Rethinking New Order Indonesia: Origins, Evolution, and Legacies

The Workshop

Despite democratization following the fall of the New Order dictatorship (1966-1998), corrosive legacies of the old regime persist. The endurance of political dynasties, repression of critical voices from civil society and social movements, incipient military involvement in civilian politics, rampant cases of embezzlement and corruption by state officials, and most worryingly the oligarchic hijacking of democratic processes, continue to feature centrally in Indonesian politics. 

These features of Indonesian politics have left observers wondering to what extent the New Order has actually ended as a regime. Has the specter of the New Order in Indonesian politics merely been dormant, now resurging with a new facade and renewed vigor? Moreover, have Indonesian voters, just like their neighbors in the Philippines and India, embraced a quasi-authoritarian, exclusionary conception of democracy rather than a liberal, progressive, or participatory one? What can we learn from Indonesia’s authoritarian past to understand the recent global wave of right-wing/conservative backlash, illiberal populism, authoritarian developmentalism, and democratic backsliding? 

This workshop, the first part of a series of three workshops, showcases research by early-career Indonesian scholars on the New Order. Among themes to be explored include a critical reevaluation of the origin and nature of the New Order, its evolution and internal dynamics over time, political ideas shaping the regime, state-society relations under the regime, and the legacies that lingers on even after its demise. It is hoped that their analysis will assist us in understanding the current Indonesia’s political landscape that has demonstrated significant continuity from the New Order.  

By reexamining the New Order, students of authoritarianism can take key insights that might contribute to the broader theoretical understanding of the working mechanisms, trajectory, and the fate of autocracies. Important insights include how the founding moment of authoritarian regimes is important in shaping their nature, their evolving political economy dynamics, and the kind of ideas available to autocrats to fashion their regime. The New Order case study can also contribute to the growing discussion on the role of key political actors and carriers of ideas and their beliefs in democratic subversion, the logic of governmentality in autocracies, and the dynamic relations between autocracies and the global norms and networks within which they are embedded in. 

Speakers (paper presenters): 

• Farabi Fakih, Lecturer, Department of History, Gadjah Mada University: The Emergence of New Order Governmentality and the Role of Global Institutions
• Norman Joshua, Research Fellow, Hoover Institution: Jurists in Uniform: Law and Military Politics in Indonesia, 1950-1960  

Discussants:

• Jeffrey Winters, Professor, Department of Political Science, Northwestern University, USA. He is the author of the award-winning book Oligarchy (Cambridge, 2011) and the forthcoming book Why Oligarchs Win (Penguin Random House, 2025).
• Adriaan Bedner, Professor of Law and Society in Indonesia at Leiden University; Honorary Fellow at the Royal Netherlands Institute of Southeast Asian and Caribbean Studies (KITLV); member of the IIAS Board 

Moderators/Conveners:

• Iqra Anugrah, Trapezio MSCA Seal of Excellence Fellow, Department of Foreign Languages, Literatures and Modern Cultures, University of Turin; Research Fellow at IIAS
• Gde Dwitya Arief Metera, Lecturer in Political Science and Research Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Research/IFAR at Indonesian International Islamic University/UIII

The Speakers and Abstracts

Farabi Fakih is a Lecturer at the Department of History at Gadjah Mada University and author of Authoritarian Modernization in Indonesia’s Early Independence Period (Brill/KITLV Press, 2020).

The Emergence of New Order Governmentality and the Role of Global Institutions 

We look into the formation of New Order governmentality through both the emergence of a normative consensus on state-society relations that were mediated by the production of managerialist discourses and ideas and the formation of ‘experts’ within the context of international technical aid. This institutionalization of developmentalist norms developed alongside more revolutionary, ‘Sukarnoist’ approaches to development. The institutional reforms that were enacted within Sukarno’s Guided Democracy government in the 1960s were a response to the developments of expertise through international technical aid during the 1950s. During the late-1960s, the technocratic establishment emerged with the support of global, western organizations, mostly based in Washington DC, such as the World Bank and the IMF and through organizations like the IGGI. During the 1970s and 1980s, there was a gradual shift towards a ‘liberal’, normative consensus, that went against ‘nationalist’, even ‘Sukarnoist’ norms and institutions. We look into the clash that occurred during the 1970s, through the case of the collapse of the national oil company, Pertamina, in 1975. The shift in normative consensus towards deregulation and neoliberalism in the 1980s occur since the mid-1970s. What kind of discourse did it generate in order to support a neoliberal shift in the 1980s and how do we account for the global mechanisms of governmentality. What transnational roles and relationship that were instrumental in the formation of competing norms? Can we think of the New Order as a series of competing global and national governmentalities? What does this approach to global governmentalities tell us about categories and analysis of authoritarianism within nation-state context and how can it help expand the discussion? 

Norman Joshua is a Research Fellow at the Hoover Institution. He was previously a Shorenstein Postdoctoral Fellow on Contemporary Asia at Stanford University. 

Jurists in Uniform: Law and Military Politics in Indonesia, 1950-1960 

In Indonesia, martial law was often lauded as the impetus for military rule in politics, particularly after Sukarno declared a nationwide state of emergency in 1957. The origins and role of military-lawyers (perwira kehakiman), however, has been underexplored in the historiography. This paper explores the emergence of this new class of military-lawyers and their role in shaping the judicial-bureaucratic apparatus of the authoritarian Guided Democracy (1959-1966) and New Order (1966-1998) regimes. In doing so, the paper traces the life and work of Basarudin Nasution, a civilian jurist who played a major role in developing the Army’s Judicial Corps, Military Law Academy, Indonesia’s first laws on national defense (1954), state of emergency (1957) and mining (1960). By arguing that the military’s focus on juridical affairs began to take shape in the 1950s, this paper demonstrates how a Basarudin’s relationship with Army theorist A.H. Nasution and jurist Djokosutono profoundly influenced the evolution of civil-military collaboration in legal affairs in post-colonial Indonesia. 

Organisation 

This workshop is jointly organized by IIAS, IFAR UIII, Central European University (CEU) Democracy Institute, and the University of Turin’s Department of Foreign Languages, Literatures and Modern Cultures and the Institute of Studies on Asia. 

Registration