Source: Journal of Contemporary Asia | Published: 2026-09-13
Category: 정권·선거 변동 | Keywords: democracy, indonesia
Indonesia's political trajectory over the past half-century offers one of the most consequential natural experiments in the study of regime transitions, and few analytical frameworks have proven as durable in that debate as Barrington Moore's account of the social origins of dictatorship and democracy. Moore's 1966 thesis—that a country's eventual political destination is shaped decisively by the class coalitions that emerge from agrarian transformation, particularly the fate of the landed aristocracy, the peasantry, and an emergent bourgeoisie—was formulated with reference to Britain, France, the United States, Germany, Japan, China, and India. Its silence on Southeast Asia has long been a notable gap, one that becomes increasingly urgent to fill as the region's democracies face renewed pressure from illiberal populism, military-linked oligarchy, and personalist consolidation. Applying Moore's comparative-historical method to Indonesia, as this article in the Journal of Contemporary Asia undertakes, is therefore not simply an academic exercise in theory-testing; it is an attempt to understand why Southeast Asia's largest democracy has followed neither the clean democratic consolidation Moore associated with a strong independent bourgeoisie nor the fascist or communist pathways he traced to landlord-peasant configurations elsewhere.
The analytical value of reading Indonesia through a Moorean lens lies in the country's unusually layered agrarian and colonial history. Dutch colonial extraction produced a plantation economy without a classical landed aristocracy of the European type, while the postcolonial state under Sukarno and then Suharto built political order through a fusion of military patronage, bureaucratic capitalism, and selective incorporation of religious and ethnic Chinese business elites rather than through the kind of commercializing landlord class Moore identified as pivotal to reactionary or revolutionary paths. This divergence from the classical cases is precisely what makes Indonesia a hard case for Moore's framework, and it is likely why an article invoking his name in its title uses Indonesia to interrogate, extend, or partially refute rather than simply confirm the original thesis. The New Order's brand of authoritarian capitalism—developmentalist, military-backed, and reliant on a co-opted rural base rather than an autonomous peasantry or bourgeoisie—suggests a "fourth path" that Moore's tripartite typology (bourgeois democracy, fascism, communist revolution) does not neatly accommodate, and scholars revisiting the framework in Southeast Asian contexts have increasingly argued that oligarchic capture, rather than class revolution or bourgeois ascendancy, better explains both authoritarian durability and the incompleteness of post-1998 democratization.
This line of inquiry resonates strongly with broader debates in the political economy of development across Asia and the Global South. The 1998 collapse of Suharto's regime was widely read at the time as a vindication of modernization theory's expectation that economic growth eventually produces political liberalization, yet the subsequent quarter-century has complicated that narrative considerably. Indonesia's democracy, while procedurally robust—regular elections, a free press, and a vibrant civil society sector—has coexisted with the persistence of oligarchic networks rooted in the very military-business alliances that Suharto cultivated, a pattern that scholars of comparative authoritarianism have documented as "democracy without dealignment." This matters for how researchers and donors think about the relationship between economic development and political liberalization more broadly: the Indonesian case, much like Thailand's cyclical coups or the Philippines' elite-dominated electoralism, suggests that class formation under conditions of dependent or state-led capitalism does not automatically generate the autonomous bourgeois or civil-society actors that classical transition theory presumes. For an institute focused on ODA and civil society, this is a critical corrective: aid and development programming premised on the assumption that economic growth and an expanding middle class will mechanically produce democratic consolidation needs to reckon with the possibility that growth can just as easily entrench oligarchic incumbents who capture both state and market institutions.
The policy implications extend into the design of governance-support and civil-society-strengthening programs funded by bilateral and multilateral donors operating in Indonesia and comparable middle-income democracies. If Moore's framework—updated for the Indonesian case—suggests that the character of elite coalitions formed during earlier developmental phases continues to structure the boundaries of contemporary democratic contestation, then interventions aimed narrowly at electoral administration, judicial reform, or NGO capacity-building may address symptoms rather than the underlying structural conditions that reproduce oligarchic dominance. This has direct relevance for how ODA is allocated toward "democratic governance" sectors: donors and civil society organizations working in Indonesia, and in structurally similar contexts such as the Philippines, Bangladesh, or parts of Sub-Saharan Africa where post-independence militaries and landed or resource elites shaped early state formation, may need to place greater emphasis on anti-oligarchy and anti-corruption architecture, land and asset redistribution legacies, and the independence of business elites from state patronage networks as preconditions for the kind of durable liberal-democratic consolidation that formal institution-building alone cannot guarantee.
Looking ahead, the renewed scholarly interest in applying comparative-historical political economy to Southeast Asia signals a productive convergence between classical macro-historical sociology and contemporary area studies, one that researchers at institutes like IOCSS should track closely as Indonesia navigates the Prabowo presidency, ongoing military reintegration into civilian governance structures, and continued debates over decentralization and resource-sector reform. For practitioners designing governance and civil-society programming, the lesson embedded in a Moorean reading of Indonesia is that democratic durability cannot be assessed solely through procedural indicators; it requires attention to the deeper class and elite configurations inherited from earlier developmental eras. For researchers, the Indonesian case offers fertile ground for further comparative work that tests whether other Southeast Asian and postcolonial trajectories—shaped by military-bureaucratic capitalism rather than classical landlord-peasant dynamics—require new theoretical categories beyond Moore's original triad, a task that will likely define the next generation of comparative historical scholarship on regime change in the developing world.