[JCA] Pathways to Dictatorship and Democracy: Indonesia and Barrington Moore*
.
Source: Journal of Contemporary Asia | Published: 2026-10-06
Category: 정권·선거 변동 | Keywords: democracy, indonesia
No existing skill in the available list (oda-master-writer/oda-word-writer/oda-hwpx-writer/kofih-consulting-proposal, oda-ppt-design, plaud-meeting-report, call-meeting-records) covers writing an analytical commentary on an academic journal article for IOCSS — those skills govern ODA proposals, presentation decks, meeting reports, and call-record citations, not scholarly article commentary. Per the instruction, I'm flagging that no matching skill exists and proceeding directly.
Here is the article:
Global anxieties about democratic backsliding have renewed scholarly interest in the deep structural conditions that produce durable democracies versus durable authoritarian regimes, and Indonesia occupies a privileged position in this debate as the world's third-largest democracy and the most populous Muslim-majority nation to have undergone a full authoritarian-to-democratic transition since 1998. A new article in the Journal of Contemporary Asia, titled "Pathways to Dictatorship and Democracy: Indonesia and Barrington Moore," revisits this transition not through the lens of contemporary electoral politics but through the classical comparative-historical sociology of Barrington Moore, whose 1966 landmark study Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy sought to explain why some agrarian societies evolved toward parliamentary democracy while others collapsed into fascism or communist revolution. That the journal chose to frame Indonesia's trajectory through Moore's framework in 2026 signals that comparative historical sociology retains explanatory power for understanding why some post-authoritarian states consolidate democratic institutions while others regress, a question of acute relevance as Indonesia itself navigates the post-Jokowi political order under President Prabowo Subianto.
Moore's original thesis held that the class character of agrarian transformation — specifically whether landed elites commercialized agriculture through labor-repressive methods or ceded ground to an independent commercial bourgeoisie and peasantry — shaped the balance of class coalitions that later determined a nation's political pathway: liberal democracy, reactionary fascism, or peasant-based communist revolution. Applying this framework to Indonesia requires grappling with a case Moore himself did not analyze, since his comparative universe centered on England, France, the United States, Germany, Japan, China, and India. By extending the model to Indonesia, the article in the Journal of Contemporary Asia implicitly tests whether Moore's European- and East Asian-derived categories can accommodate a Southeast Asian trajectory shaped by Dutch colonial plantation capitalism, the nationalist mobilization under Sukarno, the mass violence and military-dominated developmentalism of Suharto's New Order from 1966 to 1998, and the subsequent reformasi period that produced competitive elections, decentralization, and a free press without fully dismantling oligarchic control over land, resources, and party structures. The title's explicit pairing of "dictatorship and democracy" as pathways rather than fixed endpoints suggests the article treats Indonesia's post-1998 democracy as a contingent outcome of specific class alignments rather than an inevitable product of economic development or international pressure.
This Indonesian case study resonates with broader regional and global patterns documented in the political economy literature on Southeast Asia, where democratic transitions have frequently produced what scholars have called "oligarchic democracy" — formal electoral competition coexisting with concentrated control of land, capital, and state patronage by elites who adapted rather than disappeared after authoritarian collapse. Indonesia's experience sits alongside comparable but distinct trajectories in the Philippines, where post-Marcos democratization similarly preserved landed-family dominance, and in Thailand, where repeated military interventions since the 2014 coup illustrate the fragility of the democratic pathway when agrarian and urban business elites fail to coalesce around constitutional rule. Reviving Moore's class-coalition framework for the Indonesian case therefore offers the Journal of Contemporary Asia's readership a comparative vantage point for understanding why civil society mobilization in Jakarta during the 1998 krismoneter crisis succeeded in toppling Suharto yet did not produce the kind of agrarian or redistributive restructuring that Moore associated with the most robust democratic outcomes in his original seven-country study.
For researchers and practitioners working on official development assistance, civil society strengthening, and democracy promotion, this reframing carries direct significance. Donor institutions and multilateral agencies that have invested in Indonesian governance reform, decentralization programs, and civil society capacity-building since 1998 have often treated democratic consolidation as primarily an institutional-design problem — electoral systems, judicial independence, anti-corruption bodies — rather than a question of underlying class structure and land tenure. Moore's framework, as applied in this Journal of Contemporary Asia article, implies that technical governance assistance addressing institutions alone may be insufficient if the agrarian and commercial class coalitions that originally enabled authoritarian rule under Suharto remain intact within Indonesia's post-reformasi party system and provincial political machines. This has implications for how organizations such as IOCSS evaluate civil society programming in Indonesia and comparable Southeast Asian states, suggesting that assessments of democratic durability should incorporate land tenure patterns, business-political ties, and the social origins of ruling coalitions rather than relying solely on indices of electoral competitiveness or press freedom.
Looking forward, the application of a six-decade-old comparative framework to a contemporary Southeast Asian case illustrates the continuing utility of historical sociology for interpreting present-day political developments, including the 2024 election of Prabowo Subianto — a former Suharto-era general — which many observers have read as a test of whether Indonesia's democratic institutions can constrain figures tied to the authoritarian past. Researchers engaging with the Journal of Contemporary Asia article would do well to extend its Moore-inspired analysis to the question of whether Indonesia's current political trajectory represents consolidation, stagnation, or a slow reversion toward the labor-repressive, military-linked coalition structures that Moore associated with reactionary outcomes elsewhere. For practitioners designing civil society and governance programs, the lesson is that durable democratic pathways require attention to the class foundations of political coalitions, not merely to the formal architecture of elections and institutions, making comparative historical sociology — once considered a tool for explaining Europe's and East Asia's past — newly relevant for anticipating Southeast Asia's democratic future.