursed for particularistic purposes and for political benefit, typically distrib-
uted via clientelist networks, where clientelism is defined as a personalistic
1
relationship of power. Clientelistic networks devoted to the distribution of pa-
tronage have long been central features of Indonesian politics. As we shall see,
the weakening of alternate modes of organizing and imagining political identity,
growing commodification of social life and related cultural changes have
helped to heighten this feature of the political economy and made patronage
the most important glue of political relations in Indonesia.
Second is the neoliberal framework within which those arrangements are
increasingly embedded and according to whose principles state and nongov-
ernmental resources are increasingly allocated. Neoliberalism here is thus
understood not only, or even mostly, as a doctrine, but more as a set of practices.
In its original form, neoliberalism is most fundamentally “a theory of political
economic practices that proposes that human well-being can best be advanced
by liberating individual entrepreneurial freedoms and skills within an institu-
tional framework characterized by strong private property rights, free markets,
2
and free trade.” But as the neoliberal wave, emanating from its northern hemi-
sphere heartland, has swept over the globe over the last three decades, it has
become diluted, hybridized, and even delinked from many of its foundational
theories. Thus, as understood here, neoliberalism is more than a set of ideas
about how to allocate economic resources, it is also “a relatively mundane but
increasingly ubiquitous practice of making economic calculation a universal
standard for the organization, management, and government of human life and
3
conduct.” In this perspective, neoliberalism is as much a cultural phenomenon
as it is a political or economic one.
At one level, clientelism and neoliberalism would appear to be fundamen-
tally opposed, with one based on personalism, the other at least notionally
opposed to it. Observers of Indonesian politics also typically understand these
two underpinning sources of fragmentation as being in conflict: most com-
monly when the neoliberal advocates of marketization, good governance, and
greater transparency present themselves as proposing reforms that will slowly
eradicate corruption and so enhance more efficient delivery of government ser-
vices and rational allocation of resources; but also, as some critics would have it,
when the forces of neopatrimonialism and oligarchy are able to subvert and cor-
1. In using these definitions I am following Hutchcroft 2013.

2. Harvey 2005, 2.
3. Rudnyckyj 2010, 21.
28 Critical Asian Studies 45:1 (2013)
Security guards at the most recent national PDI-P congress, Bali. (Credit: author)
rode from within the institutional reforms promoted by supporters of the

neoliberal project (Vedi Hadiz and Richard Robison describe this as “The Indo-
nesian Paradox”4). Frequently, the relationship between these two forces is seen
as one dominated by the “resistance” of neopatrimonialism to neoliberalism.
Thus, for example, Hadiz and Robison argue forcefully that the predatory inter-
ests nurtured under the Suharto regime were able to “survive and accommodate
collisions with global markets” such that “economic crisis did not enable a deeper
5
and more pervasive neo-liberal victory.” This essay, however, takes such obser-
vations a step further and proposes that neoliberalism and clientelism are
linked and in some senses mutually reinforcing, at least in the effects that they
generate for Indonesian political life. In the new democratic period, both
neoliberalism and clientelism work to strip Indonesian politics of its ideological
trappings and reveal the workings of economic calculation at its core.
One illustration of the way that these two seemingly irreconcilable forces
fuse in the new Indonesian political economy, with consequences for fragmen-
tation, is in the proyek, or project. The proyek is a less obvious feature of
contemporary political life than fragmentation but arguably one that is equally
ubiquitous and consequential. Originating in the developmentalism of the New
Order period and the collaboration with international financial institutions and
4. Hadiz and Robison 2005.

5. Robison and Hadiz 2004, 12; see also Hadiz 2004.
Aspinall / Nation in Fragments 29
development agencies that went with it, the proyek—understood here as refer-
ring to a self-contained, collaborative, and funded activity intended to achieve a
designated end and which is to be attained through at least the formal perfor-
mance of a competitive process—is now a pattern that permeates not only the
bureaucracy but also the wider world of political actors and their organizations
that cluster around the state. The origins of proyek go back at least to the 1970s,
when Indonesia was awash with oil money and the government directed funds
toward various rural development schemes and other activities, parceling them
out as sources of illicit income for those with the right political connections.6
But the formal performance of competition in relation to the disbursement of
proyek, and the penetration of the proyek mode through virtually every sphere
of social and political life, are more recent phenomena. The proyek is now also
nearly ubiquitous among actors located in civil society who purportedly seek to
constrain the state. Wherever you go, in virtually every social sector, it can ap-
pear that everyone—nongovernmental organization (NGO) activists, political
party functionaries, local government bureaucrats, journalists, educators, reli-
gious leaders, and others—is engaged in the endless task of mencari proyek
(looking for projects) or at least being accused of doing so. We also see wider
seepage into language such that virtually anything—certainly, any government
grant, but also any social problem or political controversy—can be “diproyek-
kan”’ or “projectized”: turned into a project and used for the private gain of
7
nimble and inventive political operators. The proyek is both a key mode in the
neoliberal approach to governance, with government bodies and international
agencies dispensing significant parts of their funds in this way, and a central tar-
get of patronage hunters, encouraging competition and factionalization.
In general terms, how do patronage distribution and neoliberalism encour-
age fragmentation? At the most general level, the key link between patronage
and fragmentation is that, where political connections are built not on the basis
of ideological, identity, or like affinities, but on the basis of personalistic ex-
change of political loyalty and material rewards, the possibilities for multiple
patrons and clients to compete for individually beneficial political relationships
are almost endless. A market of patrons and clients can develop in which pa-
trons are ever on the lookout for new opportunities to build their political
support networks, while clients or potential clients are equally focused on find-
ing the most generous patrons available. This fissiparous logic of clientelism
can and usually is contained to some degree by some other factor, such as by
concentration of the key patronage resources in a few institutions controlled by
a limited number of gatekeepers, by overlaying ideological or identity loyalties
that limit and structure the clientelist networks, or by the use of coercion by pa-
trons to fend off rivals or keep clients within the fold. But where patronage
resources are dispersed, ideological or identity frameworks are weak, and de-
mocracy limits patrons’ capacity to order clientelism through coercion,
6. I am thankful to one of the anonymous reviewers of this journal for this point.
7. My thanks to Michele Ford for this point.
clientelism can result in unstable political arrangements.
In Indonesia, we have seen a transition in the direction of such instability,
though it is far from complete. Democracy has exacerbated the fragmentary ef-
fects of clientelism by opening up the marketplace of potential patrons and
enabling them to compete with one another without being constrained by a su-
preme patriarch, as they were under Suharto. But it has also shifted power
relations within patron–client relationships, tipping the balance more in favor
of the clients, or at least those patron/clients and brokers who are located part
way down the patronage distribution pyramids. Such people are now freer to
patron shop: to evaluate and choose leaders to whom they will sell their politi-
cal loyalty for the highest price. An aspiring ethnic political leader in a province,
for example, now has far more such opportunities than he or she did in the past:
Why now subject oneself irrevocably to a particular political party if a rival party
might offer a more promising political connection, post, or payoff? Why remain
loyal to one’s own ethnic association and its leader if the chance arises to estab-
lish a group of one’s own and peddle its wares to the various brokers, tim sukses
(the “success teams” candidates create to organize their electoral campaigns),
political candidates, parties, and bureaucrats who populate the local political
ecology? In this way, clientelism does not eliminate identity politics but perme-
ates, underpins, and, sometimes, crosscuts it.
Neoliberalism has a similar effect of elevating the role of material calculus in
social and political networks. In particular, so far in Indonesia, neoliberalism
has had a multiplying effect on sources of patronage and political authority. To
be clear: Indonesia is far from being a model neoliberal state in the Thatcherite
mold. Neoliberal principles are not implemented in unadulterated form in Indo-
nesia; on the contrary, the state continues to play a large economic role through
various forms of protection and subsidy and through state-owned enterprises.
Indeed, over the last five years or so, as Indonesia has experienced the benefits
of a commodity boom, economic nationalism and statism have been somewhat
8
resurgent. Privatization, too, has had limited effect, with the predominant pat-
tern instead being the opening of sectors that were formerly state monopolies
to competition by private companies: airlines and telecommunications are
good examples. But liberalization has affected large swaths of the economy,
especially in manufacturing and services, with profound effects on social
structure and cultural patterns. The application of neoliberal models of gover-
nance—such as through the means of the proyek—has also unsettled formerly
solid clientelist arrangements by at least partly opening up access to state funds
and distribution of patronage to a wider range of actors by way of at least for-
9
mally open bidding processes. More broadly, and more indirectly, the growing
influence of a neoliberal cultural mode, characterized by the transfer of ideas
about the primacy of markets and competition from economic to social life, has
had similar effects. In the final parts of this article, therefore, I also consider
8. Manning and Purnagunawan 2011, 322.

9. See Van Klinken and Aspinall 2011 for a discussion of this process in the construction sector.
briefly how contemporary cultural changes, including greater individuation,
marketization, and commodification of cultural expression and social ties, are
contributing to fragmentation of political identities and organization.
Past Patterns
Clientelism and distribution of patronage have long been central features of In-
donesian politics and have also long featured in the canonical literature on the
topic. Clientelism has taken markedly different forms, however, and patronage
has been organized and channeled through markedly different political ar-
rangements, in different periods.
The Pillared Clientelism of the 1950s and 1960s. In the first two decades
after independence, Indonesian political life was dominated by a pattern of
“aliran politics,” a term first introduced by Clifford Geertz, who described
aliran in the following way:
An aliran consists of a political party surrounded by a set of voluntary so-
cial organizations formally or informally linked to it. In Java there are only
four such alirans of importance: the PNI, or Nationalists; the PKI, or Com-
munists; the Masjumi, or Modernist Moslem; and the NU (Nahdlatul
Ulama), or Orthodox Moslem. With one or another of these parties as the
nucleus, an aliran is a cluster of nationally based organizations—women’s
clubs, youth groups, religious societies, and so on—sharing a similar ideo-
logical direction or standpoint.… An aliran is more than a mere political
party, certainly more than a mere ideology; it is a comprehensive pattern
10
of social integration.
The aliran pattern of social organization had its roots in the deep politi-
cization of Indonesian society during the revolutionary period and in the logic
of national political competition thereafter. In 1945–49, parties, mass associa-
tions, and militias proliferated. While their overriding aim was to rid Indonesia
of the Dutch, groups were in considerable conflict over how an independent In-
donesia should be constituted; these conflicts led to social revolutions in some
areas, violent conflict between communists and Muslims in the Madiun region
of East Java, and the proclamation of the Darul Islam (House of Islam) revolt. Af-
ter independence was achieved in 1949, the infant republic had to construct a
workable political order, in conditions where many of its impoverished and
war-ravaged citizens had high expectations that merdeka (freedom) would sat-
isfy their widely varied material and other needs. Under parliamentary
democracy (1950–59), electoral competition impelled the parties into fierce
competition to expand their mass organizations. President Sukarno, on the urg-
ing of the army, eventually abolished parliamentary rule. However, during
“Guided Democracy” (1959–65), he presided over an unstable balance be-
tween the warring, mass-based sociopolitical forces, without attempting to
fundamentally alter the political landscape. Mass mobilization and organization
became means for the parties to demonstrate loyalty to Sukarno’s anti-imperial-
10. Geertz 1959, 37.

ist order and secure a place in national government.
More generally, the flourishing of aliran politics stemmed from a failure of
the state. Geertz argued that the colonial and postcolonial state had failed to ef-
fectively penetrate village society. Largely as a result, the aliran acted as the basic
skeleton of social organization at the village level, performing a broad range of
religious, educational, economic, and other integrative functions and organiz-
11
ing the “reconstruction of vigorous village life.” These networks of mass
organizations, each centered on a political party, in many ways substituted for
effective state institutions. Through the aliran-linked organizations, villagers
could arrange loans, secure assistance to harvest their crops or repair their
houses, learn about national and international affairs, participate in or watch
cultural performances and engage in many other useful activities. At the same
time, the aliran clusters of organizations became key means through which po-
litical actors could access the economic resources centered in the state and
distribute them to their supporters. Viewed from the bottom up, the aliran orga-
nizations became a channel for the personalistic mediation of class relations
(though the Communist Party, the PKI, to a large extent stood outside this pat-
12
tern).
The Centralized Clientelism of the New Order. The conflict between the
aliran became so powerful that it erupted in bloody confrontation and the mas-
sacre of 1965–66, though this violence of course also had a strong class
dimension. At this point, the civilian enemies of the Communist Party effectively
ceded political leadership to the military, reflecting increasing consolidation of
the state apparatus and anticipating the political arrangements of subsequent
decades. As all students of Indonesian politics know, the military quickly
brushed aside their erstwhile civilian allies and constructed a system of state
corporatism in which political parties and independent associations were ei-
ther constrained by repression or pushed into state-controlled corporatist
bodies, or both. A period of state building followed. During the New Order pe-
riod, all the important analyses of Indonesian politics agreed that the state was
13
the central actor in political life. This was the era, as Jim Schiller has put it, of
14
the “powerhouse state.” Even the analysts most influenced by Marxism saw the
state not in the light of Marx’s “committee for managing the common affairs of
the whole bourgeoisie,” but as a far more powerful and autonomous actor that
to a large degree shaped the emergence of a capitalist class, rather than the
15
other way round. Scholars in this period wrote from very different philosophi-
cal starting points and often disagreed about the implications of the state’s role
in Indonesia’s economy and society. This diversity of opinion makes their con-
sensus on the centrality of that role all the more remarkable. For a while, it
seemed that the state was the only game in town.
11. Ibid., 37.

12. The preceding two paragraphs are modified from Aspinall 2004, 64–65.
13. See, for example, the otherwise very different approaches taken by Jackson 1978 and Ander-
son 1983.
14. Schiller 1996.
15. The classic statement of this position is Robison 1986.
Of course, the image of the powerhouse state towering over and ordering so-
ciety was, to some degree, always a myth. The state itself was shot through with a
16
mélange of personalistic interests and networks. Patronage distribution re-
mained central to the coherence and resilience of the system, as virtually every
17
analyst of the New Order observed. What was distinctive about the New Order,
however, was that it was a system of centralized clientelism, with patronage dis-
tributed downwards through a pyramidal structure that centered, at its apex, on
18
the presidential palace. The centralized nature of the system was maintained,
ultimately, by the threat of coercion, even if it was of course bolstered by a signif-
icant ideological apparatus and performance legitimation. It was this pattern
that broke down with the collapse of the Suharto regime in 1998.
Contemporary Fragmentation
Amidst all the dramatic political changes that have taken place since 1998, traces
of the old political formations are still visible. Thus, in the new political system,
the resurrected aliran limp on in the form of successor parties (the PDI-P for
PNI, PKB for NU, etc). More broadly, a populist political sensibility inherited
from the 1940s–1960s still pervades national political discourse. The distinct
socioreligious divisions that shaped political life in the first decades after inde-
pendence are still influential, at least in the sense that we can see political
organizations that are more or less Islamic and more or less secular, despite
countervailing trends (the mainstreaming of Islam across the party spectrum,
the erosion of the distinctiveness of an abangan, or syncretist, variant of Java-
nese Islam by several decades of Islamization, and the blurring of the distinction
between the traditionalists and modernists).
Even more significant has been the continuing legacy of the New Order pow-
erhouse state. As so many studies now contend, the institutions of the new
democracy were largely captured by old elites who had been nurtured within
19
the old New Order state and its own highly centralized clientelist structures.
Despite democratization, the state and its functionaries still possess a weight in
the new polity that is much greater even than in many neighboring Southeast
Asian countries. One sign of this is the degree to which in the regions the win-
ners of direct elections for local executive government office are career bureau-
crats (for example, in Michael Buehler’s data on gubernatorial candidates
during 2005–2008, 52 percent were either bureaucrats, former district heads,
or mayors and military/police, while another 18.2 percent were incumbent gov-
20
ernors or deputy governors ) rather than individuals whose sources of political
authority and economic power are located in the private economy or in other
extra-state sources. When businesspeople do win local government positions,
they tend to be from sectors where economic advantage is conferred by
16. See Van Klinken and Barker 2010; Aspinall and van Klinken 2011.
17. One classic text is Crouch 1979.
18. Described by Ross McLeod as Suharto’s “franchise system”: McLeod 2011.
19. The by now classic statement of this position is Robison and Hadiz 2004.
20. Buehler 2010, 275.
personalistic ties with state officials.
Despite these continuing traces of the past, the modes of political organiza-
tion that are now dominant in Indonesia are very different from both the
ordered multi-polarity of the pre-authoritarian period and the unipolarity of the
New Order. A striking feature of Indonesian political life now is its lack of pow-
erful and permanent poles of attraction. Fragmentation is visible virtually
wherever we look. For instance, almost every subset of civil society is character-
ised by atomization: take examples as diverse as the fractious and feuding
organizations of victims of the 1965–66 massacres through to ethnic organiza-
tions in the regions (e.g., in North Sumatra alone there are about thirty-six
associations of Javanese, all claiming authority to speak on behalf of their com-
21
munity). Mass-based peasant organizations sprang up in the aftermath of the
downfall of the New Order, some of them claiming tens of thousands of mem-
bers, but attempts to forge effective national coalitions among them broke
22
down in the face of splintering at the grassroots. The labor movement is
equally fragmented, numbering, within a few years of the democratic transition,
23
“over sixty union federations and three major confederations.” One promi-
nent former labor activist defines the major problems of the labor movement as
being “localism and sectoralism; lots of trade unions are formed at the level of
24
just one city…or at the level of just one factory or company.”
But this atomization is visible beyond civil society, too. For example, the
national government—to say nothing of the lower levels—presents a kalei-
doscopic image, with national ministries divvied up between parties and
milked for the patronage resources they provide and with ministers competing
against each other as much as cooperating. The breakdown of the orderly pa-
tronage relationships of the New Order has also produced internal fracturing
within what are ostensibly Indonesia’s most hierarchical state institutions. Thus
one important ethnographic study of the national police found that, whereas
relations between police officers and the Chinese entrepreneurs who spon-
sored them used to take the form of “a structural alliance in the form of joint
ventures,” they now resemble “a loose, shifting economy aligned around per-
25
sonal relations, departments and positions.”
It is not simply the pattern of fragmentation that is noteworthy, however. On
its own we could perhaps ascribe this pattern merely to the greater pluralism
that develops as society modernizes and democratizes. What is also typical is the
process of recursive splintering by which pluralism emerges: often it is through
first-generation organizations splitting and being succeeded by an ever greater
number of second, third, and subsequent generations, sometimes in condi-
tions of considerable discord, involving demonstrations, rival boards, and
expulsions. Yet perhaps equally remarkable is the ease by which this fractious-
21. Aspinall 2011, 1.

22. Bachriadi 2010.
23. Manning 2008, 5.
24. Interview with Dita Indah Sari, Jakarta, 14 September 2011.
25. Baker 2012, 128.
ness is overlain by a multiplicity of crosscutting ties, such that organizations that
appear to be ideologically worlds apart can cooperate with relative ease in local
executive government election campaigns, local or national parliaments, or in
other contexts, such that Dan Slater, in one important early account of this phe-
nomenon, dubbed Indonesia a “collusive democracy.”26 And, very often, it is
patronage that drives both the splintering and the cooperation: new groups are
formed in order to provide their leaders with greater access to patronage re-
sources, but they work together when opportunities arise to divide up the
patronage pie. We see, in other words, a pattern of increasing complexity, with
the fading of the central organizing pillars of the old aliran pattern and the ab-
sence of a similarly strong identity-based politics to organize the system as a
27
whole and structure the flow of patronage. In contrast to the pillared and cen-
tralized clientelism of the past, Indonesia is now characterized by decentered
clientelism.
Before proceeding, an important caveat is in order. As the previous discus-
sion has made clear, the primary aims of this article are to identify political and
social patterns in contemporary Indonesia and compare them with patterns of
the past. In highlighting discontinuities with the past and features that are char-
acteristic of the current age, I do not mean that contemporary Indonesia is
uniquely fragmented. No doubt much analytical leverage would be gained by
extending the argument and comparing Indonesia with other countries in the
region or further afield. Among neighboring countries, the Philippines, for ex-
ample, is known for its especially fractured politics, with weak parties, local
bossism, and a very diverse and combative civil society. This combination is of-
ten explained by reference, among other factors, to the persistence of an
28
independently powerful, regionally based landowning elite. The legacies of a
relatively strong state apparatus, and of identity-based political cleavages, con-
tinue to provide greater coherence to Indonesian political forms and identities
than in the Philippines, such that although some scholars have identified trends
of “Philippinization” in Indonesia, especially in the party system, such diagno-
29
ses are probably premature. Although, as I argue below, Indonesia’s party
system is becoming more fragmented, the number of effective parties is greater,
and the level of electoral volatility lower, than in most of Southeast and North-
30
east Asia.
On the other hand, the Indonesian condition sketched in this essay is also
different to some post-transitional countries in which populism, electoral au-
thoritarianism, or similar trends have prompted a reconsolidation of political
alignments. For example, Indonesia of the 2010s might resemble, in its degree
of fragmentation, aspects of Thailand in the early and mid 1990s, but it is much
26. Slater 2004, 65; see also Aspinall 2010 (Irony).

27. Ethnic parties often play such a role: both Chandra (2004) and Posner (2005) suggest that stra-
tegic calculations about how to access patronage resources are important motivations when
voters decide to identify with ethnic parties or co-ethnic candidates in India and Africa.
28. See, for example, Hedman and Sidel 2000.
29. See, for example, Ufen 2006.
30. Croissant and Völkel 2012.
The “success team” of a district head having a meal at campaign time, Aceh. (Credit: author)
less similar to that country today where the dominant pattern is not fragmenta-
tion but polarization between the “reds” who support former prime minister
Thaksin Shinawatra, and his opponents who claim the yellow color of the mon-
31
archy. There has long been speculation about the possibility of an author-
itarian-populist reaction to democratization in Indonesia; should such a reac-
tion ever materialize, perhaps some of the fragmentation trends discussed in
this article might be at least partly reversed.
With such caveats in mind, let us now examine a few principal domains of con-
temporary political life in Indonesia, paying attention to the ways by which the
twinned sources of neoliberalism and patronage contribute to fragmentation.
1. State Structure
The most obvious example of fragmentation, and one that has helped drive frag-
mentation in other areas of political life, has of course been Indonesia’s shift
from a highly centralized to a decentralized pattern of managing center–region
relations over the last decade. Decentralization also nicely illustrates the conflu-
ence between neoliberal impulses and patronage that lies at the heart of the
new political order. The impulse for this reform was partly political, in the sense
of it being a response to expressions of regional discontent that erupted during
and immediately after the collapse of the New Order. Most explanations of de-
centralization stress this factor. But decentralization was also an Indonesian
version of a worldwide movement at a time when it was “estimated that 80 per-
cent of developing countries including the transitional economies of Eastern
32
and Central Europe are experimenting with some form of decentralization.”
Much design work and technical assistance was provided by the international
agencies that are everywhere at the cutting edge of the neoliberal project: the
World Bank, International Monetary Fund, U.S. Agency for International Devel-
31. See for example Montesano, Chachavalpongpun, and Chongvilaivan 2012.

32. Work 2002, 9, citing Furtado 2001.
33
opment (USAID), and so on. The underlying rationale was that by delivering
decision-making authority and program delivery to the level of government that
was closest to the end-users (citizens) the allocation of resources and delivery of
services would be more effective and efficient. Moreover, different regions
would be able to compete in creating business-friendly investment climates—
embodied in one-stop shops, e-government initiatives, and the like—that
would generate a virtuous circle of better governance, economic development,
and contented citizens and ensure reelection of local politicians able to deliver
on such goals. Targeted assistance to local civil society, meanwhile, would gen-
erate greater “accountability and voice” and enhance the “demand side” of
improved governance.
Yet, as has been described and argued most consistently and vividly by Vedi
Hadiz, but also by many other scholars, the most immediate and dramatic politi-
cal consequence of decentralization was to encourage an explosion of rent
34
seeking at the local level. Especially in the early phases of decentralization,
there was a phase of near-naked predation in which local businesspeople, bu-
reaucrats, and politicians bought their way into office. District head and
mayoral and gubernatorial positions were more or less openly sold off to the
candidates who could pay the most to the members of local legislatures who
elected them or, slightly later, by the parties that would nominate candidates in
35
local government head direct elections. A gold-rush mentality took over, with
local politicians, bureaucrats, and their allies plundering state budgets, re-
gional assets, and natural resources. Though some of the exuberance of this
period has passed, the patronage-based nature of local politics remains deeply
embedded: in early 2011, the minister of internal affairs reported that seven-
teen of the country’s thirty-three governors had been named by investigators as
36
graft suspects. In some regions forms of bossism and dynastic politics have be-
come institutionalized.
The fragmentary effects on political life of decentralization are so obvious
that they barely require comment. With key political decision-making and con-
trol over a large portion of the government’s budget devolved to the hundreds
of districts, in a stroke Indonesia’s political map became highly varied, with di-
verse configurations of party, organizational and class politics found in locales
across the country. By devolving power to several hundred districts rather than
to the few dozen provinces, decentralization also heightened the political sa-
37
lience of relatively small-scale ethnic and regional identities. Of course, as well
as allowing the flourishing of patronage politics, decentralization has had many
33. For example, Ahmad and Hofman 2000, Ahmad and Mansoor 2002. See also Hadiz 2010 for a
general discussion.
34. See Hadiz 2002, 2004, 2010; also, for example, Buehler 2010 and various chapters in Aspinall
and Fealy 2002 and Van Klinken and Nordholt 2007.
35. Hadiz 2002; Mietzner 2009; Buehler and Tan 2007.
36. “Aceh sampai Papua Tersandera Korupsi,” Kompas, 24 January 2011. On the same occasion the
minister explained: “Today, 155 regional heads became suspects. But I think there will be
more. Every week there is a new suspect. Three months in the office and they become sus-
pects.…” “17 governors are graft suspects,” The Jakarta Post, 17 January 2011.
37. Aspinall 2011.
beneficial effects, including promoting a greater sense of ownership of, and par-
ticipation in, governmental affairs than had been possible previously. The jury is
still out on the long-term consequences for governance and service delivery for
citizens, with evidence of improvement in some regions.38
Perhaps nothing better illustrates the fragmenting effects of decentralization,
however, than the process of pemekaran or “blossoming” that decentralization
39
set in train. When Indonesia democratized, it had 341 districts. By 2010 the fig-
ure stood at 497. Often, the publicly stated rationale for creating a new district
out of an old one is to provide an administrative home for a local ethnic or
sub-ethnic group that lives in a concentrated area and to ameliorate tension
with other groups. Equally frequently the justification is an extension of the
bringing-the-government-to-the-people approach used to argue for decentral-
ization itself, with advocates of pemekaran typically arguing that a smaller
district or province is needed for more effective governance. The underlying
motive, however, is often to provide a slice of patronage resources for the bu-
reaucrats, political bosses, and networks that dominate these areas. A new
district creates seats in a new legislature, a new district budget, new opportuni-
ties to appoint family or friends to civil service positions, and lucrative
construction contracts to build new government buildings. Indeed, sometimes,
pemekaran is driven by a candidate who loses election for political office in one
40
district and so lobbies for a new district carved out of the old one. After a mora-
torium on new districts and provinces expired, one report in March 2011
suggested that the DPR (the national parliament) had received 98 requests for
41
further pemekaran, and the Ministry of Internal Affairs, 155.
2. Political Parties
Overall, over the last dozen years of democratic reform, the major trend in the
party system has been fragmentation. Thus, whereas the two biggest parties in
1999 (then PDI-P and Golkar) between them won 56 percent of the vote and
then 40 percent in 2004, in 2009 the two largest parties (now Partai Demokrat
and Golkar) achieved only 34 percent. In 1999, the five largest parties between
them won 86 percent of the vote; in 2004 they won 66 percent; and in 2009,
only 61 percent. Moreover, at the national level in 2009 a little over 18 percent
of voters chose small parties that failed to meet the new parliamentary thresh-
42
old of 2.5 percent, and which would thus not be represented in the DPR.
The pattern of fragmentation is also visible when we study closely the stories
of the major parties, almost every one of which has experienced major internal
38. Von Luebke 2009.

39. See, for example, Kimura 2007 and Vel 2007.
40. Parts of this paragraph are from Aspinall 2010 (Irony), 27.
41. Kompas, 24 March 2011.
42. Parts of this paragraph are adapted from Aspinall 2010 (Indonesia), 105. The 19 million voters
who voted for parties that did not make the electoral threshold, plus the 17 million votes that
were declared invalid meant that about 22 percent of individuals who cast votes in the legisla-
tive election did not end up with their votes being represented in the DPR: Kompas, 13
November 2009.
strife and splits, with Golkar giving rise to Partai Kesatuan dan Persatuan (and
others); PDI-P (itself the product of a split) to Partai Demokrasi Pembaruan; PPP
to Partai Bintang Reformasi; PKB to rival boards and rival versions of the party;
PAN to Partai Matahari Bangsa. Even if most of these splinter parties did not per-
form well in the polls, with most suffering further internal strife, they all
succeeded in whittling away the support base of their predecessor parties.
Many of the major parties are still loosely organized around a particular ideolog-
ical stance or identity position, but in every case these internal ructions have
been driven by personality conflicts and competition for position and patron-
age, rather than disputes over policy, let alone ideology.
The internal life of parties also attests to the ubiquity of fragmentation, with
most resembling loose federations of cliques, being shot through with clientel-
istic networks (rather than highly organized factions), and (with some
exceptions) being viewed and treated by their members primarily as vehicles for
personal advancement and access to political office and networks of influence.
Golkar itself is perhaps prototypical in this regard, despite it having what is in
some ways a decidedly professional and modern party structure and style. Orga-
nizationally, Golkar is little more than a loosely coherent federation of local
branches, headed by leaders who sell themselves with disarming frankness every
five years to the highest bidder at the party congress. Internecine plotting and
competition within the party is persistent, and those who make trouble most ef-
fectively are just as likely to get rewarded as those who serve the party faithfully.
Golkar is perhaps the extreme example but each party mimics to some degree
43
its reliance on patronage and its pattern of fluid internal factional alignments.
A similar logic gives rise to even greater fragmentation of the political map at
the local level where the parliamentary threshold does not apply. Especially in
rural and remote districts, where the politics of patronage and clientelism are
relatively unchecked and where local notables are the political actors who
count, a prevalent political pattern is “party shopping” by political candidates.
This pattern occurs when a local bureaucrat or businessperson who has a
strong presence in a particular locale or possesses some other mobilizational
advantage (e.g., a clan affiliation, strong bureaucratic network, or simply
enough money to buy his/her way to office), rather than subjecting him/herself
to a number two position in a party dominated by a competitor, will simply
switch party. The result is that in such places the ratio of the number of parties
43. On Golkar, see Tomsa 2006. The two major parties that seem to go against the trend toward
atomization are only qualified exceptions. The PKS (Prosperous Justice Party) has most com-
monly been discussed in this regard because its organizational model as a cadre party based
around a core set of ideas derived from Muslim Brotherhood sources seems to set it apart.
However, the PKS is itself a boutique party that appeals to a limited segment of the population
and is in this regard a sign of fragmentation more than a counter to it. Moreover, PKS in its in-
ternal affairs is increasingly resembling other parties as it adapts to the mainstream, with
growing internal tensions typically concerning corruption scandals. Partai Demokrat is little
more than a loose confederation of local interests in the Golkar pattern, but it has had more co-
herence because of its personalist dependence on President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono. Few
observers put much faith in its programmatic coherence or staying power beyond his term in
office.
represented in a local legislature to the number of seats available in that legisla-
ture is often 1:2 or even lower. For example, in Biak Numfor (Papua) after the
44
2009 elections there are fifteen parties represented in a 25–seat legislature; in
North Nias (North Sumatra) there are sixteen parties in a 25–member legisla-
ture; in Central Aceh the numbers are seventeen and thirty. In such areas,
political fragmentation is almost complete, with local representative bodies
merely representing individual leaders and their networks rather than collec-
tive interests or programs that can be connected to national-level politics.
Yet even if the political parties are at core patronage machines, this is a pat-
tern that is not entirely incompatible with the developing neoliberal mode of
governance and culture. In addition to the ubiquity of patronage, a striking de-
velopment in electoral politics over the last half-decade has been its increasing
professionalization and modernization. Especially at the national level, but in
the regions as well, political candidates are aware of image management, public
relations, and media campaigning, and the most serious among them employ
45
professional consultants to design and run their campaigns. Meanwhile, analy-
ses of voter behavior, notably as made by R. William Liddle and Saiful Mujani,
point to the declining influence of collective identities—such as those based on
46
religion, ethnicity, or region—in determining voter choice. Instead, increas-
ingly important, in national elections at least, are “party leader or candidate
appeal”; “party and presidential/vice-presidential media campaigns, especially
47
on television”; and “voter perceptions of the national economic condition.” In
short, relations between voters and candidates are becoming individuated, and,
to a growing degree, are based more and more on calculation of direct eco-
nomic benefit and mediated by the images and messages propagated through
the electronic media. Meanwhile, pollsters and consultants analyze the voting
public as just another market, identifying areas where their candidate is weak,
advising on remedial action, and carefully targeting swing voters. The consul-
tants package their candidates like any other product, borrowing from the
pleasing images and styles of the entertainment industry in designing their cam-
paigns. The conclusion of Ariel Heryanto on these developments is striking:
The political and electoral dynamics of the post-Suharto period have pro-
duced a new kind of disempowerment—one that is marked by the
dominance over the electorate of the entertainment industry and its val-
ues. In addition to the rise of the politics of entertainment, the populace
has been seriously fragmented by the heightened political competition
among its members. As a result, Indonesia’s contemporary masses appear
to have voluntarily become dispersed and domesticated. Ironically, this is
a situation that the New Order strongly desired but was incapable of
48
achieving.
44. Chauvel 2010, 323.

45. Mietzner 2009 (Political) and Qodari 2010.
46. Mujani and Liddle 2007; 2010, 75–76.
47. Mujani and Liddle 2010, 76.
48. Heryanto 2010, 181–82.
This picture is arguably too gloomy. Electoral democracy is after all delivering
many benefits to voters, such as in new local health care regimes (a topic that
has so far received almost no scholarly attention). Even so, it is easy to discern
the suffusion of a market logic deep into the patterns of electoral and party po-
litical life.
3. Nongovernmental Organizations
Indonesia’s civil society sector, specifically that part made up of NGOs, is widely
recognized as an important arena in contemporary Indonesian politics. Many
commentators, myself included, have stressed the role that civil society actors,
including NGOs, have played in undermining authoritarian rule, promoting
democratic agendas, and popularizing democratic ideas. Recently, the number
49
of registered NGOs was put at 8,000, though the absolute number is no doubt
much higher than this. Indonesian NGOs are active in a variety of fields, from
human rights protection to organization of micro-finance, rule-of-law strength-
ening to inter-faith dialogue, indigenous rights promotion to women’s
empowerment, and a thousand other areas besides. In the liberal vision of civil
society, complexity and density have beneficial effects, enabling civil society or-
ganizations to hem in the state on every side, monitoring, critiquing, and
constraining it, and providing the targeted feedback and advice required to im-
50
prove policy and performance.
At the same time, it is difficult if not impossible to conceptualize Indonesian
NGOs in purely domestic terms because they are so deeply embedded in global
51
networks. The discourse, orientations, and strategies of Indonesian NGOs are
influenced and even determined by global connections, and most of their fund-
ing still comes from overseas sources. Some Indonesian NGOs define
themselves as being part of a global movement countering neoliberal globaliza-
tion. They reject funding that derives from major capitalist states (or at least
from the United States) and wish instead to build their networks with, and de-
rive their funds from, likeminded organizations in Europe and elsewhere. Yet
they are a minority. Indonesia is also a site where we see the playing out of a
neoliberal vision of global civil society that “not only restrains state power but
also actually provides a substitute for many of the functions provided by the
52
state.” The ultimate sources of funding for many Indonesian NGOs, especially
those concerned with crucial political issues such as governance, rule of law,
and elections, are first-world government development agencies and global fi-
nancial institutions, which are pioneering Indonesia’s transformation into an
open-market economy. In 2001 alone, for example, USAID budgeted almost
US$7 million “to increase citizen participation in governance by strengthening
civil society organizations and their ability to affect the policy making and imple-
53
mentation processes.” Much of such assistance is premised on the very
49. Tyson 2006.

50. See, for example, Diamond 1994.
51. Sinanu 2010.
52. Kaldor 2003, 9.
53. USAID website, www.usaid.gov; accessed 1 November 2009. Note, however, that rich-world
assumptions that underpin main-
stream liberal civil society theory, with
donors often justifying their funding
for civil society groups in terms of how
they will help improve governance
and build social capital, though in re-
cent years there has also been a shift
t o war d go ve r n an ce pr o gr a ms .
Although there has been a large de-
gree of agency on the part of local
NGO actors, who sometimes guide
foreign agendas as much as they are
captured by them, it is also necessary
to recognize the massive international
effort that aims to remake Indonesia
via the medium of civil society.
In this sense, Indonesian NGOs are
not only intermediaries between a do-
Roadside sign in Lombok reads: “Beware of mestic urban elite and marginalized
the Project.” (Credit: author) groups, but also between global and
local forces. They are mostly dependent on international donors for funding;
they receive “capacity-building” support and training from international agen-
cies; and they adapt (and sometimes invent) programs to fit donors’ priorities.
Given that many international NGO donors themselves are funded by first-
world government agencies or global financial institutions, local NGOs argu-
ably thus become agents not only of a specifically Indonesian politico-economic
order, but also part of an emerging neoliberal global governmentality, by which
individual subjects come to internalize dominant social and political norms,
and “are then induced to self-manage according to market principles of disci-
54
pline, efficiency and competetivness.” NGOs not only discipline the state (the
conventional view in writing on Indonesian civil society), but also discipline cit-
izens, especially subordinate groups, to accommodate themselves to the
emerging democratic political system and liberal economic order.
For present purposes, what is most relevant about the NGO sector is the pat-
tern of fragmentation that characterizes it. Of course, NGOs are by definition
issue-oriented and therefore the overall shape of the sector is liable to be frag-
mented. Unlike in many other political spheres, analysts and practitioners alike
often view fragmentation within civil society as a strength. Yet this fragmenta-
tion is also to a large degree determined by the pattern of relations between
Indonesian NGOs and their donors and the particular model of funding that
predominates: that of the project. To quote from a recent report I authored on
donor assistance to NGOs in the democracy assistance area:
funding for Indonesian NGOs has declined sharply since the global financial crisis that began
in 2008.
54. Ong 2006, 4; see also Lipschutz 2005.
One particular problem that was commonly identified was that most do-
nors do not fund CSOs [civil society organizations] for their basic
institutional expenses, but only for particular short-term projects. This ap-
proach reflects worldwide tendencies in the democracy assistance field,
and was also a deliberate choice by major donors early on at a time that, in
the recollection of one USAID staffer, “we thought that it was best to keep
recipients flexible and competitive, and not to encourage complacency.”
This tendency, however, causes problems among CSOs who often have to
live from hand to mouth, from one project to the next, whose staff num-
bers and networking abilities fluctuate dramatically, and who often have
difficulties in carrying out long-term strategic planning. More insidiously,
it has also given rise to a widespread tendency on the part of CSOs to dis-
guise their institutional costs in the project proposals and financial
reports they send to donors, for example, by inflating costs for some ser-
vices or levying “taxes” on the salaries or honorariums paid to their staff.
As one person put it, donors would tell them about good governance prin-
55
ciples, but “It is you who teach us manipulation!”
Again we see an intersection between a neoliberal market-based model of
political action and tendencies toward clientelism and patronage, with effects
of fragmentation. Competitive bidding for dollops of project funding for speci-
fied activities encourages competition and splinters activists’ focus, vision, and
energies. It encourages a model of hierarchically structured relations between
groups based on control of and access to funding flows, with large NGOs or co-
alitions in Jakarta often acting as brokers between the international donor and
regional NGOs, and with local NGOs in the regions then able to build up their
networks of community organizations, micro-credit cooperatives, and the like
in the same way. And, as the NGO activist quoted above indicates, the project
model also is amenable to irregular usage of those funds and lends itself to the
corruption which is also relatively common in the NGO world. Many of the con-
flicts and recriminations that permeate Indonesia’s NGO scene are about
funding and proyek.
Recursive splintering of NGOs is one result. Indeed it is possible to describe a
fairly typical pattern of splintering, where a secondary leader of an NGO builds
up over time enough experience, inside knowledge, and, especially, personal
relations with international donors to strike out and establish a new organiza-
tion of his or her own, with a focus that differs only by nuance with the original
organization. One prototypical example is the world of human rights NGOs,
with most NGOs in this sector able to trace their lineage through such a process
of splintering back to the grandparent of them all: the Legal Aid Institute, LBH.
Other NGOs are established purely—or mainly—with the intention of accessing
resources when a new international patron or program arrives on the scene.
To this discussion of critically minded NGOs that campaign on issues likely to
attract foreign funding, we must add at least brief reference to the more paro-
55. Aspinall 2010 (Assessing), 14.

chial but even more vast and fragmented world of ormas (organisasi
kemasyarakatan, or societal organizations): the political, youth, religious, eth-
nic, self-help, development, and other organizations that operate in every
province, district, and town. It is difficult to generalize, but it is obvious that
many such organizations are established for patronage-seeking purposes. As
one Internal Affairs Ministry official put it in 2008, of the 80,000 ormas then reg-
istered with the government, only 10 percent carried out their proper function.
The rest were either “red plates” (referring to the red-colored registration plates
on government vehicles) that had been “formed by rulers to maintain them-
selves in power” or “yellow plates” (plates on public transportation vehicles)
founded for the purpose of family business: “One family can have six ormas
56
headed by various members of the family,” he explained. Organizations with
greater popular involvement can operate also as patronage vehicles. For exam-
ple, a research team that conducted a survey of local government in South Aceh,
a remote and rural part of that province, found that four hundred farmers and
fishers’ groups existed in the district. However, “Most of the year they are idle,
and they become only active during the time when government assistance to
57
farmers is being channelled.”
4. Islamic Organizations
Much has been written about the rise of new and more assertive strands of
Islamism and Islamic conservatism in the aftermath of democratization. Some
commentators point to an increasingly Islamized public sphere, intolerance for
religious minorities, and a state that is more inclined to intervene in religious af-
fairs of citizens in order to uphold orthodoxy. Others highlight the increasing
adoption of Islamic symbols by mainstream political parties and politicians, es-
pecially in election campaigns. One part of this broad trend has been the
growing influence of new transnationally oriented Islamic movements, such as
the Prosperous Justice Party (PKS), which was inspired by the Muslim Brother-
hood, and Hizbut Tahrir (Party of Liberation), as well as the emergence of a
smaller number of groups that espouse violence. The appearance of these bod-
ies, in the view of one seasoned observer, “is an important phenomenon that
has definitely changed the landscape of Indonesian Islam, reducing the central
58
importance of Muhammadiyah and NU in defining the moderate mainstream.”
Muhammadiyah and NU were the central organizations of the modernist and
traditionalist aliran in pre–New Order Indonesia and still remain by far the larg-
est Islamic organizations in Indonesia.
Setting aside the critical question of whether such trends amount to a conser-
vative shift in Indonesian Islam overall, the important point for present
purposes is that their most striking impact has been to further fragment Islamic
social and political organization and religious expression. Indonesian Islam has
56. Hervin Saputra, “72 Ribu Ormas Menyimpang dari Fungsinya,” vhrmedia, 13 August 2008,
www.vhrmedia.com/print.php?.g=news&.s=berita&.bk=2229; accessed 1 October 2011.
57. Avonius et al. 2011, 14.
58. Van Bruinessen 2011, 6.
moved away from a model defined by the contest between traditionalist and
modernist aliran, their chief organizations, NU and Muhammadiyah, and the
cluster of smaller bodies that used to orbit around them. Instead, we see a much
more plural field populated by mass organizations, celebrity preachers, Sufi
sects, NGOs, and a plethora of other actors, many of whom it is impossible to
define in light of the old modernist–traditionalist dichotomy. The transnation-
ally oriented Islamist groups themselves are fractious, with groups such as PKS
and Hizbut Tahrir (to say nothing of the jihadi grouplets) fiercely divided on is-
sues of doctrine and strategy and orienting themselves to different
international models and centers. At the other end of the Islamic spectrum,
many new and assertive liberal Islamic groups have emerged, which, even if
lacking the popular support of their Islamist opponents, have nevertheless con-
tributed a counterweight to them and ensured the circulation through the
public sphere of highly varied Islamic opinion on political and social issues. In
between, we have witnessed a proliferation of new religious movements in
what is becoming a much more competitive and commercialized religious field.
One noteworthy development is the attraction of Sufism and individually ori-
ented mysticism to many Indonesians, such that “[i]t is various shades of Sufism
that appear to constitute the…preferred form of Islamic piety among the urban
59
middle class.” A related trend is the rise of celebrity preachers who have at-
tained fame and fortune by using electronic media and clever marketing
techniques and who “have designed a form of Islamic practice that inculcates an
ethics of accountability, personal responsibility, and self-discipline that they see
60
as conducive to corporate success.”
In short, this pluralization of religious expression is itself one sign of the
wider social and cultural changes associated with an emerging neoliberal social
pattern and allied transformations: globalization, commercialization, digitaliza-
tion, new communication technologies, and so on. Greg Fealy contends that we
are witnessing a “commodificaton [that] broadens and variegates Islamic ex-
61
pression.” Especially in urban centers, where people are immersed in mobile
and diverse social contexts, far removed from the closed social environment of
the village, many are becoming “religious seekers” who might participate in a
Hizbut Tahrir meeting one day, visit a celebrity preacher the next, and then
download some fatwa from a favorite website the next morning before going on
62
to participate in a particularly satisfying Sufi gathering. Religion is in other
words coming to resemble an increasingly diverse marketplace inhabited by in-
dividual consumers, rather than being constituted by rigidly defined collective
identities and their associated organizations into which a person is born and
63
wedded until death.
Viewed in this light, the bewildering multiplication of Islamic movements
59. Ibid., 43.

60. Rudnyckyj 2010, 19.
61. Fealy 2008, 34.
62. On religious seekers in a very different context, see Roof 1993.
63. My great thanks to Greg Fealy for discussions leading to this and the preceding paragraph.
must be viewed as
one part of a wider
fracturing and mul-
tiplying of identity
affiliations. Indone-
sian Christianity,
too, is being riven
by an array of new
evangelical, pente-
costal, and other
sects, challenging
the dominance of
the established Prot-
estant churches.
Most commonly re-
Voters at an election rally in South Aceh, 2007. (Credit: author) marked upon in
scholarly literature
is the emergence of myriad new or revivified local identities based on ethnicity
and region, with various forms of cultural revival, reinvigoration of customary
institutions, proliferation of ethnic associations, and mobilization of local eth-
nic identities in virtually every region. Many commentators have viewed such
developments in a negative light, seeing them as a sign of parochial erosion of
the sense of common citizenship required in a healthy polity. Beyond religion
and the regions, however, we see such phenomena as an increasingly energetic
gay and lesbian scene, including in regional centers and in its political assertive-
ness, as well as such seemingly trivial but cumulatively important phenomena
as national gatherings of Vespa lovers and underground networks of punks in
64
Banda Aceh and other cities. A striking globalization of consumption styles
and social habits is also evident among a growing segment of the country’s mid-
dle class, especially youngsters. Everywhere we look, identity patterns are
becoming both more fragmented and more assertive.
At the same time, the fragmenting effects of patronage competition are visi-
ble among Islamic organizations, especially those active in political affairs.
Some of the bitterest factional fights and most naked patronage seeking have
occurred in the Islamic political parties. Splits in the major Islamic parties have
typically occurred on the basis of material and personal calculation, rather than
65
because of matters of doctrine or policy. One of Indonesia’s most venerable
and deeply rooted local Islamic organizations—Nahdlatul Wathan, by far the
dominant socioreligious organization on the island of Lombok—fractured after
the death of its founder in 1997 when rival camps based around two of his
64. On the former, see McCallum 2010; on the latter, see Balowski 2012 and Baulch 2007.
65. Thus, the dispute in PPP leading to the formation of PBR was not merely a reprise of the old
conflicts between modernists and traditionalists that had dogged the party throughout the
New Order period. On the contrary, PBR drew on dissident traditionalists and modernists
within PPP: Platzdasch 2009, 52.
66
daughters squabbled over control of the organization’s assets. Islamist vigi-
lante groups are often de facto protection rackets, fighting over control of
67
territory and the income it provides. Factional competition at the Nahdlatul
Ulama Congress in 2010 took the form, not of the heavy-handed state interven-
tion of the New Order period, but of a variety of money politics that was far
more open than in the past, in which: “Candidates offered to pay travel ex-
penses and other costs for those delegates who promised to vote for them. Vote
buying continued during the congress, as delegates were persuaded to shift
their allegiances. A local newspaper reported that votes were sold for 25 million
68
rupiah.” Deep social changes have played their part in the fracturing of Islamic
politics, but so too has mundane competition for economic resources.
Another caveat: none of this analysis of religious fragmentation should be read
as suggesting that old conflicts about the place Islam should occupy in Indone-
sia’s social and political order have been superseded. On the contrary, as Marcus
Mietzner argues, such debates still mark an important line of cleavage in the party
69
system. Many of the most contentious political disputes of the last fifteen years
speak to the persistence of a decades-old debate about whether Islam should be
given special legal recognition and protection. Key episodes include passage of
the antipornography law in 2008; ongoing public contestation over the legal sta-
tus and physical protection of the Ahmadiyah sect and other minorities; disputes
about the building of churches in some Muslim majority regions; and rolling pub-
lic controversy over hundreds of “perda syariah”—syariah regional
regulations—that dozens of local governments have passed since 1998 and that
are designed to implement aspects of Islamic law on matters ranging from pay-
ment of zakat (alms) to regulation of public morality in matters such as dress.
This diverse (and incomplete) list, however, should alert us to a critical as-
pect of the contemporary debate: contestation over the place of Islam is being
waged on a myriad of fronts. This makes the contemporary era dissimilar from
the 1950s, when similar local disputes also found expression in the national-
level Constituent Assembly debate over the philosophical foundation of the
state and the Jakarta Charter (a constitutional provision that would make Is-
lamic law obligatory for all Muslims). In the early post-Suharto years, Islamic
parties made a short-lived attempt to incorporate the Jakarta Charter into the
Constitution; since that time, Islamic agendas have been advanced in a piece-
meal fashion, with activists and politicians using local power at the district or
provincial level to achieve their goals, lobbying for the inclusion of Islam-
friendly articles in national legislation, and using a myriad of other footholds in
the bureaucracy, media, and public sphere. In short, even the most epic and persis-
tent of political contests in Indonesia—that between Islamism and secularism—
has become fragmented.
66. Fogg and Ending 2011.

67. “Islam Defenders mutating into splinter cells for hire,” The Jakarta Post, 16 July 2010. See also
Wilson 2008.
68. Van Bruinessen 2010.
69. Mietzner forthcoming.
Conclusion and Implications
My purpose in this essay has been to write a characterization of Indonesia’s con-
temporary political order that is as all-encompassing as possible. The goal has
not been to assess the country’s progress toward any particular regime form,
the functioning of its democratic institutions, or the nature of its class relations.
Instead, I have sought to identify the chief patterns that dominate organiza-
tional arrangements in a broad spectrum of political life and to locate the
economic and social roots of those patterns. In that regard, my goal has been
very different from most analyses of Indonesian politics over the last decade,
which have tended to take as their starting point questions about the depth and
meaning of Indonesia’s democratic transition, the nature of class power and
public institutions, and the possibilities of, and constraints on, popular repre-
sentation. The rich literature on these topics has addressed many fundamental
issues about Indonesia’s transformation since the downfall of Suharto, but few
works seemed to identify, or at least to stress, the all-pervasive fragmentation
that I have encountered in my own research on otherwise very diverse sectors of
Indonesian society.
Indeed, in emphasizing fragmentation, this essay takes a rather different ap-
proach to much recent literature on Indonesian politics, where the emphasis
has been on identifying and classifying modes of accumulation and concentra-
70
tion of material and political power. One group of scholars, notably Richard
Robison, Vedi Hadiz, and Jeffrey Winters, has argued that Indonesia’s transition
to democracy can best be understood in terms of survival of oligarchic rule. To
be sure, for Winters, post-Suharto Indonesia is best described as an “untamed
oligarchy,” where there is considerable competition between rival oligarchs
71
who “confront a proliferation of lateral threats and predations from above.”
Yet despite such fractiousness, in Winters’s view, this is a system in which “the
only actors who can dominate the political stage are oligarchs with massive per-
sonal wealth, and elites with a capacity to attract or extract sizeable resources
72
from the state.” Other analysts have worked more within a comparative de-
mocratization framework while also addressing the means by which political
elites have used various forms of corruption and patronage to accumulate polit-
73
ical power and cement coalitions. Yet others have emphasized Indonesia’s
democratic transformation in a more positive mode, stressing how the dispersal
74
of political authority has helped progress toward democratic consolidation.
Though I have cast my net more widely in stressing organizational fragmenta-
tion, I have by no means intended to repudiate these other analyses. In fact,
much analytical leverage might be gained by transposing, as it were, the conclu-
70. I am grateful to one of the journal’s anonymous reviewers for this formulation.
71. Winters 2011, 181.
72. Ibid., 180.
73. A far from complete list of such writers would include Kuskridho Ambardi (2008), Michael
Buehler (2010), Jamie Davidson (2009), Gerry van Klinken (2009), Marcus Mietzner (2007),
and Dan Slater (2004). I have myself authored pieces in this vein (e.g., Aspinall 2010 (Irony);
see also Aspinall and Van Klinken 2011).
74. Liddle and Mujani forthcoming is one good example.
sions of other scholars onto those offered in this essay about fragmentation.
What would be the implications of combining an analysis of institutional and
organizational fragmentation, of the type advanced here, with the emphasis on
political inequality and accumulation of the sort that has been so prominent in
the literature? What would be the implications of integrating an emphasis on
fragmentation into the study of Indonesian democratization, or of oligarchy?
Space does not permit a full consideration of these questions, which would
in any case also require a more serious attempt to situate Indonesia in terms of
global trends. Perhaps, after all, in Indonesia we are witnessing simply a playing
out of the near-universal drama of increasing individuation and atomization of
social and political relations characteristic of the contemporary epoch globally.
Cultural and political theorists in many contexts have debated whether such
trends are best seen as disempowering, because of the barriers they throw in the
pathway of collective agency and social connectedness—or liberating, because
they provide greater scope to individual agency and choice.
Accordingly, it is certainly possible to read the above analysis of Indonesian
fragmentation in the style of a lament, and to emphasize how fragmentation has
impeded thorough-going democratization and will continue to constrain pro-
gressive political projects of various sorts. To cite just one example, analysts and
practitioners alike have long pointed to the fragmentation of Indonesia’s de-
mocracy movement as representing a significant source of the weakness of the
country’s post–1998 democratic impulse and hence of the elite dominance and
75
low quality of Indonesian democracy. While oligarchs and others with material
resources can navigate, and dominate, the webs of informal power that consti-
tute contemporary Indonesia politics, ordinary citizens and the marginalized
still require organization to muster social and political influence. Striking fea-
tures of the democracy movement include not only the dominance of the NGO
model within it and its consequent atomization, as discussed above, but also its
repeated failure to produce long-lasting, effective, or influential reformist na-
tional coalitions, let alone political parties. Instead, as became obvious in the
2009 elections, when NGO activists recognize they have reached the limits of
what they can achieve through civil society lobbying, they have little choice but
to join the existing elite-dominated political parties, effectively fragmenting and
76
dispersing their efforts yet further.
These observations help remind us that Indonesia’s highly fragmented politi-
cal map should not be confused with a situation of extreme pluralism in which
all political forces are potential equals. Indonesian politics is not a marketplace
of equally empowered buyers and sellers. As authors like several of those
named above have tried to explain to us, there is indeed a deep architecture of
political authority in Indonesia that is anchored in profound material inequality
and built on a framework of patronage and clientelism. The fact that we do not
75. Key studies are Priyono and Subono 2007, and more generally Priyono et al. 2007
76. Aspinall 2012.
77. Juliawan 2011, 367.

see a pattern of highly structured, rigid, or pillared clientelism, but one in which
patronage networks are relatively fluid and crosscutting, has been positive for
the stability of Indonesia’s democracy and for preserving social peace. But this
cannot disguise the deep and abiding inequality in political resources fragmen-
tation points to at the heart of Indonesia’s political order. In this perspective, we
might say, fragmentation enables oligarchy.
And yet, this is not all there is to the story. On the side of liberation, much
could be said about the greater scope for individual agency that comes with
many of the social and political changes sketched through this essay. The com-
fort individuals derive from living in a rural community that swaddles a person
in a shared set of religious beliefs and practices from cradle to grave, for exam-
ple, might be more than compensated for by the greater scope for individual
religious expression and exploration that he or she might find in the big city or
on the internet. Politically, too, there have been recent moments in Indonesia of
apparent citizen empowerment via electronic media and web-based network-
ing (such as the dramatic episode of late 2009, when more than a million people
signed up to Facebook pages defending the Corruption Eradication Commis-
sion and prompting the president to take action to protect it). Such episodes
seem not so much to defy as to be enabled by the overall pattern of atomization
discussed above. Fragmentation might constrain some forms of social power
and mobilization, but it clearly does not impede all. One analyst of Indonesia’s
labor movement, for example, sees in the proliferation of local level street pro-
tests by workers—organized by an anarchic multitude of unions and
committees—the embryo of an Indonesian “movement society,” in which the
77
representation of claims by social movements has become normalized.
Indonesia’s historical background is also salient here. For those who would
lament current trends of fragmentation, it is well to remember the immediate
past. Indonesia is not moving from a halcyon period of collective agency to a
gloomy era of demobilization, nor is it experiencing the dismantling of the so-
cial protections offered by a robust welfare state, as in many places where
neoliberalism operates. The New Order regime offered no such protections.
While some Indonesians may bemoan fragmentation as inhibiting collective ac-
tion, many remember the dull conformity of the New Order years and see in the
new epoch sparkling possibilities. Certainly, few of those promoting social jus-
tice and further democratization in Indonesia lament the loss of national
purpose of those earlier years, conditioned as it was by repression and exclu-
sion. Viewed in this light, perhaps if we were to substitute words such as
“pluralism” or “diversity” for “fragmentation,” the possibilities of the present
would come more clearly into focus.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS: Early versions of this article were presented at a meeting of the Asso-
ciation for Asian Studies and at Columbia University and the Australian National
University. Many people who attended these presentations gave me valuable feedback,
which I appreciate. In addition, I am grateful to Michele Ford, Tom Pepinsky, Bill Liddle,
Matthew S. Winters, and the four anonymous reviewers for this journal for their de-
tailed—and sometimes highly critical—comments. I am also grateful to the Australian
Research Council for providing research funding that made this article possible.

References
Ahmad, Ehtisham, and Bert Hofman. 2000. Indonesia: Decentralization, opportunities and risks.
Available at siteresources.worldbank.org/INTINDONESIA/Resources/Decentralization/Op-
portunities_and_Risks_A1.pdf; accessed 20 March 2011.
Ahmad, Ehtisham, and Ali M. Mansoor. 2002. Indonesia: Managing decentralization. Washington,
D.C.: International Monetary Fund.
Ambardi, Kuskridho. 2008. The making of the Indonesian multiparty system: A cartelized party sys-
tem and its origin. PhD diss. Ohio State University.
Anderson, Benedict R. O’G. 1983. Old state, new society: Indonesia’s New Order in comparative
historical perspective. Journal of Asian Studies 42 (3): 477–96.
Aspinall, Edward. 2004. Indonesia: Civil society and democratic breakthrough. In Muthiah Alagap-
pa, ed. Civil society and political change in Asia. Expanding and contracting democratic
space. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
___ 2010 (Assessing). Assessing democracy assistance: Indonesia. Madrid: FRIDE Institute.
___ 2010 (Indonesia). Indonesia in 2009: Democratic triumphs and trials. In Daljit Singh, ed. South-
east Asian Affairs 2010. Singapore: ISEAS.
___ 2010 (Irony). The irony of success. Journal of Democracy 21 (2): 20–34.
___ 2011. Democratization and ethnic politics in Indonesia: Nine theses. Journal of East Asian
Studies 11 (1): 289–319.
___ 2012. Still an age of activism. Inside Indonesia 107. Available at www.insideindonesia.org/fea-
ture/still-an-age-of-activism-22012883; accessed 25 August 2012.
Aspinall, Edward, and Greg Fealy, eds. 2002. Local power and politics in Indonesia: Decentralisa-
tion and democratisation. Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies.
Aspinall, Edward, and Marcus Mietzner, eds. 2010. Problems of democratisation in Indonesia:
Elections, institutions, society. Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies. 267–86.
Aspinall, Edward, and Gerry van Klinken, eds. 2011. The state and illegality in Indonesia. Leiden:
KITLV Press.
Avonius, Leena, with Olle Törnquist and Fadhli Ali. 2011. Mapping spaces for democratic participa-
tion in South Aceh. Paper presented at “Reforms and Innovations in Local Democracy:
Workshop on Democratic Local Governance in Asia,” Phnom Penh, Cambodia, 13–14 May, the
Swedish International Centre for Local Democracy and East-West Center.
Bachriadi, Dianto. 2010. Between discourse and action: Agrarian reform and the politics of rural so-
cial movements in Indonesia post 1965. PhD diss. Flinders University, Adelaide.
Baker, Jacqueline. 2012. The rise of Polri: Democratisation and the political economy of security in
Indonesia. PhD diss. London School of Economics and Political Science.
Balowski, James. 2012. The mohawk crusade. Inside Indonesia. 107. Available at www.inside indo-
nesia.org/stories/the-mohawk-crusade-28012881; accessed 25 August 2012.
Baulch, Emma. 2007. Making scenes: Reggae, punk, and death metal in 1990s Bali. Durham, N.C.:
Duke University Press.
Bruinessen, Martin van. 2010. New leadership, new policies? Inside Indonesia. 100. Available at
www.insideindonesia.org/stories/new-leadership-new-policies-16061325; accessed 25 Au-
gust 2012.
———. 2011. What happened to the smiling face of Indonesian Islam? Muslim intellectualism and
the conservative turn in post-Suharto Indonesia. Singapore: RSIS Working Paper no. 222 Avail-
able at www.rsis.edu.sg/publications/workingpapers/wp222.pdf; accessed 25 August 2012.
Buehler, Michael. 2010. Decentralisation and local democracy in Indonesia: The marginalisation of
the public sphere. In Aspinall and Mietzner, eds. 2010.
Buehler, Michael, and Paige Tan. 2007. Party-candidate relationships in Indonesian local politics: A
case study of the 2005 regional elections in Gowa, South Sulawesi. Indonesia 84: 41–69.
Chandra, Kanchan. 2004. Why ethnic parties succeed: Patronage and ethnic head counts in India.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Chauvel, Richard. 2010. Electoral politics and democratic freedoms in Papua. In Aspinall and
Mietzner, eds. 2010.
Clear, Annette. 2002. International donors and Indonesian democracy. Brown Journal of World Af-
fairs 9 (1): 141–55.
Croissant, Aurel, and Philip Völkel. 2012. Party system types and party system institutionalization:
Comparing new democracies in East and Southeast Asia. Party Politics 18 (2): 235–65.
Crouch, Harold. 1979. Patrimonialism and military rule in Indonesia. World Politics 31 (4): 571–87.
Davidson, Jamie S. 2009. Dilemmas of democratic consolidation in Indonesia. The Pacific Review 22
(3): 291–308.
Diamond, Larry. 1994. Rethinking civil society: Toward democratic consolidation. Journal of De-
mocracy 5 (3): 4–17.
Fealy, Greg. 2008. Consuming Islam: Commodified religion and aspirational pietism in contempo-
rary Indonesia. In Greg Fealy and Sally White, eds. Expressing Islam: Religious life and politics
in Indonesia. Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies.

Fogg, Kevin W., and Muhammad Saleh Ending. 2011. One Islamic community, two rival sisters. In-
side Indonesia 103. Available at www.insideindonesia.org/weekly-articles-103-jan-mar-2011/
one-islamic-community-two-rival-sisters-17121928; accessed 25 August 2012.
Furtado, Xavier. 2001. Decentralisation and capacity development: Understanding the links and the
implications for programming. CIDA Policy Branch. Available at www.asocam.org/biblioteca/
DC_162.pdf; accessed 25 August 2012.
Geertz, Clifford. 1959. The Javanese village. In G. William Skinner, ed. Local, ethnic and national
loyalties in village Indonesia. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Cultural Report Series.
Hadiz, Vedi R. 2002. Power and politics in North Sumatra: The uncompleted reformasi. In Edward
Aspinall and Greg Fealy, eds. Local power and politics in Indonesia. Singapore: Institute of
Southeast Asian Studies. 119–31.
———. 2004. Indonesian local party politics: A site of resistance to neoliberal reform. Critical Asian
Studies 36 (4): 615–36.
———. 2010. Localising power in post-authoritarian Indonesia: A Southeast Asia perspective.
Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Hadiz ,Vedi R., and Richard Robison. 2005. Neo-liberal reforms and illiberal consolidations: The In-
donesian paradox. The Journal of Development Studies 41 (2): 220–41.
Harvey, David. 2005. A brief history of neoliberalism. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Hedman, Eva-Lotta, and John Sidel. 2000. Philippine politics and society in the twentieth century:
Colonial legacies, post-colonial trajectories. London and New York: Routledge.
Heryanto, Ariel. 2010. Entertainment, domestication and dispersal: Street politics as popular cul-
ture. In Aspinall and Mietzner, eds. 2010.
Hutchcroft, Paul D. 2013. Linking capital and countryside: Patronage and clientelism in Japan, Thai-
land, and the Philippines. In Diego Abente Brun and Larry Diamond, eds. Political clientelism,
social policies, and the quality of democracy. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Jackson, Karl D. 1978. Bureaucratic polity: A theoretical framework for the analysis of power and
communications in Indonesia. In Karl D. Jackson and Lucian W. Pye, eds. Political power and
communications in Indonesia. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press.
Juliawan, Benny Hari. 2011. Street-level politics: Labour protests in postauthoritarian Indonesia.
Journal of Contemporary Asia 41 (3): 349–70.
Kaldor, Mary. 2003. Global civil society: An answer to war. Oxford: Polity Press.
Kimura, Ehito. 2007. Marginality and opportunity in the periphery: The emergence of Gorontalo
province in North Sulawesi. Indonesia 84: 71–95.
Klinken, Gerry van. 2009. Patronage democracy in provincial Indonesia. In John Harriss, Kristian
Stokke, and Olle Törnquist, eds. Rethinking popular representation. Basingstoke: Palgrave
Macmillan.
Klinken, Gerry van, and Edward Aspinall. 2011. Building relations: Corruption, competition and
cooperation in the construction industry. In Aspinall and van Klinken, eds. 2011.
Klinken, Gerry van, and Joshua Barker, eds. 2009. State of authority: The state in society in Indone-
sia. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University, Southeast Asia Program.
Liddle, R. William, and Saiful Mujani. 2007. Leadership, party, and religion: Explaining voting be-
havior in Indonesia. Comparative Political Studies 40 (7): 832–57.
——— Forthcoming. Indonesian democracy: From transition to consolidation. In Mirjam Künkler
and Alfred Stepan, eds. Democratization and Islam in Indonesia. New York: Columbia Uni-
versity Press.
Lipschutz, Ronnie. 2005. Power, politics and global civil society. Millennium: Journal of Interna-
tional Studies 33 (3): 747–69.
Von Luebke, Christian. 2009. The political economy of local governance: Findings from an Indone-
sian field study. Bulletin of Indonesian Economic Studies 45 (2): 201–30.
Manning, Chris. 2008. The political economy of reform: Labour after Soeharto. Indonesian Studies
Working Papers no. 6. The University of Sydney.
Manning, Chris, and Raden M. Purnagunawan. 2011. Survey of recent developments. Bulletin of In-
donesian Economic Studies 47 (3): 303–32.
McCallum, Jenny. 2010. Only Vespas can unite the archipelago. Inside Indonesia 102. Available at
www.insideindonesia.org/stories/only-vespas-can-unite-the-archipelago-24101363/all-pages;
accessed 25 August 2012.
McLeod, Ross H. 2011. Institutionalized public sector corruption: A legacy of the Soeharto fran-
chise. In Aspinall and van Klinken, eds. 2011. 45–64.
Mietzner, Marcus. 2007. Party financing in post-Soeharto Indonesia: Between state subsidies and
political corruption. Contemporary Southeast Asia 29 (2): 238–63.
———. 2008. Comparing Indonesia’s party systems of the 1950s and the post-Suharto era: From
centrifugal to centripetal interparty competition. Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 39 (3):
431–54.
———. 2009 (Indonesia). Indonesia and the pitfalls of low-quality democracy: A case study of the
gubernatorial elections in North Sulawesi. In Andreas Ufen and Marco Bünte, eds. Democrati-
zation in post-Suharto Indonesia. London and New York: Routledge.

———. 2009 (Political). Political opinion polling in post-authoritarian Indonesia: Catalyst or obsta-
cle to democratic consolidation? Bijdragen tot de Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde 165 (1):
95–126.
———. 2010. Indonesia’s direct elections: Empowering the electorate or entrenching the New Or-
der oligarchy? In Edward Aspinall and Greg Fealy, eds. Soeharto’s New Order and its legacy:
Essays in honour of Harold Crouch. Canberra: ANU E-Press.
———. Forthcoming. Money, power and ideology: Political parties in post-authoritarian Indone-
sia. Singapore: NUS Press.
Montesano, Michael J., Pavin Chachavalpongpun, and Aekapol Chongvilaivan, eds., 2010. Bangkok,
May 2010: Perspectives on a divided Thailand. Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian
Studies.
Mujani, Saiful, and R. William Liddle. 2010. Voters and the new Indonesian democracy. In Aspinall
and Mietzner, eds. 2010.
Ong, Aiwha. 2006. Neoliberalism as exception: Mutations in citizenship and sovereignty. Durham,
N.C.: Duke University Press.
Platzdasch, Bernhard. 2009. Islamism in Indonesia. Politics in the emerging democracy. Singa-
pore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies.
Posner, Daniel N. 2005. Institutions and ethnic politics in Africa. New York: Cambridge University
Press.
Priyono, A.E., Willy Purna Samadhi, Olle Törnquist. 2007. Rev. ed. Making democracy meaningful:
Problems and options in Indonesia. Jakarta: Demos.
Priyono, A.E., and Nur Iman Subono. 2007. Issue-based democracy movement: Towards an agenda
for defragmentation. In Priyono, Samadhi, and Törnquist, eds. 2007.
Qodari, Muhammad. 2010. The professionalisation of politics: The growing role of polling organi-
sations and political consultants. In Aspinall and Mietzner, eds. 2010. 122–40.
Robison, Richard. 1986. Indonesia: The rise of capital. North Sydney: Allen and Unwin.
Robison, Richard, and Vedi R. Hadiz. 2004. Reorganising power in Indonesia: The politics of oligar-
chy in an age of markets. London: RoutledgeCurzon.
Rudnyckyj, Daromir. 2010. Spiritual economies: Islam, globalization, and the afterlife of develop-
ment. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press.
Roof, Wade C. 1993. A generation of seekers: The spiritual journeys of the baby boom generation.
San Francisco: Harper.
Schiller, Jim. 1996. Developing Jepara: State and society in New Order Indonesia. Clayton, Vict.:
Monash University. Monash Asia Institute. Centre of Southeast Asian Studies.
Schulte Nordholt, Henk, and Gerry van Klinken, eds. 2007. Renegotiating boundaries: Local poli-
tics in post-Suharto Indonesia. Leiden: KITLV Press.
Sinanu, Frieda L. 2010. Everyday politics of global civil society: A study of the relationships between
international and local NGOs in Indonesia. PhD diss. Australian National University, Canberra.
Slater, Dan. 2004. Indonesia’s accountability trap: Party cartels and presidential power after demo-
cratic transition. Indonesia 78: 61–92.
Tomsa, Dirk. 2006. The defeat of centralized paternalism: Factionalism, assertive regional cadres,
and the long fall of Golkar chairman Akbar Tandjung. Indonesia 81: 1–22.
Tyson, Adam. 2006. The enduring appeal of NGOs. The Jakarta Post. 16 January.
Ufen, Andreas. 2006. Political parties in post-Suharto Indonesia: Between politik aliran and
“Philippinisation.” GIGA Working Paper no. 37. Hamburg: German Institute for Global and
Area Studies.
Vel, Jacqueline. 2007. Campaigning for a new district in West Sumba. In Schulte Nordholt and van
Klinken, eds. 2007.
Wilson, Ian Douglas. 2008. “As long as it’s Halal”: Islamic preman in Jakarta. In Greg Fealy and Sally
White, eds. Expressing Islam: Religious life and politics in Indonesia. Singapore: Institute of
Southeast Asian Studies.
Winters, Jeffrey A. 2011. Oligarchy. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Work, Robertson. 2002. Overview of decentralisation worldwide: A stepping stone to improved gov-
ernance and human development. Paper presented to the “Second International Conference
on Decentralisation,” 25–27 July 2002. Organized by the United Nations Development
Programme (Manila).
q

Aspinall - Patronage and Clientelism

Caricato da

Informazioni sul documento

Copyright

Formati disponibili

Condividi questo documento

Condividi o incorpora il documento

Opzioni di condivisione

Hai trovato utile questo documento?

Questo contenuto è inappropriato?

Copyright:

Formati disponibili

Aspinall - Patronage and Clientelism

Caricato da

Copyright:

Formati disponibili

Critical Asian Studies

ISSN: 1467-2715 (Print) 1472-6033 (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rcra20

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/14672715.2013.758820

Published online: 28 Jan 2013.

Submit your article to this journal

Article views: 2371

Citing articles: 60 View citing articles

Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at

How might we characterize the fundamental ordering principles of contempo-

1. In using these definitions I am following Hutchcroft 2013.

rode from within the institutional reforms promoted by supporters of the

4. Hadiz and Robison 2005.

8. Manning and Purnagunawan 2011, 322.

10. Geertz 1959, 37.

11. Ibid., 37.

21. Aspinall 2011, 1.

26. Slater 2004, 65; see also Aspinall 2010 (Irony).

31. See for example Montesano, Chachavalpongpun, and Chongvilaivan 2012.

38. Von Luebke 2009.

44. Chauvel 2010, 323.

49. Tyson 2006.

55. Aspinall 2010 (Assessing), 14.

59. Ibid., 43.

66. Fogg and Ending 2011.

50 Critical Asian Studies 45:1 (2013)

Aspinall / Nation in Fragments 51

52 Critical Asian Studies 45:1 (2013)

Aspinall / Nation in Fragments 53

54 Critical Asian Studies 45:1 (2013)

Potrebbero piacerti anche