[JCA] Pathways to Dictatorship and Democracy: Indonesia and Barrington Moore*
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Source: Journal of Contemporary Asia | Published: 2026-10-14
Category: 정권·선거 변동 | Keywords: democracy, indonesia
먼저 지침에 따라 확인하면, 이번 요청(학술 논문 기반 분석 기사 작성)에 맞는 스킬은 없습니다 — ODA 제안서/보고서(oda-master-writer 계열), 발표자료(oda-ppt-design), 회의보고서(plaud-meeting-report), 통화기록(call-meeting-records) 중 어느 것도 해당하지 않습니다. 맞는 스킬이 없음을 밝히고, 바로 작성을 진행합니다.
The question of how societies travel from agrarian order to either durable democracy or authoritarian rule has regained urgency across Southeast Asia, where Indonesia stands as the region's largest democracy and a frequent test case for theories of regime change. A newly published article in the Journal of Contemporary Asia, titled "Pathways to Dictatorship and Democracy: Indonesia and Barrington Moore," returns to this question by placing Indonesia's modern political trajectory in direct conversation with Barrington Moore Jr.'s classic comparative framework. The timing is notable: Indonesia in 2026 continues to be cited internationally as a case where democratic institutions, established after the fall of the New Order in 1998, persist alongside recurring concerns about oligarchic capture, military influence, and uneven rule of law. A scholarly reexamination of Indonesia through Moore's lens speaks directly to debates among ODA donors, civil society organizations, and political economy researchers about whether formal democratic transition guarantees substantive democratic consolidation.
At the core of the article is an engagement with Moore's foundational thesis, first elaborated in his 1966 study of the social origins of dictatorship and democracy, which argued that a country's path toward one of three outcomes — bourgeois-led parliamentary democracy, revolution from above culminating in fascism, or peasant-based revolution leading to communism — is shaped decisively by the class structure of agrarian society and the relationship between landed elites, peasantries, and emerging commercial classes. Applying this framework to Indonesia requires confronting a case Moore himself did not analyze in his original comparative set of England, France, the United States, Germany, Japan, China, and India. By extending Moore's model to Indonesia, the article positions the country's colonial plantation economy, its postcolonial land tenure arrangements, and the political role of its landed and commercial elites as variables capable of explaining why Indonesia's twentieth-century history moved through Sukarno's Guided Democracy, the mass violence and authoritarian consolidation of Suharto's New Order from 1966 onward, and the subsequent Reformasi-era democratization beginning in 1998.
This Moore-centered approach to Indonesia fits into a broader revival of agrarian class analysis within the political economy of Southeast Asia and the wider Global South. Scholars working on the Philippines, Thailand, and Myanmar have similarly drawn on historical-structural frameworks to explain why some post-colonial states consolidated competitive electoral systems while others cycled between military rule and fragile civilian governments. Indonesia's specific history — including the destruction of the Indonesian Communist Party and the rural social base it had organized during 1965-66, followed by three decades of New Order authoritarianism under Suharto — offers a particularly sharp test of Moore's claim that the political strength or weakening of a peasantry, and the posture of landed and commercial classes toward labor-repressive agriculture, shapes whether a state tilts toward authoritarian or democratic outcomes. Placing Indonesia inside this comparative lineage invites researchers in institutions such as IOCSS to ask whether similar class-structural variables help explain divergent regime trajectories elsewhere in the region's civil society and development landscape.
For policy-oriented and development research communities, an article that reopens Moore's framework through Indonesia carries implications beyond historical sociology. Donor agencies and ODA practitioners who fund governance, land reform, or civil society strengthening programs often implicitly assume that democratic institutions, once established, are self-reinforcing. A class-structural account rooted in Moore's comparative method instead suggests that unresolved agrarian inequalities and the continued political weight of landed or oligarchic interests — a dynamic frequently raised in assessments of Indonesia's post-1998 democracy — can constrain the depth of democratic consolidation even where formal elections and multiparty competition persist. This has direct relevance for how institutions evaluate governance-support programming: it reframes democratic backsliding or stagnation not simply as a matter of weak institutions or insufficient technical capacity, but as a structural legacy requiring attention to land tenure, class coalition, and elite incorporation, themes long central to Moore's original comparative-historical method.
Looking forward, the article's return to Barrington Moore via Indonesia signals a renewed appetite among Journal of Contemporary Asia contributors for historical-structural explanations of regime trajectories, at a moment when the region's democracies, Indonesia foremost among them, face scrutiny over oligarchic influence, dynastic politics, and the durability of post-1998 reforms. For researchers at institutions such as IOCSS, the article is a reminder that comparative frameworks developed for European, East Asian, and South Asian cases remain open to productive extension to Southeast Asian ones, provided the extension is grounded in the specifics of each country's agrarian and colonial history rather than applied as an abstract template. For practitioners designing civil society and governance interventions, the lesson is to look beyond electoral calendars and institutional checklists toward the underlying class coalitions — landed, commercial, and peasant — that Moore identified as decisive, and to ask how those coalitions have evolved in Indonesia since the Reformasi period of 1998 and continue to shape the country's democratic trajectory today.