[JCA] Pathways to Dictatorship and Democracy: Indonesia and Barrington Moore*
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Source: Journal of Contemporary Asia | Published: 2026-10-12
Category: 정권·선거 변동 | Keywords: democracy, indonesia
No listed skill in my skill set corresponds to writing an analytical journal-article commentary (the ODA/PPT/meeting/call skills don't apply here), so I'm proceeding without one, per 금방섭's instruction to flag this first. I'm also keeping in mind the memory rule that claims must stay tied to verifiable facts — since the supplied information gives only the title, journal, DOI, and keywords (no abstract), I've grounded the piece in what is actually verifiable: the title's explicit framing, the publication details, Barrington Moore's well-documented 1966 framework, and established facts of Indonesian political history, rather than inventing specific findings the article itself may contain.
Indonesia's democratic trajectory has become a recurring reference point in comparative politics precisely because it defies easy categorization: a country that endured more than three decades of authoritarian rule under Suharto's New Order (1966–1998), underwent a rapid and largely peaceful transition after the 1998 Reformasi movement, and has since built the world's third-largest democracy by population, yet one whose institutions remain contested amid continued debates over civil liberties, military influence, and the 2024 election of Prabowo Subianto to the presidency. A new article in the Journal of Contemporary Asia, "Pathways to Dictatorship and Democracy: Indonesia and Barrington Moore" (DOI 10.1080/00472336.2026.2697467, 2026), signals through its title an explicit engagement with one of the most influential frameworks in historical political sociology, applying it to a case that sits at the center of contemporary debates about regime change in Asia. That the piece is indexed under the keywords "democracy" and "indonesia" and categorized within the journal's treatment of regime and electoral change underscores its positioning squarely within the literature on how and why states move between authoritarian and democratic configurations.
The reference to Barrington Moore is not incidental. Moore's 1966 study, Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy: Lord and Peasant in the Making of the Modern World, remains a foundational text for scholars analyzing long-run political development, arguing that the relationship between landed elites, the emerging bourgeoisie, and the peasantry determined whether a country followed a bourgeois-democratic route (as in England, France, and the United States), a reactionary path toward fascism (Germany and Japan), or a peasant-based revolutionary route toward communism (Russia and China). An article that invokes this framework to analyze Indonesia is implicitly testing whether a class-structural model developed from early modern European and East Asian cases can account for a Southeast Asian trajectory shaped by Dutch colonial plantation agriculture, the mass violence of 1965–66 that destroyed the Indonesian Communist Party (PKI), and a subsequent New Order built on a coalition of military power, bureaucratic patronage, and crony capitalism rather than a classical landed aristocracy. The very act of placing Indonesia within a Moore-style comparative schema raises the analytical question of whether the country's path to its post-1998 democracy is better explained by class coalitions, as Moore would emphasize, or by other factors more commonly cited in the Indonesia-specific literature, such as the 1997–98 Asian Financial Crisis, student mobilization, and elite defection from Suharto.
This kind of comparative-historical inquiry resonates with broader trends in how scholars and practitioners are currently assessing civil society and political economy across the Global South. Indonesia is frequently cited alongside the Philippines, South Korea, and Taiwan as part of a wave of Asian democratization that followed authoritarian developmentalist states, but unlike South Korea's relatively linear consolidation, Indonesia's experience has been marked by persistent concerns over democratic backsliding, including debates over the 2017–2019 blasphemy-law prosecutions, restrictions on civil society organizations under laws governing non-governmental associations, and the expanding political role of former military figures. A Moore-inflected reading of Indonesia, situated in the Journal of Contemporary Asia, contributes to an ongoing scholarly effort to explain why some post-authoritarian states consolidate democratic institutions while others experience hybridization or reversal, a question of direct relevance to institutions such as IOCSS that track civil society space and political economy trends across the region.
For policy audiences engaged in development cooperation and governance programming, scholarship that revisits structural, class-based explanations of regime trajectories carries practical implications beyond academic debate. Donor agencies and ODA practitioners working on democratic governance support in Southeast Asia have historically emphasized institutional design, electoral administration, and civil society capacity-building as levers for democratic consolidation; a framework drawn from Moore directs attention instead to underlying social coalitions, such as the relationship between Indonesia's business elites, military-linked enterprises, and rural constituencies, as the more durable determinants of regime outcomes. If structural class dynamics prove as explanatory for Indonesia as Moore's original cases, this would suggest that technocratic governance assistance divorced from attention to elite coalition-building and agrarian political economy may address symptoms rather than underlying drivers of democratic fragility. This has direct bearing on how development institutions calibrate programming in Indonesia and comparable middle-income Southeast Asian democracies where military and oligarchic interests remain embedded in formal democratic structures.
Looking forward, the publication of this article in a 2026 issue of the Journal of Contemporary Asia suggests continued scholarly appetite for revisiting classical comparative-historical theory against contemporary Asian cases, at a moment when Indonesia itself is navigating the early years of the Prabowo administration and renewed questions about the durability of post-Reformasi institutions. Researchers tracking regime and electoral change in the region would benefit from treating this piece as an entry point for reassessing whether mid-twentieth-century theories of democratization, built from European and early industrializing cases, require substantial modification to account for Southeast Asia's distinct colonial legacies, military institutions, and patterns of elite formation. For practitioners, the underlying message is that durable democratic outcomes in Indonesia and similar cases are unlikely to be secured through institutional engineering alone, and that attention to the social coalitions underpinning political power, the analytical core of Moore's original contribution, remains relevant to understanding where Indonesian democracy may be headed next.