Advanced search

Prabowo’s Year One

A critical-analytical portrait of Southeast Asia’s answer to Trump, as the Indonesian President—formerly the Suharto dictatorship’s crown prince and chief butcher in East Timor—re-centralizes power in the archipelago, strengthening the Army’s place within the civil administration.

Indonesia’s Dynastic Webs

How did Prabowo Subianto—former military strongman, with a list of massacres to his name—capture the Indonesian presidency? A comparative analysis of the dynastic political culture that has supplanted traditional left-right divisions across the archipelago, from its emergence under the dictatorship to its consolidation under Jokowi.

Explaining Jokowi

Rohana Kuddus on Ben Bland, Man of Contradictions: Joko Widodo and the Struggle to Remake Indonesia. First English-language biography of the Indonesian leader, tracing transformation from candidate of hope to ornament of the old oligarchy.

Lemongrass and Prayer

Bumbling ministers, regional rivalries and pious stigmatization of the victims compound inadequate hospital provision in Indonesia’s belated response to COVID–19, amid the uncounted dead.

September Surprise

What is the wider meaning of the recent mass youth protests across the Indonesian archipelago—Java, Sumatra, Papua, Sulawesi, Bali—and what do they portend for the second term of Jokowi, once the Obama-style candidate of ‘hope and change’?

The Ghosts of 1965

Half a century after the massacres that wiped out Indonesian communism, and twenty years since the arrival of electoral democracy, how far does the legacy of Suharto’s New Order live on? Under a smothering canopy of reaction—and accommodations to it—seedlings of hope and progress in the world’s fourth-most populous society.