Source: Journal of Contemporary Asia | Published: 2026-09-09
Category: 정권·선거 변동 | Keywords: democracy, indonesia
원문 검색으로 확인한 사실(저자: Richard Robison, Melbourne대 Asia Institute; 직접 인용 포함)을 근거로 아래 분석 기사를 작성했습니다.
Indonesia occupies an unusual place in the comparative politics of democratization: a country that underwent one of the twentieth century's bloodiest anti-communist purges, endured more than three decades of military-backed authoritarian rule under Soeharto's New Order, and then, after 1998, produced one of the more durable electoral democracies in the Muslim-majority world. Yet that democracy has proven strikingly compatible with entrenched elite privilege, patronage politics, and weak accountability. As Southeast Asia's democratic trajectories diverge sharply in the 2020s — with Myanmar's coup, the Philippines' oscillation between reformist and dynastic politics, and Thailand's cycle of coups and constitutional engineering — Indonesia's case offers a crucial test of whether formal democratic transition genuinely dislodges the power structures that authoritarianism built. It is this question that Richard Robison, of the Asia Institute at the University of Melbourne, takes up in "Pathways to Dictatorship and Democracy: Indonesia and Barrington Moore," published in the Journal of Contemporary Asia, by returning to one of comparative political economy's foundational texts to reinterpret Indonesia's twentieth-century trajectory.
Robison's article revisits Barrington Moore's 1966 classic Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy, whose central proposition was that the path a society takes to modernity — liberal democracy, fascism, or communist revolution — is forged in conflicts over power and wealth among landed elites, peasantries, and rising bourgeoisies during the transition to capitalist agriculture. Robison argues that applying this framework to Indonesia requires moving decisively beyond the modernization theory that dominated Cold War-era analysis, which tended to treat authoritarianism as a transitional stage on the way to an inevitable liberal-capitalist endpoint driven by economic growth and an emerging middle class. Instead, Robison contends that Indonesia's modern capitalist society was shaped "by and within a system of oligarchic domination embedded in a rentier state" — a formulation that inverts the modernization narrative. Rather than industrialization producing a bourgeoisie capable of demanding political liberalization, as Moore's English and French cases suggested, Indonesia's capitalist development under and after Soeharto produced "powerful vested interests able to colonise and harness democratic and market institutions." The state's reliance on resource extraction and rent distribution, rather than on a bourgeois revolution or a centralized Weberian administrative apparatus, generated a form of power that proved remarkably adaptable — able to survive not only the fall of the New Order in 1998 but also the subsequent introduction of competitive elections, decentralization, and a free press.
This argument resonates with, and extends, a broader body of scholarship on Indonesian political economy associated with figures such as Robison's own earlier work with Vedi Hadiz on "predatory oligarchy," Jeffrey Winters' analysis of oligarchic power, and Edward Aspinall's studies of clientelism in Indonesian elections. What Robison's return to Moore contributes is a deeper comparative-historical grounding: by situating Indonesia within Moore's typology of pathways to the modern world, he implicitly asks why the archipelago did not follow the "bourgeois revolution" route associated with Britain, France, and the United States, nor the "revolution from above" route associated with Germany and Japan, nor the peasant-based communist route of Russia and China. The 1965–66 mass violence against the Indonesian Communist Party (PKI), often read primarily through a Cold War geopolitical lens, appears in this framework as a foundational moment in class formation — one that eliminated the organized political-economic actor most likely to have contested oligarchic and landed interests, thereby clearing the path for the rentier-oligarchic order that followed. This reframes 1965 not merely as an episode of anti-communist violence but as a structuring event in Indonesia's long-run political economy, with consequences that outlasted the formal end of authoritarian rule.
The article's broader significance lies in what it suggests about the limits of procedural democratization across the Global South more generally. Indonesia is frequently cited in ODA and governance circles as a democratization success story — a large, diverse, Muslim-majority country that avoided the fate of military rule reasserting itself, unlike Thailand or Myanmar, and that has held six consecutive competitive presidential elections since 1999. Robison's Moore-inflected analysis complicates this success narrative by suggesting that electoral competition and formal institutional reform, however genuine, have operated within and through oligarchic structures rather than against them. This has direct relevance for how international development institutions, donor governments, and civil society organizations conceptualize democratic consolidation. Governance indicators that measure the presence of elections, judicial independence on paper, or civil society space can miss the deeper question Moore's framework poses: which social coalitions actually hold power over the state's resources, and whose interests does the resulting order serve? For civil society actors and reform-oriented technocrats operating within Indonesia's anti-corruption agencies, land reform initiatives, or decentralization programs, the implication is sobering — institutional design alone is unlikely to dislodge oligarchic power that has proven adept at "colonising" precisely the reform institutions meant to constrain it.
For researchers and practitioners in the ODA and civil society space, Robison's article is a useful corrective to teleological assumptions embedded in much democracy-promotion discourse, and it invites renewed attention to the political economy foundations — land tenure, resource rents, capital formation, and class coalitions — that Moore treated as decisive nearly six decades ago. It also raises a comparative research agenda: how do oligarchic-rentier pathways of the Indonesian type compare with other Southeast Asian and postcolonial trajectories, and under what conditions, if any, might such structures be destabilized short of the kind of violent rupture Moore associated with historical transitions to democracy or fascism? As Indonesia approaches its next electoral cycles and continues to navigate resource-driven growth strategies, including nickel processing and other extractive investments tied to the global energy transition, Robison's framework suggests that observers should watch not only whether elections remain free and fair, but whether the rents generated by new resource booms continue to entrench the same oligarchic coalitions that captured the state under the New Order. That question — whether democratic institutions can ever escape the political economy that produced them — remains as open in Indonesia today as it was when Moore first posed his comparative puzzle in 1966.
--- **출처**: [Pathways to Dictatorship and Democracy: Indonesia (JCA blog, 2026-07-17)](https://journalofcontemporaryasia.wordpress.com/2026/07/17/pathways-to-dictatorship-and-democracy-indonesia/) — 저자 Richard Robison (University of Melbourne, Asia Institute) 확인. 원문 저널 페이지(tandfonline.com)는 403으로 직접 접근 불가하여 이 블로그 요약과 직접 인용문에 근거해 작성했습니다.