Rethinking New Order Indonesia: Origins, Evolution, and Legacies (Part 2)

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. 

Speaker (paper presenter): Gde Dwitya Arief Metera, Lecturer in Political Science and Research Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Research/IFAR at Indonesian International Islamic University/UIII

Discussants:

• Dan Slater, Professor of Political Science and Director of Center for Emerging Democracies at University of Michigan; Convenor at the Global Forum on Democracy and Development.
• Amalinda Savirani, Professor, Department of Politics and Government, Gadjah Mada University.

Moderator: Iqra Anugrah, Trapezio MSCA Seal of Excellence Fellow, Department of Foreign Languages, Literatures and Modern Cultures, University of Turin; Research Fellow, International Institute for Asian Studies (IIAS), Leiden University.

Title and Abstract

Arrested State Building: The New Order Legacy and Democratic Decoupling in Indonesia

Contemporary analyses of Indonesian politics are dominated by a narrative of democratic backsliding, which highlights the erosion of liberal democratic norms despite the persistence of electoral procedures. While this perspective captures important aspects of Indonesia’s democratic trajectory, it obscures a deeper structural disjuncture: the decoupling between regime development and state-building processes. This study contends that the primary challenge facing Indonesian democracy is not merely its illiberal drift, but the enduring bifurcation between electoral competition and rights protection—a divergence rooted deep in New Order’s political dynamics. The persistence of weak institutions, selective enforcement of the rule of law, and fragmented bureaucratic authority are traced to the arrested state-building legacy of the New Order. By shifting the analytical lens from democratic decline to state-regime divergence, this study offers a more comprehensive account of the constraints shaping Indonesia’s political development.

Acknowledgement:

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