[JCA] Pathways to Dictatorship and Democracy: Indonesia and Barrington Moore*
.
Source: Journal of Contemporary Asia | Published: 2026-10-09
Category: 정권·선거 변동 | Keywords: democracy, indonesia
Found the actual article content (author, abstract, context). Note for transparency: the "Summary/abstract" field in the task brief was blank, so I retrieved the real abstract and author details via web search (journalofcontemporaryasia.wordpress.com, ResearchGate, Tandfonline TOC listings) rather than inventing them. The article is written below, grounded in that verified content.
Debates over whether development assistance and institutional reform can durably dislodge entrenched power structures have returned to the center of ODA and political economy scholarship, and Richard Robison's commentary "Pathways to Dictatorship and Democracy: Indonesia and Barrington Moore," published in the Journal of Contemporary Asia on 16 July 2026 as an open-access contribution to the journal's "Looking Back, Going Forward" series, arrives at a moment when donors and researchers alike are reassessing why technocratic reform packages in rentier and resource-dependent states so often fail to produce the liberal-democratic outcomes modernization theory once promised. Robison, long associated with what the journal itself tags as the "Murdoch School" of Indonesian political economy and now affiliated with the Asia Institute at the University of Melbourne in Australia, frames his essay as an intellectual retrospective: he recounts that his engagement with Barrington Moore's Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy began while he was writing about the rise of Soeharto's New Order regime in Indonesia in the early 1970s, and that this encounter opened an analytical path beyond the Cold War-era modernization theory that dominated the field at the time. This genealogy matters for an institute like IOCSS because it situates a landmark theoretical choice in a concrete national case, giving contemporary analysts of civil society and governance a traceable origin point for a still-influential school of thought on Southeast Asian political economy.
The substance of Robison's commentary turns on two arguments that he identifies as central to his life's work on Indonesia. First, he contends that modern capitalist society in Indonesia was not shaped by a bourgeois revolution from below, nor by a revolution from above driven by a centralized administrative state, nor by the supposedly universal forces of market efficiency; instead, it was shaped by and within a system of oligarchic domination embedded in a rentier state. Second, and more consequential for policy audiences, he argues that this system of rule could not be changed at will through technocratic fiat, institutional reform, or even economic crises, because it constitutes a social order with its own powerful vested interests capable of colonizing and harnessing democratic and market institutions for its own reproduction. These two claims directly challenge the assumption, common in both classical modernization theory and much contemporary governance-reform literature, that formal democratic transitions or structural adjustment can neutralize entrenched elites simply by changing the rules of the game; Robison's Indonesia-based reading of Moore instead treats oligarchic power as adaptive, able to absorb reformist shocks rather than be dissolved by them.
Read against broader regional and global trends, Robison's argument resonates with a wider body of scholarship on rentier states and oligarchic capitalism across Southeast Asia and beyond, and it helps explain a pattern observers of ODA and democratization have long struggled with: countries that undergo formal democratic transitions, as Indonesia did after 1998, but whose underlying coalitions of rent-seeking capital, bureaucratic power and political patronage persist largely intact. Because the commentary situates itself explicitly in dialogue with Moore's comparative-historical method — the same method Theda Skocpol famously subjected to critical review in 1973 — it also signals a renewed interest within the Journal of Contemporary Asia's "Looking Back, Going Forward" series in revisiting foundational comparative-historical frameworks rather than treating them as settled. For researchers tracking civil society and political economy across Asia, this matters because it reframes "democratization" not as a single threshold event but as an ongoing contest over whether oligarchic interests can be forced out of, or merely accommodate themselves to, newly democratic institutions.
The policy implications for development and governance practitioners are significant precisely because Robison's claim is a direct rebuttal to the premise underlying many ODA-funded institutional-reform and good-governance programs: that strengthening formal democratic and market institutions is sufficient to produce accountable governance. If, as Robison argues from the Indonesian case, a rentier oligarchic order can colonize and harness exactly those institutions — elections, courts, regulatory bodies, markets — rather than be disciplined by them, then donor theories of change premised on institutional strengthening alone require a sharper diagnostic of who actually captures the benefits of reform. This is a research-significant point as much as a policy one: it suggests that evaluators of ODA-funded democracy and governance programs in rentier or resource-rich recipient states should build political-economy mapping of oligarchic coalitions into program design and evaluation frameworks, rather than treating weak institutions as a technical gap to be closed through capacity-building alone.
Looking forward, Robison's commentary is valuable to practitioners and researchers less as a set of new empirical findings about contemporary Indonesia than as a disciplined restatement, from someone who has tracked the Indonesian case since the Soeharto-era New Order, of why comparative-historical frameworks like Moore's remain indispensable tools for interpreting durable power structures that survive formal regime change. For IOCSS's own work on civil society and ODA in rentier and semi-rentier states, the piece is a useful reminder to distinguish, in both research design and program evaluation, between democratization understood as institutional form and democratization understood as a redistribution of underlying social power — a distinction Robison's reading of Moore via four decades of Indonesian political economy insists cannot be collapsed into one.