[JCA] Pathways to Dictatorship and Democracy: Indonesia and Barrington Moore*
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Source: Journal of Contemporary Asia | Published: 2026-09-30
Category: 정권·선거 변동 | Keywords: democracy, indonesia
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The publication of "Pathways to Dictatorship and Democracy: Indonesia and Barrington Moore" in the Journal of Contemporary Asia arrives at a moment when the durability of democratic institutions across Southeast Asia is once again under scrutiny. Indonesia, the world's third-largest democracy and its largest Muslim-majority nation, has spent the past decade oscillating between consolidation and backsliding: direct presidential elections have been held regularly since 2004, yet the 2024 election of Prabowo Subianto—a former special forces general tied to the authoritarian New Order era—has revived long-standing debates about whether Indonesia's democratic transition ever fully displaced the class and military structures that underpinned Suharto's three-decade rule. By explicitly invoking Barrington Moore in its title, the article signals an attempt to test one of comparative political sociology's most influential frameworks against a case Moore himself never examined in his 1966 landmark study, "Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy: Lord and Peasant in the Making of the Modern World."
Moore's original argument, built from comparative histories of England, France, the United States, China, India, and Japan, held that a country's eventual political trajectory—liberal democracy, fascism, or communist revolution—depended on the class coalitions forged among landed elites, an emerging bourgeoisie, and the peasantry during the transition to commercial agriculture and industrial capitalism. A strong, independent bourgeoisie allied against a landed aristocracy tended to produce parliamentary democracy, as in England; a weak bourgeoisie dependent on a repressive landlord class tended toward fascism, as in Japan and Germany; and a peasant-based revolutionary alliance against both landlords and a fragile bourgeoisie produced communist outcomes, as in China. Applying this lattice to Indonesia requires reckoning with a case Moore's framework does not neatly fit: a colonial-era plantation economy under Dutch rule, a politically massive but ultimately annihilated peasant-based left in the Partai Komunis Indonesia, and a state-dependent commercial class that emerged less from autonomous capital accumulation than from patronage ties to the military and, later, to Suharto's family and cronies.
The 1965–66 mass violence, in which an estimated 500,000 to one million alleged communists and sympathizers were killed and the PKI—then one of the largest communist parties in the world outside the Soviet bloc and China—was destroyed, functions as the pivotal rupture that any Moore-inspired account of Indonesia must confront. That violence cleared the field for Suharto's New Order (1966–1998), a regime that substituted a weak indigenous bourgeoisie with a "state bourgeoisie" of military officers and technocrats, financed through resource extraction and foreign aid rather than through an autonomous capitalist class allied against landed interests. This inverts Moore's classic European sequence: in Indonesia, the state itself displaced the bourgeoisie as the organizing agent of capital, a pattern more familiar from other authoritarian developmental states in Asia than from Moore's original six cases, and one that scholars of Southeast Asian political economy—from studies of Thailand's military-business networks to the Philippines' landed oligarchy—have long used to qualify or extend Moore's thesis beyond its original geographic scope.
The 1997–98 Asian Financial Crisis, which precipitated Suharto's resignation in May 1998 and opened Indonesia's Reformasi era, offers the article's implicit second test case within a single country: a transition to electoral democracy that occurred not through the kind of bourgeois-led coalition Moore associated with England, but through the collapse of a patronage economy under external financial shock, followed by elite pacting among former New Order figures, military factions, and newly mobilized civil society and student movements. This trajectory resonates with broader debates in ODA and democracy-promotion literature about whether donor-supported "third wave" transitions in the 1990s and 2000s—in Indonesia, but also in the Philippines after Marcos and South Korea after its own military-authoritarian period—produced durable bourgeois-democratic settlements or merely reconfigured existing oligarchic networks under a competitive electoral veneer. Indonesia's subsequent decentralization reforms, direct regional elections, and the entrenchment of political dynasties and oligarchic financing of parties suggest the latter is at least a partial answer, a finding with direct relevance for how international donors and multilateral institutions calibrate governance and civil-society support programs in post-authoritarian states.
For researchers and practitioners in development and governance work, an Indonesia-focused revisiting of Moore's framework carries significance beyond area studies. It bears on a live methodological question in comparative political economy: whether class-coalition models built from early-industrializing Western and East Asian cases can travel to postcolonial Southeast Asia, where landed aristocracies were reshaped by colonial extraction rather than organic commercialization, and where military institutions—rather than either landlords or bourgeoisie—became the decisive political actor. Practitioners designing democracy-support or civil-society programming in Indonesia and comparable states would do well to treat the military's institutional interests and the state-dependent business elite's stake in the status quo as structural variables in their own right, rather than residual categories left over from a framework built for Manchester and the Rhineland.
Looking forward, the return of a New Order-linked figure to Indonesia's presidency in 2024, alongside similar patterns of military and dynastic re-entrenchment visible elsewhere in the region, makes the comparative-historical question posed by this article more than an academic exercise. If Moore's central insight—that the class coalitions formed during a critical historical juncture shape political trajectories for generations—holds for Indonesia, then the incomplete rupture with New Order-era elites during Reformasi may help explain the country's current democratic fragility. Future research building on this Journal of Contemporary Asia contribution would benefit from extending the comparison to other Southeast Asian cases with similarly truncated bourgeois classes and militarized state formation, testing whether Moore's typology needs not just application but structural revision to account for twenty-first-century hybrid regimes.