[JCA] Pathways to Dictatorship and Democracy: Indonesia and Barrington Moore*
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Source: Journal of Contemporary Asia | Published: 2026-10-10
Category: 정권·선거 변동 | Keywords: democracy, indonesia
Before writing, I checked the available skills against your writing-trigger rule (ODA 제안서/보고서, 발표자료, 회의·미팅 보고서, 통화 기록 인용) — none of them cover this task, which is a scholarly analytical article about an academic journal piece on Indonesian political economy. No matching skill exists, so per your instruction I'm flagging that and proceeding directly.
Indonesia's trajectory since the fall of Suharto in 1998 has become one of the most closely watched test cases in comparative democratization studies, and the publication of "Pathways to Dictatorship and Democracy: Indonesia and Barrington Moore" in the Journal of Contemporary Asia (2026, DOI 10.1080/00472336.2026.2697467) arrives at a moment when that trajectory is again under scrutiny. The world's third-largest democracy and Southeast Asia's largest economy elected Prabowo Subianto, a former general with a record tied to the New Order's security apparatus, as president in 2024, inheriting the political machinery built by his predecessor Joko Widodo. Against this backdrop, a scholarly return to Barrington Moore's classic comparative-historical framework is timely: it forces analysts to ask whether Indonesia's post-1998 democratic opening rested on the kind of class foundations Moore identified as necessary for durable democracy, or whether the country's current drift toward concentrated executive power and a resurgent military role reflects structural weaknesses that were always present beneath the electoral surface.
Moore's 1966 study, Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy, argued that the political destination of a modernizing agrarian society depends on the balance of power among landed elites, an emerging commercial or industrial bourgeoisie, and the peasantry: a strong independent bourgeoisie able to break landlord power produced liberal democracy (England, France, the United States); an alliance of capital with a still-dominant landed class produced fascism (Germany, Japan); and a peasant-based revolutionary upheaval produced communist dictatorship (Russia, China). Applying this typology to Indonesia is analytically awkward precisely because Indonesia fits none of Moore's three routes cleanly. Dutch colonial rule left behind a weak and dependent indigenous commercial class rather than an autonomous bourgeoisie; Sukarno's Guided Democracy (1959–1965) collapsed not into bourgeois revolution but into mass violence and the consolidation of military-backed authoritarianism; and Suharto's New Order (1966–1998) built a developmental state in which capital accumulation was directed by a military-bureaucratic elite rather than an independent business class. The article's engagement with Moore is significant because it uses Indonesia as a case that stresses the limits of a framework built on European and East Asian cases, asking what happens when democratization in 1998 arrives without the social-class rupture Moore treated as a precondition.
This question connects directly to wider debates about Southeast Asia's divergent regime trajectories. Thailand's repeated cycle of elected governments and military coups, the Philippines' oligarchic democracy under dynastic political families, and Myanmar's 2021 reversal into outright military rule all illustrate the region's uneven relationship between capitalist development and liberal politics, and each invites comparison with the Indonesian case in ways that echo Samuel Huntington's account of a global "third wave" of democratization that was always more fragile in agrarian, military-penetrated societies than in Moore's original European sample. For an institute such as IOCSS, which tracks the civil society and ODA dimensions of political change, the Indonesian case is also instructive because Reformasi in 1998 was driven substantially by student movements, labor organizing, and an increasingly assertive NGO sector operating alongside, and sometimes in tension with, international donor engagement — a civil society mobilization that substituted, in Moore's terms, for the missing bourgeois agent of democratization. That substitution helps explain both the achievements and the fragility of Indonesian democracy: an electoral system was installed relatively quickly after 1998, but the underlying coalition of oligarchic business interests, regional elites, and the military that Suharto's New Order had cultivated was never fully dismantled.
The policy and research implications of revisiting Moore through the Indonesian case extend beyond academic debate. For donor agencies and democracy-assistance programs that have invested in Indonesian civil society and electoral institutions since 1998, the framework implies that formal elections and institutional design are necessary but insufficient without corresponding shifts in class power — a caution relevant to current concerns about the weakening of Indonesia's Corruption Eradication Commission (KPK) and the expanding political role of active and retired military officers under the Prabowo government. Scholars working on the political economy of ODA and development assistance should take from this analysis that programs aimed at strengthening democratic institutions in agrarian or newly industrializing societies cannot treat Moore's European routes as a template to be replicated; instead, they must account for hybrid configurations in which military, bureaucratic, and oligarchic capital interests coexist with electoral competition. This has direct bearing on how institutions such as IOCSS evaluate civil society resilience in Southeast Asia, since the durability of democratic gains depends less on the frequency of elections than on whether independent social forces can constrain the landed, military, and business coalitions that Moore identified as democracy's historical adversaries.
Looking forward, researchers and practitioners following Indonesia should watch closely how the coalition between Prabowo and the Widodo-era political network evolves ahead of the 2029 elections, since this alliance represents precisely the kind of elite accommodation Moore's framework treats as a precursor to democratic erosion rather than consolidation. The Journal of Contemporary Asia's publication of this Moore-Indonesia analysis in 2026 suggests renewed scholarly appetite for testing classic structural theories of regime change against contemporary Southeast Asian evidence, and comparative extensions to the Philippines and Thailand would further clarify whether Indonesia's trajectory is an outlier or representative of a broader regional pattern. For practitioners engaged in democracy support and civil society programming, the enduring lesson from Moore, as refracted through the Indonesian case, is that institutional reform divorced from shifts in underlying class and military power is unlikely to produce the durable liberal democracy that formal elections alone promise.