[JCA] Pathways to Dictatorship and Democracy: Indonesia and Barrington Moore*
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Source: Journal of Contemporary Asia | Published: 2026-10-11
Category: 정권·선거 변동 | Keywords: democracy, indonesia
작성 지시를 주셔서 먼저 확인드립니다. 이 요청은 학술 논문 기반 분석 기사(IOCSS 연구노트) 작성으로, CLAUDE.md에 지정된 ODA 제안서/보고서, 발표자료, 회의·미팅 보고서, 통화·회의 기록 인용 스킬 중 어느 것에도 해당하지 않습니다. 맞는 스킬이 없음을 먼저 밝히고, 일반 분석 기사 작성 방식으로 진행하겠습니다.
The question of how societies travel from authoritarian rule toward democratic governance — or fail to — has regained urgency across Southeast Asia, where Indonesia stands as the region's largest democracy and a test case for whether post-authoritarian transitions can endure under economic and political strain. A forthcoming article in the Journal of Contemporary Asia, titled "Pathways to Dictatorship and Democracy: Indonesia and Barrington Moore*" (DOI 10.1080/00472336.2026.2697467, 2026), returns to this question by placing Indonesia's trajectory in conversation with Barrington Moore's classic comparative-historical framework. The timing is notable: Indonesia in 2024 completed a presidential transition from Joko Widodo to Prabowo Subianto, a former general once barred from entering the United States over human rights allegations tied to the Suharto era, raising fresh questions about whether Indonesia's democratic consolidation since the 1998 Reformasi is durable or reversible. For an institute like IOCSS, which tracks civil society and political economy across the Global South, an article that re-examines Indonesia through Moore's lens offers a useful anchor for assessing how structural and class-based explanations of regime change hold up against a non-European case.
Barrington Moore's 1966 work, Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy, argued that the balance of class forces — landlords, peasants, and a commercializing bourgeoisie — shaped whether a country's modernization produced parliamentary democracy, fascism, or communist revolution. Applying that framework to Indonesia is analytically demanding because Indonesia's path did not follow the Western European sequence Moore studied; instead, the archipelago moved from Dutch colonial rule, through Sukarno's Guided Democracy, into Suharto's three-decade New Order (1966–1998), and only then into the post-1998 democratic period marked by direct presidential elections, a free press, and a proliferation of political parties including Golkar, PDI-P, and Gerindra. By placing Indonesia and Moore's categories side by side, the article under review implicitly tests whether a framework built on agrarian class conflict in England, France, Germany, and the United States can explain outcomes in a plantation-and-smallholder economy shaped by colonial extraction, military patronage, and, later, resource-export dependence on palm oil and coal. The article's framing in the "정권·선거 변동" (regime and electoral change) category suggests its core contribution lies in tracing how shifting class and institutional coalitions — rather than elite pacts alone — account for Indonesia's oscillation between authoritarian consolidation and democratic opening.
This re-engagement with Moore fits a broader pattern in comparative politics scholarship on Southeast Asia, where researchers have increasingly revisited structuralist theories to explain why democratization in the region has often stalled short of full consolidation. Indonesia is frequently cited alongside the Philippines and Thailand as a case where democratic institutions survived formal transition but remain vulnerable to "democratic backsliding" — a term scholars have applied to developments such as the 2017 criminalization of Jakarta's then-governor Basuki Tjahaja Purnama (Ahok) on blasphemy charges, and the 2024 return of military-linked figures to the presidency through Prabowo's election. An article that reaches back to Moore rather than relying solely on newer "hybrid regime" or "competitive authoritarianism" literature signals an effort within the Journal of Contemporary Asia to ground current debates about Indonesian democracy in longer-run structural analysis, connecting agrarian history, oligarchic business interests, and military institutional legacies to contemporary electoral outcomes.
For researchers and policymakers engaged with official development assistance and civil society support in Indonesia, this kind of structural analysis carries direct implications. Donor programming — including governance and civil-society strengthening components historically supported by institutions such as USAID, the Asia Foundation, and various European development agencies operating in Indonesia — has often been designed around short-term institutional benchmarks: election administration, judicial reform, anti-corruption bodies such as Indonesia's KPK (Corruption Eradication Commission). A Moore-inspired reading would caution that such interventions address symptoms rather than the underlying coalition of landed, military, and conglomerate interests that Moore's framework identifies as decisive for regime trajectories. If the article's analysis holds, it implies that civil society support strategies focused narrowly on procedural democracy — voter education, NGO capacity-building — may be insufficient without attention to the political economy of land ownership, natural-resource concessions, and military-business ties that have persisted from the Suharto period into the present.
The article's republication of Moore in an Indonesian context also speaks to a renewed scholarly interest in testing mid-twentieth-century comparative-historical sociology against non-Western cases, a trend visible in recent Journal of Contemporary Asia issues addressing regime change across the region. This matters for IOCSS's broader research agenda on global political economy because it suggests that explanatory frameworks developed from European and North American historical experience require careful adaptation — not wholesale rejection — when applied to postcolonial states with different class formations and state-building sequences. Indonesia's experience, moving from Sukarno through Suharto to the post-1998 multiparty system and now to a Prabowo presidency staffed partly by New Order-era figures, offers a rich empirical record for testing whether structural class analysis or elite-pact and institutionalist accounts better predict democratic durability.
Looking forward, practitioners monitoring Indonesia's political trajectory should watch how Prabowo's government manages the coalition of business, military, and party interests that underpinned his 2024 victory, since Moore's framework would treat the composition of that coalition as more predictive of democratic durability than formal constitutional safeguards alone. Researchers working on comparative regime transitions would benefit from using this article as a prompt to revisit other Southeast Asian cases — the Philippines under the Marcos family's return to power, or Thailand's recurring cycle of coups and elections — through the same structural lens, rather than treating each country's democratic backsliding as an isolated, idiosyncratic event. For an institute tracking civil society and ODA effectiveness, the enduring lesson from reapplying Moore to Indonesia is that donor and research strategies aiming to strengthen democratic resilience should engage more directly with the underlying distribution of economic power, not only with the electoral and legal institutions that sit atop it.