INDONESIA STUDIES PROGRAMME
About the Seminar
This presentation will review the recent elections for governors, district heads and mayors, looking in particular at the relationship between parties and their most prominent candidates, usually chosen for “electability” above all else. The recent gubernatorial election in Jakarta will be a major focus of the presentation, along with references to other areas. What are the implications for the role of ideology and policy, especially in terms of national political economy, with the steadily increasing strength of “elektabilitas” politics? The presentation will argue that the increasing trend for parties to coalesce specifically around “electable candidates” rather than ideological, programmatic or platform perspectives represents a stagnation in Indonesian party politics. This stagnation represents a deep capturing of these parties by a narrowly defined status quo political economy. It will also argue that on the rare occasions where policy issues or ideology have been important in the recent local elections for bupati, mayors and governors, the policies have been the policies of individuals and not parties and have a strictly local characteristic thereby not effectively countering the status quo capture of the party system.
The gubernatorial elections in Jakarta will be highlighted as a partial exception, resulting from the perception that the elections there are directly connected to the 2019 Presidential elections, which has national implications. However, policy differences of substance still did not become central. Different ideological emphasis around the issue of the role of religion and ‘pluralism’ did emerge but were not reflected in any policy debates.
About the Speaker
Max Lane is a Senior Visiting Fellow (half-time) at ISEAS – Yusof Ishak Institute and a Visiting Lecturer at the Faculty of Social and Political Sciences, Gajah Mada University. His most recent books are Decentralization and Discontents: An Essay on Class, Political Agency and National Perspective in Indonesian Politics (ISEAS 2014); Unfinished Nation: Indonesia Before and After Suharto (Verso 2008, 2017); and Catastrophe in Indonesia (Seagull/University of Chicago 2010). In 2016 he published a collection of poems and prose in Indonesia, Poems and Otherwise: Anecdotes Scattered (Djaman Baroe, 2016), which was launched at the 2016 Singapore Writers Festival. He is also the translator of Pramoedya Ananta Toer’s Buru Quartet set of novels and other works of Toer as well as plays and poems of W.S. Rendra. He was the founding editor of Inside Indonesia magazine, has served as a Second Secretary at the Australian Embassy in Jakarta and as a Principal Research Officer for the Senate Standing Committee on Foreign Affairs, Defence and Trade in the Australian Parliament as well as a journalist.
Registration
To register, please fill in this form and email it to iseasevents3@iseas.edu.sg by 23 March 2017.
About the Seminar
The 2017 round of simultaneous direct local elections (Pilkada) taking place on 15 February in Indonesia bears great significance for national politics. At stake is not only the Jakarta governorship, but also the presidency in 2019, as President Joko Widodo has shown that whoever wins the Jakarta election may have a shot at the presidency. The evolving saga of the gubernatorial race in Jakarta, which has seen the incumbent Chinese Christian governor Basuki Tjahaja Purnama accused of blasphemy against Islam and embroiled in an on-going court case, demonstrates that religious and ethnic sensitivities cannot be ignored in Indonesian politics. At the same time, elections in Jakarta and other regions continue to reveal the importance of factors such as the role of political parties, the electability of candidates and money politics in Indonesian national politics.
This seminar aims to outline the nuances of these trends in the 2017 simultaneous Pilkada, drawing not only on the Jakarta case but also cases in East Java and West Kalimantan. Through such a comparative perspective, we will consider the issues that will remain prominent in national politics as the 2019 presidential and general elections approach.
About the Speakers
Hui Yew-Foong is an anthropologist and Senior Fellow with ISEAS – Yusof Ishak Institute. His research interests include the Chinese minority in Indonesia, religion and politics in Southeast Asia, decentralization in post-Suharto Indonesia, and heritage politics. He had been a Visiting Fellow at Cornell University, the University of Hong Kong and Xiamen University. Besides Singapore, he has conducted multi-sited field research in Indonesia, East Malaysia, South China, Hong Kong and Taiwan. He is the author of Strangers at Home: History and Subjectivity among the Chinese Communities of West Kalimantan, Indonesia, co-author of Different Under God: A Survey of Church-Going Protestants in Singapore and editor of Encountering Islam: The Politics of Religious Identities in Southeast Asia.
Ulla Fionna is Fellow at ISEAS – Yusof Ishak Institute. She studied at Airlangga University, the University of Warwick, and the University of Sydney. After receiving her PhD, she held post-doctoral positions and taught at the University of Sydney. She is the author of The Institutionalisation of Political Parties in Post-authoritarian Indonesia: From the Grass-roots Up (Amsterdam: University of Amsterdam Press, 2013), and editor of Watching the Indonesian Elections 2014 (Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 2015). Her latest article “The trap of pop-charisma for the institutionalization of Indonesia’s post-Suharto parties” was published in the Asian Journal of Political Science (2016). Her main research interests are Indonesian politics, political parties, electoral politics, and democratisation. Currently, she is observing the Indonesian middle-class Muslims and their political aspirations.
Charlotte Setijadi is Visiting Fellow at ISEAS – Yusof Ishak Institute. Her research interests include Chinese soft power in Southeast Asia, ethnic Chinese business networks, transnational migration, and identity politics in Indonesia. Charlotte completed her Ph.D. in Anthropology at La Trobe University, Melbourne. Prior to joining ISEAS, Charlotte was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the School of Humanities and Social Sciences, Nanyang Technological University. Her most recent journal article ‘”A Beautiful Bridge: Chinese Indonesian Associations, Social Capital and Strategic Identification in a New Era of China-Indonesia Relations’ was published by the Journal of Contemporary China (2016).
Johanes Herlijanto is a Visiting Fellow at ISEAS – Yusof Ishak Institute, Singapore. He earned his PhD in anthropology at Macquarie University, Sydney and Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam. Johanes previously taught in the Department of International Relations, Bina Nusantara University, Jakarta, and in the Chinese studies program at the University of Indonesia, Depok. His publications include, “‘Search for Knowledge as Far as China!’ Indonesian Responses to the Rise of China”, in Chinese Encounters in Southeast Asia, How People, Money, and Ideas from China Are Changing A Region, Pal Nyiri and Danielle Tan (eds.) (Seattle: University of Washington Press Forthcoming). He also wrote an ISEAS Perspective “What Does Indonesia’s Pribumi Elite Think of Ethnic Chinese Today?”, and “Cultivating the Past, Imagining the Future: Enthusiasm for Zheng He in Contemporary Indonesia” in Zheng He and the Afro-Asian World, Chia Lin Sien & Sally K Church (eds.) (Singapore: Melaka Museums Corporation [PERZIM] and International Zheng He Society, 2012). He is currently working on the perception of China and the ethnic Chinese in Indonesia, especially among the pribumi Indonesian political and economic elite
Registration
To register, please fill in this form and email it to iseasevents3@iseas.edu.sg by 16 February 2017.
INDONESIA STUDIES PROGRAMME
About the Seminar
In April this year, the then Coordinating Minister for Politics and Security, Luhut Panjaitan, together with the Governor of the National Defence Institute (LEMHAMNAS), retired major-General Agus Wijoyo, organised a national symposium on the “1965 tragedy”. This followed several years of persistent advocacy by human rights and victims groups. It also followed promises of resolving” the “1965 tragedy”– though vague – made by Joko Widodo during his presidential campaign in 2014. The symposium went for two days and heard presentations from a range of parties, including former political prisoners and historians. The symposium is yet to make public its recommendations to the President.
In the wake of the symposium another symposium was organised by retired generals, with the presence of the Minister for Defence, Ryamizard Ryacudu. This symposium took a position hostile to any “reconciliation” process that conceded wrong doing by the Indonesian state or military. It advocated the launching of a movement to squash what it saw as a revival of Indonesian Communist Party (PKI). At the same time, there was an escalation of actions by anti-communist groups, including some using the Islamic banner, to physically disrupt events around the country considered to be sympathetic to the PKI. This activity championed by former generals, Kivlan Zein and Kiki Syahnakri, has in turn elicited resistance and counter-polemics. Government spokesperson’s statements appear to be seeking a middle course.
This presentation will report on these events but also present an analysis that the emergence of a public national discussion on this issue challenges the limits imposed by post New Order “reformasi” democracy, and asks whether those limits are likely to collapse or be extended.
About the Speaker
Dr Max Lane is a Senior Visiting Fellow at ISEAS and has been an irregular guest lecturer at Gajah Mada University in Yogyakarta, Indonesia and Yogyakarta State University. He is author of Unfinished Nation: Indonesia before and After Suharto (Verso, 2008), Catastrophe in Indonesia (Seagull, 2010) and Decentralization and Its Discontents: An Essay on Class, Political Agency and National Perspective in Indonesian Politics (ISEAS, 2014). He is also translator of Pramoedya Ananta Toer’s This Earth of Mankind and its sequels, Arok of Java and The Chinese in Indonesia, as well as of W.S. Rendra’s Struggle of the Naga Tribe. He has observed Indonesia as an officer of the Australian Embassy, a researcher at the Australian Parliament, a journalist as well as an academic.
He is currently writing a monograph length introduction to the politics of the Indonesian labour movement. His next publication will be Indonesia and Not: Poems and Otherwise (Djaman Baroe, Yogyakarta, forthcoming, 2016.)
Registration
To register, please fill in this form and email to iseasevents3@iseas.edu.sg by 18 November 2016.
About the Conference
The fall of the New Order regime in 1998 and the abolition of assimilation policies in the post-Suharto ushered in a “revival” of Chinese culture and identity politics in Indonesia. In particular, the post-Suharto years, with the rise of regional autonomy and identities, have also seen a more pronounced regional identity politics among ethnic Chinese keen to express their diverse regional origins. Externally, the rapid rise of China in the last fifteen years has become a significant factor that influenced Chinese Indonesian identity politics. For many Chinese Indonesians, the rise of China incited a feeling of pride towards one’s Chineseness, particularly after decades of forced assimilation. Furthermore, the burgeoning bilateral relationship between the PRC and Indonesia has seen Chinese Indonesian organisations and individuals playing a greater role in dealings between the two countries.
In the context of these new developments, new questions need to be asked with regards to the position and perceptions of contemporary post-Suharto Chinese Indonesians. For instance, how are Chinese Indonesians from different parts of Indonesia shaped by their regional contexts, and how does this affect their roles in local politics and economies? What roles do Chinese Indonesians play in contemporary Sino-Indonesian relations? How do Chinese Indonesians perceive Chinese identity and belonging at the time of China’s rise? At the other end of the spectrum, it also needs to be asked: how do non-Chinese Indonesians perceive the greater visibility of Chineseness in post-Suharto Indonesia? Furthermore, in an era of heightened connectivity, what sort of trans-national/trans-border/trans-local connections do Chinese Indonesians forge and maintain?
Today, the time is right for scholars to reassess the Chinese Indonesian situation and to potentially move beyond the conventional framework of the nation-state. This conference is intended to be a scholarly “update” on the contemporary history and ethnography of Chinese Indonesians. It is also intended to be a forum where both established and emerging scholars can introduce new directions and trends in Chinese Indonesian studies, particularly those with a transnational approach.
Keynote speaker: Dr Mary Somers Heidhues
Conference programme: Click here for the programme
Registration: Attendance to the conference is free of charge but registration is required by 14 October 2016. As seats are limited, please register early using this registration form. Admission to the conference can only be taken as confirmed upon receiving the written acceptance from ISEAS. For any queries, please feel free to e-mail: <iseasevents2@iseas.edu.sg>.
Seminar: Previewing the 2017 Jakarta Election: Candidates, Coalitions and Prospects for the Campaign
INDONESIA STUDIES PROGRAMME
About the Seminar
In February 2017, Indonesia will stage yet another round of direct local elections for governors, mayors and district heads. Arguably, the most highly anticipated of these upcoming polls will be the gubernatorial election in the capital Jakarta where incumbent governor Basuki Tjahaja Purnama, better known as Ahok, will seek to become the first Christian ethnic Chinese to win an executive election in the nation’s capital. In recent months, the Jakarta election has already captured the public’s attention as Ahok reneged on an earlier announcement to run as an independent candidate and accepted a party nomination instead. Meanwhile, speculation and rumours about who will challenge Ahok in the election have also mounted ahead of the registration deadline on 23 September. Given the pivotal importance of this election and the immense public interest in who will become Jakarta’s next governor, this seminar will provide a preview of the 2017 Jakarta election. It will introduce the candidates who registered with the General Election Commission, trace their pathways to the nomination, and assess their respective strengths and weaknesses. It will then contextualize the election in broader political trends in Indonesia and analyse the significance of the impending campaign for future elections in Indonesia.
About the Speakers
Dr Charlotte Setijadi is Visiting Fellow at the ISEAS – Yusof Ishak Institute. Her research interests include Chinese soft power in Southeast Asia, ethnic Chinese business networks, transnational migration, and identity politics in Indonesia.
Dr Deasy Simandjuntak is Visiting Fellow at the ISEAS – Yusof Ishak Institute. Her research interests include democratization, decentralization, local elections and identity politics in Indonesia.
Dr Dirk Tomsa is a Senior Visiting Fellow at the ISEAS – Yusof Ishak Institute. His main research interests include electoral and party politics in Indonesia as well as comparative Southeast Asian politics.
Registration
To register, please fill in this form and email to iseasevents3@iseas.edu.sg by 26 September 2016.
INDONESIA STUDIES PROGRAMME
About the Seminar
Since the beginning of this century, the relations between Indonesia and China have become much closer. Trades between the two countries have significantly increased, especially after the strategic partnership agreement between the two countries was signed in 2005. In recent years, the incoming investments from China have also grown unprecedentedly, especially in the mining and infrastructure sectors. Cultural and political relations between these two Asian countries have also improved, as exemplified by the establishment of several Confucius Institutes in Indonesia, and the mutual visits between a number of Indonesian political parties and the Chinese Communist Party.
Yet critical voices about China and its relation with Indonesia are apparent in certain groups of Indonesians, who may be broadly defined as the elites. Suspicions about China’s agenda to dominate Indonesia through its participation in Indonesia’s infrastructure projects, and in collaboration with the ethnic Chinese big businessmen and politicians, are spread widely, especially among those who resent the Indonesian government’s close relations with China. What are the basis for these suspicions? Who are the groups of elites who believe in these views? How do the elite members of the groups who support President Joko Widodo see China and the latest development of its relations with Indonesia? This presentation will attempt to discuss these questions.
About the Speaker
Johanes Herlijanto is a Visiting Fellow at ISEAS – Yusof Ishak Institute, Singapore. He earned his PhD in anthropology at Macquarie University, Sydney and Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam.
Johanes previously taught in the Department of International Relations, Bina Nusantara University, Jakarta, and in the Chinese studies program at the University of Indonesia, Depok.
His publications include, “‘Search for Knowledge as Far as China!’ Indonesian Responses to the Rise of China”, in Chinese Encounters in Southeast Asia, How People, Money, and Ideas from China Are Changing A Region, Pal Nyiri and Danielle Tan (eds.) (Seattle: University of Washington Press, Forthcoming). He also wrote an ISEAS Perspective on “What Does Indonesia’s Pribumi Elite Think of Ethnic Chinese Today?”, and “Cultivating the Past, Imagining the Future: Enthusiasm for Zheng He in Contemporary Indonesia” in Zheng He and the Afro-Asian World, Chia Lin Sien & Sally K Church (eds.) (Singapore: Melaka Museums Corporation [PERZIM] and International Zheng He Society, 2012). He is currently working on the perception of China and the ethnic Chinese in Indonesia, especially among the pribumi Indonesian political and economic elite.
Registration
For registration, please fill in this form and email to iseasevents3@iseas.edu.sg by 26 July 2016.
INDONESIA STUDIES PROGRAMME
About the Seminar
Once regarded as inherently antagonistic arenas of contests, formal electoral politics and the political activism of social movements are now increasingly seen as closely intertwined. While in established Western democracies issue-based movements often form alliances with programmatic parties and complement the campaign efforts of these parties through informal activism, the nexus between movements and elections in new democracies is more commonly defined by personality-driven electoral movements that mobilize support for populist candidates for executive positions. In Indonesia, this trend has been evident since 2012 when Joko Widodo (Jokowi) won the Jakarta governor election on the back of an unprecedented mobilization of volunteers. In 2014, another volunteer movement emerged to mobilize support for Jokowi’s presidential campaign. Right now, volunteers are once again lining up to help Basuki Tjahaja Purnama (Ahok) in the 2017 Jakarta governor election.
This presentation analyses this new political activism in Indonesia by examining how informal, non-partisan mobilization affects the party-dominated arena of electoral politics. Building on a conceptual framework developed by McAdam and Tarrow, it puts forward three main arguments. First, volunteer activism has added a new dimension to electoral campaigning in Indonesia which is otherwise dominated by professional consultancies and the rampant use of money politics. Second, new electoral movements are posing a challenge to the supremacy of political parties in electoral contests as they not only complement but often take over important functions that are conventionally regarded as the domain of political parties. Third, the emergence of these electoral movements are both products of broader regime dynamics as well as potential determinants of the future trajectory of Indonesia’s current democratic regime. The presentation concludes with an outlook to the 2017 Jakarta election and a critical assessment of the prospects for this new kind of activism to spread to other elections.
About the Speaker
Dirk Tomsa is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Politics and Philosophy at La Trobe University, Melbourne, and a Visiting Senior Fellow at the ISEAS-Yusof Ishak Institute. His main research interests include Indonesian and comparative Southeast Asian politics, especially electoral and party politics. He is the author of Party Politics and Democratization in Indonesia: Golkar in the post-Suharto era (Routledge, 2008) and co-editor (with Edward Aspinall and Marcus Mietzner) of The Yudhoyono Presidency: Indonesia’s Decade of Stability and Stagnation (ISEAS, 2015).
Registration
For registration, please fill in this form and email to iseasevents3@iseas.edu.sg by 13 June 2016.
INDONESIA STUDIES PROGRAMME SEMINAR
About the Seminar
Bugis Indonesians were long encouraged to informally emigrate to the East Malaysian state of Sabah as labourers, where they were readily assimilated as Malay-speaking Muslim members of the greater “Malay race”. In recent years, however, these immigrants have been accused by Sabah’s ethnic Chinese and indigenous Christian groups of displacing “genuine Sabahans”. Bugis immigrants have been framed by these groups as instruments of attempts by the United Malays National Organization to augment the Malay population and re-engineer eastern Malaysia’s political demography. Opposition leaders and concerned Sabahans allege that hundreds of thousands of falsified national identity cards have been distributed to such immigrants, allowing them pass as citizens and illegally vote in elections for UMNO. Minority groups and opposition politicians claim that these illegal interlopers are difficult to distinguish from their “authentic,” co-ethnic Malaysian counterparts due to a practical challenge: they look like locals, speak Malay, and carry fake IDs marking them as citizens. In response, state agents and concerned citizens have begun relying on a particular sensory modality — hearing or listening — in order to sort non-citizens from citizens.
This paper examines how state agents and concerned citizens are identifying illegal immigrants by virtue of their “foreign” or “awkward”-sounding Malay accents. So too, it addresses how undocumented Bugis immigrants are identifying, minimizing, and masking the out-of-place sounds in their Malay speech in order to more effectively pass as locals.
About the Speaker
Andrew M Carruthers is a linguistic and sociocultural anthropologist and a Visiting Fellow at the ISEAS-Yusof Ishak Institute. His dissertation research centred on undocumented Indonesian labour migrants in the East Malaysian state of Sabah, evaluating how their assimilatory strategies are shifting amidst ongoing state crackdowns on illegal immigrants. His more recent work focuses on infrastructure and social dynamics of urban life in Makassar, Indonesia. He is the recipient of several grants and awards, including a Fulbright-Hays GPA grant, a Fulbright IIE research grant, and the Society for Linguistic Anthropology Graduate Prize. He holds a B.A. from Cornell, an M.Phil. from Yale, and receives his Ph.D. from Yale in May 2016.
Registration
For registration, please fill in this form and email to iseasevents3@iseas.edu.sg by 12 May 2016.
INDONESIA STUDIES PROGRAMME
About the Seminar
ISEAS-Yusof Ishak Institute is honoured to host an exclusive preview of a major new report, Indonesian Students in Egypt and Turkey, co-authored by Sidney Jones and Navhat Nuraniyah from the Institute for Policy Analysis of Conflict in Jakarta and Anthony Bubalo from the Lowy Institute in Sydney, Australia. This report will be launched in Sydney, Australia next week. The report, based on extensive face-to-face interviews of Indonesian students studying across Egypt and Turkey, analyses their views of the Islamic State phenomenon, the relationship between Islam and democracy, and the significant cultural and religious differences between Indonesia and their host states. The report concluded:
“Despite the fact that all the students we interviewed were religious students, religion was only one criterion by which they judged political events and leaders. Finally, and perhaps most importantly for an age when Western political leaders still talk loosely and superficially about Islam and Muslims, our interviews with Indonesian students underlined how far off the mark such a monolithic view of the Islamic faith and its faithful really are.”
About the Speakers
Sidney Jones is the Director of the Institute for Policy Analysis of Conflict (IPAC) based in Jakarta. From 2002 to 2013, Jones worked with the International Crisis Group, first as Southeast Asia project director, then from 2007 as senior adviser to the Asia program. Before joining Crisis Group, she worked for the Ford Foundation in Jakarta and New York (1977-84); Amnesty International in London as the Indonesia-Philippines-Pacific researcher (1985-88); and Human Rights Watch in New York as the Asia director (1989-2002).
Navhat Nuraniyah is an analyst at IPAC. Before joining IPAC in 2014, she worked as a researcher on terrorism and radicalisation in Indonesia at the Centre of Excellence for National Security (CENS), S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies (RSIS), Singapore. She holds a Master of Arts in International Relations, with Honours, and a Master of Diplomacy from the Australian National University. She obtained a BA in International Relations from Muhammadiyah University Yogyakarta and was trained in Arabic and Islamic studies at pesantrens in East Java and Yogyakarta.
Anthony Bubalo is the Deputy Director and Research Director at the Lowy Institute for International Policy. He has also produced research on a variety of Middle Eastern issues, including Middle East – Asia linkages, Islamism, democratisation, terrorism and energy security. He comments on Middle Eastern politics for the Australian and international media outlets. He has written for The Australian, The Age, The Sydney Morning Herald, the Financial Times, Ha’aretz and Asahi Shimbun newspapers as well as The American Interest and ForeignPolicy.com. Before joining the Lowy Institute Anthony was an officer of the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade. He served in Australian diplomatic missions in Saudi Arabia and Israel and was Middle East Analyst with the Office of National Assessments from 1996 to 1998.
REGISTRATION
For registration, please fill in this form and email to iseasevents3@iseas.edu.sg by 5 April 2016.
INDONESIA STUDIES PROGRAMME
ABOUT THE SEMINAR
Analysts have increasingly argued that Indonesia under President Jokowi is drifting toward China, citing Jokowi’s multiple meetings with Chinese President Xi Jinping and Indonesia’s drive for greater investment from China. At the same time, relations with the United States under Jokowi appeared troubled, the result of diplomatic missteps on both sides.
While the Jokowi Administration is working hard to boost Chinese investment, it is not clear that these efforts exceed that of its predecessors, or have affected Indonesian diplomacy in areas of regional politics or security. The drop in warmth in the relationship with the US is more pronounced, but may merely be the artefact of bureaucratic anomalies on both sides.
This seminar will review developments in Jakarta’s relationship with both Washington and Beijing, the implications for regional security concerns like those in the South China Sea, and place them in the context of Indonesian foreign policy under Jokowi more generally.
ABOUT THE SPEAKER
Aaron L Connelly is a Research Fellow in the East Asia Program at the Lowy Institute for International Policy, where he focuses on Southeast Asia, particularly Indonesia and Myanmar, and the U.S. role in the region. Prior to joining the Lowy Institute, Aaron was a director in the Asia practice and a special assistant to the chair at Albright Stonebridge Group, a commercial diplomacy consultancy headquartered in Washington. Earlier in his career, he was a researcher in the Asia programs at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) in Washington, and a Fulbright scholar and visiting fellow at the Centre for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) in Jakarta.
REGISTRATION
For registration, please fill in this form and email to iseasevents3@iseas.edu.sg by 2 March 2016.