[JCA] Pathways to Dictatorship and Democracy: Indonesia and Barrington Moore*
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Source: Journal of Contemporary Asia | Published: 2026-09-28
Category: 정권·선거 변동 | Keywords: democracy, indonesia
확인 결과 저자는 Richard Robison(멜버른대 Asia Institute)이며, 이 글은 Journal of Contemporary Asia의 "Looking Back, Going Forward" 시리즈로 2026년 7월 17일 게재된 오픈액세스 논문입니다. 이 사실관계를 바탕으로 기사를 작성했습니다.
Indonesia's political trajectory since the fall of Soeharto in 1998 continues to test one of the oldest questions in comparative political economy: whether capitalist development reliably produces democratic outcomes, or whether it can just as easily entrench authoritarian rule. Richard Robison's article "Pathways to Dictatorship and Democracy: Indonesia and Barrington Moore," published in the Journal of Contemporary Asia as part of its "Looking Back, Going Forward" retrospective series on 17 July 2026, revisits this question by tracing his own decades-long engagement with Indonesia back to the early 1970s, when he began writing about the consolidation of Soeharto's New Order regime. For an institute such as IOCSS, which tracks how ODA, civil society, and political economy intersect across the Global South, Robison's reflection matters because Indonesia remains a bellwether case: a G20 economy, ASEAN's largest state, and a country whose post-authoritarian reform experience is routinely cited by donors and multilateral institutions as a template for democratic transition elsewhere in Southeast Asia.
At the core of Robison's argument, as summarized in the Journal of Contemporary Asia's own account of the piece, is the claim that his analysis of Indonesia was reshaped by his discovery of Barrington Moore's 1966 classic, The Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy, which offered an alternative to the modernization theory dominant during the Cold War. Rather than treating Indonesian capitalism as a delayed or imperfect version of Western bourgeois development, Robison argues that it emerged through "oligarchic domination embedded in a rentier state," a pathway to modernity fundamentally different from the bourgeois revolutions or state-led industrial transformations that Moore identified as generating either democracy or dictatorship in Europe and Asia. This is a significant reframing: instead of asking whether Indonesia is converging toward a liberal-democratic endpoint, Robison's Moore-inflected analysis asks what kind of social order capitalism actually produced there, and why that order proved so durable across the transition from authoritarian rule to formal electoral democracy.
The article's most consequential claim concerns entrenchment. Robison describes the oligarchic order forged under the New Order as constituting "a social order with its own powerful vested interests," one capable of colonizing both market institutions and the democratic institutions that followed 1998, rendering it resistant to technocratic reform packages and largely undisturbed even by major economic shocks such as the 1997-98 Asian Financial Crisis that formally ended Soeharto's rule. This argument situates Robison within what the journal's own tagging identifies as the "Murdoch School" of Southeast Asian political economy, a body of scholarship associated with Murdoch University that emphasizes class formation, rent-seeking, and oligarchic power over institutionalist or modernization-based accounts of regime change. For readers tracking regime and electoral variation across Asia, the implication is that formal democratization, elections, party competition, decentralization, can coexist indefinitely with an underlying oligarchic settlement, rather than representing a decisive rupture from it.
Read against broader regional trends, Robison's Indonesia case resonates with patterns visible elsewhere in Southeast Asia and beyond, where donor-funded governance and anti-corruption programming has often assumed that market liberalization and electoral competition would erode entrenched rent-seeking networks. Indonesia's experience, as reconstructed through Moore's framework, suggests the opposite causal direction is at least equally plausible: that a rentier oligarchy can actively shape and absorb the very market and democratic institutions that reformers intended as constraints on it. This has direct relevance for how ODA-funded civil society and governance programs are designed, since interventions premised on a linear modernization logic, more markets and more elections yielding less oligarchic capture, may misdiagnose the structural durability of vested interests that Robison identifies as constitutive of, rather than incidental to, Indonesia's capitalist development.
For policy audiences and researchers, the significance of Robison's retrospective lies less in offering new empirical data than in restating, with the benefit of over five decades of observation beginning with his early-1970s writing on the New Order, why structural political-economy frameworks like Moore's retain analytical purchase in contemporary Southeast Asia. Practitioners designing governance, anti-corruption, or decentralization programming in Indonesia and comparable oligarchic-rentier settings should treat formal democratic consolidation as a necessary but insufficient indicator of reduced elite capture, since Robison's account implies that vested interests can persist and adapt across regime type. For researchers, the piece is a reminder that Barrington Moore's mid-century comparative framework, developed from cases of English, French, American, Chinese, Japanese, and Indian development, still offers interpretive leverage for a Southeast Asian case that modernization theory alone struggled to explain. As Indonesia continues to navigate questions of democratic backsliding, natural-resource rents, and oligarchic influence over its post-Soeharto institutions, Robison's Moore-inflected synthesis, published now as a considered look back across his own career-length engagement with the country, offers both a caution against linear transition narratives and a methodological invitation to re-examine other Southeast Asian cases through the same lens of class formation and state-capitalist pathways.