THE INCOMPLETE PROCESS OF INDONESIA’S DEMOCRATIZATION

Abstract

The two editors of the book, Edward Aspinall and Marcus Mietzner have been actively researching Indonesian politics since their adolescence. Aspinall lived previously for several years in Malang and Mietzner conducted his initial research on Indonesia in Ambon. The two editors, now scholars at the Australian National University in Canberra, belong to the new generation of Indonesian experts. The two Australia based scholars represent a shift from the dominance of the American based experts from the earlier generation such as George McTurnan Kahin (Cornell University), Benedict Anderson (Cornell University), and Daniel S. Lev (Washington University), who researched Indonesia during the Cold War period. At that time Indonesia was considered as a country threatened by the “domino effects” of communism that already swept China, North Korea, Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia, leading to increased funds for Indonesian studies in the US, and therefore contributing to in depth political analysis produced among others by the Cornell Modern Indonesia Project (CMIP). However, the importance of Indonesia in particular and Asian studies in general (Ellings & Hathaway 2010: 2) abated in the post Cold War period as attention is drawn further to more severe conflict areas. Therefore, with this book the two editors aim at bringing Indonesia back to the international political discourse. They argue that most of the comparativists, for instance like the Washington DC based Freedom house, have treated Indonesia only as one country among many others 212 | Masyarakat Indonesia in their quantitative analyses. A number of important work on Indonesia have also been published by junior scholars, unfortunately they lack influence for triggering a larger international debate on Indonesia.