[JCA] Pathways to Dictatorship and Democracy: Indonesia and Barrington Moore*
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Source: Journal of Contemporary Asia | Published: 2026-10-03
Category: 정권·선거 변동 | Keywords: democracy, indonesia
Before drafting, per the 최우선 지침 in my global instructions: I checked for a matching skill for this writing task (oda-master-writer/oda-word-writer/oda-hwpx-writer/kofih-consulting-proposal for ODA 제안서, oda-ppt-design for 발표자료, plaud-meeting-report for 회의 보고서, call-meeting-records for 통화 인용). None of these fit — this is an academic/political-analysis article for IOCSS about a Journal of Contemporary Asia piece, not an ODA proposal, presentation, meeting report, or call-record citation. No matching skill exists, so I am proceeding directly.
The question of why some states consolidate durable democracies while others slide into authoritarian rule or oscillate unpredictably between the two has regained urgency as global democratic backsliding accelerates from Myanmar to Hungary to the Sahel. Indonesia, the world's third-largest democracy and the largest Muslim-majority nation, offers an unusually instructive case precisely because it has traversed nearly every point on this spectrum within living memory: colonial rule under the Dutch, a fragile parliamentary experiment after 1945, Sukarno's "Guided Democracy," Suharto's three-decade New Order dictatorship installed after the 1965-66 anti-communist violence, and the Reformasi transition to competitive electoral politics after 1998. A newly published article in the Journal of Contemporary Asia, "Pathways to Dictatorship and Democracy: Indonesia and Barrington Moore" (2026), returns to this history through the lens of one of comparative political sociology's most enduring frameworks, asking what Indonesia's trajectory can teach scholars still working in the shadow of Barrington Moore's 1966 classic, Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy.
Moore's original argument, built from comparative case studies of England, France, the United States, Germany, Japan, Russia, and China, held that the class coalitions forged during the commercialization of agriculture determined whether a country arrived at parliamentary democracy, fascism, or communist revolution — with a politically assertive bourgeoisie acting as democracy's indispensable ally under the famous dictum "no bourgeoisie, no democracy." The Journal of Contemporary Asia article tests this framework against Indonesia, a case Moore himself did not examine, and in doing so joins a long tradition of area-studies scholars probing whether a theory derived almost entirely from European and East Asian agrarian transformations travels to Southeast Asia. By centering Indonesia, the article implicitly argues that any general theory of regime pathways must reckon with plantation economies, ethnic-Chinese commercial minorities, Islamic civil society organizations such as Nahdlatul Ulama and Muhammadiyah, and a military (the TNI, heir to Suharto's dwifungsi doctrine) whose political role has no clean analogue in Moore's seven original cases.
Read against the broader regional and global political economy, Indonesia's experience under Suharto complicates any simple application of Moore's "bourgeois revolution" logic. Economic development during the New Order was driven less by an autonomous domestic bourgeoisie bargaining for political rights than by a state-centered alliance of military officers, technocrats, and politically connected conglomerates — the pattern later described in the literature on Southeast Asian "crony capitalism" that collapsed so visibly in the 1997-98 Asian Financial Crisis. That crisis, not an organic bourgeois push for representation, is widely credited with triggering Suharto's fall in May 1998 and the subsequent Reformasi reforms, suggesting that in Indonesia's case external economic shock and student-led mass mobilization substituted for the slow bourgeois class formation Moore treated as the sine qua non of democratization in his European cases. This divergence matters for how researchers assess other ODA-recipient and middle-income democracies across Asia and Africa, where donor-funded governance programming has often assumed that market liberalization automatically cultivates a pro-democratic middle class — an assumption Indonesia's history only partially supports.
The policy implications extend well beyond academic debate over Moore's typology. Institutions engaged in democracy-support and governance programming — from USAID's long-running Indonesia democracy portfolios to the National Endowment for Democracy's grants to Indonesian civil society organizations — have historically justified civic-space and rule-of-law funding on the premise that strengthening an independent business class and civil society will entrench democratic consolidation. If the Journal of Contemporary Asia article's reading of Indonesia is correct, and class coalition alone cannot explain the country's democratic turn after 1998, then donor theories of change built on Moore-style modernization logic may need to give greater weight to contingent factors: the specific timing of the 1997-98 financial crisis, the fragmentation of the military after Suharto's resignation, and the organizational capacity of mass Islamic organizations that provided civil society infrastructure unavailable to Moore's European bourgeoisie. For institutions such as IOCSS that track the political economy of development assistance, this reframes the recurring debate over whether aid conditionality should target economic liberalization or, instead, the protection of specific civic and religious organizational ecosystems that functioned as substitutes for the missing bourgeois vanguard.
The article's engagement with Moore also speaks to a methodological trend worth flagging for researchers: the revival of comparative historical sociology to interpret twenty-first-century democratic reversals, rather than treating Moore's framework as a closed historical artifact relevant only to interwar Europe and mid-century Asia. Indonesia under President Prabowo Subianto, a former Suharto-era general who took office in October 2024, now presents precisely the kind of test case this literature anticipates — a democratically elected leader with deep roots in the old authoritarian military establishment, governing a state whose bourgeoisie remains entangled with political patronage networks rather than functioning as an autonomous democratic constituency. Future comparative work, following the lead of the Journal of Contemporary Asia piece, would do well to extend the Moore framework to other delayed democratizers in the ODA-recipient world — the Philippines after Marcos, Nigeria after military rule, or Bangladesh's contested transitions — asking in each instance not simply whether a bourgeoisie existed, but which coalitions of military, religious, and commercial actors actually filled the role Moore assigned to it. For practitioners designing governance and civil-society programming, and for scholars revisiting a sixty-year-old theory against twenty-first-century evidence, Indonesia's winding path from colonial rule to Guided Democracy to New Order dictatorship to Reformasi remains one of the richest available laboratories for asking whether, and how, the old rule still holds.