Author: Trissia Wijaya (Asia Institute, University of Melbourne) | Journal: Journal of Contemporary Asia, Vol. 56, Issue 3, 2026 | DOI: 10.1080/00472336.2025.2565367 | Published online: October 2025 | Open Access
Keywords: Authoritarian neo-liberalism, Authoritarian statism, financialisation, growth strategies, Indonesia, Nicos Poulantzas, technocratic populism
Part of JCA Feature Section: "Oligarchs, Authoritarianism, and Development in Indonesia"
Abstract
"There is now a tacit consensus among scholars of Indonesian politics that the country has experienced an authoritarian turn characterised by executive aggrandisement and the marginalisation of subaltern forces justified by claims of economic growth and development. Yet, little attention has been paid to understanding why institutional changes have taken an increasing authoritarian form, and how various growth strategies shape class relations during periods of capitalist crisis. This article expands on approaches to oligarchy using the concepts of authoritarian statism and the politics of disincorporation. It suggests that the oligarchic system finds expression in a form of authoritarian statism, masked as technocratic populism, as the state, increasingly beset with crisis due to contradictions between the process of neo-liberalisation and the interest of power bloc, seeks to maintain its political legitimacy. This has seen the emergence of new growth strategies like downstream industrialisation and infrastructure financing, that are encapsulated within technocratic institutions through which executive government has consolidated decision-making power while deepening middle-class and poor reliance on the state."
Background and Positioning
This article is part of the same JCA Issue 3 (2026) feature section on "Oligarchs, Authoritarianism, and Development in Indonesia" as the companion piece by Karim and Kholid on authoritarian neo-liberalism. Where Karim and Kholid trace the mechanisms of authoritarian neo-liberalism from the political-regulatory angle (recentralisation and executive empowerment), Wijaya provides the deeper political-economic and class-analytical explanation of why this took the specific institutional form it did.
The article draws on the theoretical framework of Nicos Poulantzas — the Greek-French Marxist state theorist — particularly his concept of "authoritarian statism," developed in his final work State, Power, Socialism (1978). Poulantzas used the concept to describe a distinctive form of capitalist governance: a state that concentrates decision-making in the executive while maintaining formal democratic institutions in degraded form, deploying technocratic and bureaucratic mechanisms to insulate key policy domains from democratic pressure, and managing class conflict through a combination of repression and selective incorporation.
Theoretical Framework: Authoritarian Statism and the Politics of Disincorporation
Authoritarian Statism
Drawing on Poulantzas, the author argues that Indonesia under Jokowi developed a distinctive form of authoritarian statism: the concentration of executive decision-making through technocratic institutions deliberately insulated from legislative, judicial, and civil society oversight. Key economic governance domains — infrastructure development, natural resource processing (downstreaming), investment licensing — were relocated into executive-controlled technocratic bodies. This produced a form of governance that was formally populist and developmentalist in its rhetoric (emphasising growth, welfare, and national pride), but structurally authoritarian in its institutional design.
Politics of Disincorporation
The author introduces the concept of the "politics of disincorporation" to describe the fracturing of the modes through which subordinate groups (workers, peasants, the poor) had previously been partially integrated into the political system. Under Suharto's New Order, subordinate groups were incorporated through corporatist state structures (controlled labour unions, rural organisations). Post-1998 democratisation created new channels for incorporation through decentralisation, competitive elections, and civil society. Under Jokowi, the author argues, these channels were progressively closed off — not through old-style corporatist control, but through the technocratic management of growth strategies that by-passed subaltern demands and weakened institutional channels for subordinate-class political representation.
Key Arguments
1. The Oligarchy Framework Needs Supplementation
The article acknowledges the importance of the oligarchy literature (associated particularly with Jeffrey Winters and Richard Robison) in explaining Indonesian politics, but argues it has limitations: it tends to focus on the interests of elite actors without adequately explaining the specific institutional form that political power takes, or how class relations below the oligarchic elite are shaped by crisis dynamics. Authoritarian statism explains not just who has power but how that power is exercised institutionally and why it takes the specific form it does at particular historical moments.
2. Neo-Liberal Crisis and the Legitimacy Fix
A central argument is that authoritarian statism emerged not from a position of confidence or stability, but from a state increasingly beset by internal crises — contradictions between the process of neo-liberalisation and the interests of the dominant power bloc. The author identifies two key crises: the crisis of capital accumulation (stagnant wages, jobless growth, failure to industrialise beyond raw material extraction, inequality) and the crisis of political legitimacy (growing popular dissatisfaction as the promises of reformasi went unfulfilled). Authoritarian statism, masked as technocratic populism, was the state's attempted "legitimacy fix".
3. Downstream Industrialisation as a Growth Strategy
The article analyses nickel downstream industrialisation — Jokowi's flagship policy of banning nickel ore exports to force processing into higher-value products on Indonesian soil — as a key case of authoritarian statist governance in practice. While this policy generated investment, manufacturing employment, and significant GDP contributions, it was designed and implemented through executive-controlled technocratic bodies that excluded labour, environmental, and community input. The downstream industrialisation strategy deepened the power of specific oligarchic actors (connected to nickel processing concessions) while the broader distribution of benefits to workers and communities remained highly constrained. Labour relations in nickel processing zones have been marked by low wages, poor conditions, resistance to unionisation, and the extensive use of Chinese contract labour that displaced Indonesian workers.
4. Infrastructure Financing and Financialisation
The author analyses Jokowi's massive infrastructure programme — including toll roads, railways, dams, and the new capital city Nusantara — through the lens of financialisation. The infrastructure build-out was financed significantly through state-owned enterprise debt, often involving public-private partnerships and blended finance instruments that committed future government revenue streams and tied the state's fiscal position to the interests of financial capital and connected contractors. This financialisation created a structural alignment between the state's fiscal sustainability and the interests of oligarchic capital — deepening the political economy of authoritarian statism by making the state increasingly dependent on and responsive to the preferences of financial and construction capital.
5. Technocratic Populism as Masking Mechanism
The author develops the concept of "technocratic populism" to describe the discursive strategy through which authoritarian statism was presented to the Indonesian public. Jokowi's public persona — the humble furniture entrepreneur from Solo, a figure of ordinary folk ("wong cilik") — provided a powerful populist legitimating narrative. This was combined with technocratic governance: the concentration of economic policy in expert bodies insulated from democratic pressure, presented as neutral, evidence-based, and in the national interest. The combination allowed genuinely popular policies (rural infrastructure, digital financial inclusion, social protection programmes) to coexist with structural economic governance that served oligarchic interests.
6. The Crisis Is Not Resolved
The article concludes that the growth strategies of authoritarian statism — downstream industrialisation and infrastructure financing — have not resolved the underlying neo-liberal crisis. They have contributed to GDP growth and investment but have not dealt with inequality, stagnant wages, or jobless growth. The August 2025 Indonesian protests, which disrupted Jokowi's successor Prabowo Subianto's administration in its early months, reflected the accumulated pressures of the politics of disincorporation: the fracturing of the state's capacity to manage class conflict through the growth strategies and legitimacy mechanisms of the Jokowi period.
Significance
The article is notable for bringing Poulantzian state theory into dialogue with the Indonesian political economy literature and for its class-analytical approach to understanding the politics of authoritarianism. It argues that to understand authoritarian governance in formally democratic contexts like Indonesia, we need frameworks that can account for the structural imperatives of capital accumulation, crisis dynamics in neo-liberal political economies, and the institutional forms through which states manage class conflict and maintain legitimacy during periods of economic contradiction.
Open Access article — full text available at tandfonline.com. Part of the JCA feature section "Oligarchs, Authoritarianism, and Development in Indonesia," Vol. 56, Issue 3, 2026.