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Much research, both within the field of globalization and democratization studies, have highlighted how these processes challenge the state, especially in post-colonial and post-communist countries. The point of departure for this paper is twofold. First, the observation that despite the challenges of globalization and regime transition the state often seems remarkably resilient. Second, the relative lack of integration and cross-fertilization between democratization and globalization studies. Hence, the aim of this paper is to indicate one way of integrating globalization and democratization research through a discussion of the puzzle of relative state resilience in the face of globalization and regime transition. This is done through a thick description of the Indonesian case. Starting with an argument about the importance of ?path-dependency? when analysing state transformation, the paper first considers the specific history of state formation from colonial time to New Order authoritarianism. The impact on Indonesia of different aspects of globalization is examined. I pay special attention to the impact of the global economy ? especially the economic crisis that began in 1997 ? the end of the Cold War, and the activities of global civil society actors. Hence, the paper offers an analysis of the contemporary Indonesian state in a time of globalization and regime transition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What role do moderate Islamic organizations play in promoting democratization in Malaysia and Indonesia? What is the difference between large, grassroots organizations and newer more urban-based NGO's? Is one type of organization more effective than the other? This paper looks at the changing dynamics of moderate or progressive Islamic organizations in Malaysia and Indonesia. Some of these groups receive funding and assistance from US sources like the Asia Foundation or USAID. Moderate, progressive, or "liberal" Islamic groups suffer from being perceived as "good" Muslims by US policy makers. Given this inadvertent association, can these organizations effectively promote democracy and human rights to the larger population when that population is so critical and angry at the United States? In other words, are Indonesians and Malaysians more likely to turn away from moderate and progressive Islamic ideas because they may seem to be linked to a US agenda of building liberalism? This paper looks at organizations such as the Liberal Islam Network in Indonesia and Sisters in Islam in Malaysia, as well as others to try and understand the conflict between moderate or progressive Islamic groups and more conservative Islamic forces and to evaluate the role such moderate organizations play in advocating for greater protection of rights and liberties. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Indonesia, the world’s fourth most populous country, has embarked on a perilous democratization, precipitated by the resignation of the country’s long-time authoritarian ruler, Suharto, in May 1998. Competitive elections have been held; media licenses have been liberalized; the army’s visibility in politics has been curtailed; decentralization has taken place and human rights talk has flourished. Yet, these very same processes have engendered dynamics antithetical to democratization: a politicization of ascriptive and territorial-based identities; extensive regional violence, and a concomitant crisis of some one million internally displaced persons. For one, these contradictory yet arguably complimentary processes illustrate the limitations of the democratic transition literature that overly focuses on national level processes, formal institutions and overt political actors. Analyses restricted to the strategic bargaining among the capital-situated elite crucially overlook the ways in which power is distributed throughout the polity. Consider decentralization. While correctly theorized as an imperative to the democratic empowerment of regional government and local populations, decentralization is often cast in an idealized light. There is little acknowledgment of its dark side--for instance, pernicious nativism. Seen as the means to arrest coercive New Order centralization, decentralization has nonetheless engendered several instances of ethnic and/or religious cleansing. My paper, which provides a grass-roots analysis of five cases of such cleansings, depicts decentralization, at best, as a double-edged sword that has progressive and injurious consequences. I then briefly interrogate post-cleansing environments, where an evident politics of coercion and intimidation has gained momentum. Local ethnic elites, backed by the organizations and/or native son militias that were instrumental in the expulsion of the non-indigenous migrants, have taken control. Their men now sit in the lucrative district executive position and staff district bureaucracies. Companies, international and national alike, are urged to pay substantial ‘district’ fees to operate and local journalists who have reported the corruption have been beaten or in some cases, have disappeared. Murderers from the proper ethnic group either walk out the police station’s back door or corruptible judges set defendants free. Quasi-illegal smuggling of goods and natural resources have skyrocketed. These multi-functional patronage networks have taken their cue from the infamous networks that Suharto culled over three decades, through which he ran the country. In the incipient post-Suharto state, Indonesia is experiencing a decentralization of authoritarianism, belying the façade of democratic strides made at the national level. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Democracy assistance programs have always been notoriously difficult to measure in terms of outcome, but the need to show their impact (or lack of it) remains critical, even as the Managing for Results era of the 1990s has passed. This paper continues an effort to develop a tool for measuring civil society program impact in the form of an advocacy ladder encompassing democracy’s critical components of participation, accountability and contestation. The ladder is tested in the context of USAID-assisted initiatives in the Philippines and Indonesia, where it demonstrates a capacity both to monitor donor assistance outcomes and to suggest future program initiatives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper tries to explain the role of the Nahdlatul Ulama during Indonesia’s democratic transition. It argues for a greater conceptualization of the relationship between state and society in the period prior to the democratic transition in order to better understand the effectiveness, or in this case ineffectiveness,of the organization in 1998. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Democratization has often gone hand in hand with decentralization, but how do the two processes relate to each other? To answer such questions one needs fine-grained data on decentralization, and these have been hard to come by in South East Asia. This paper provides a careful estimation of the formal authority of regional governments in five Southeast Asian countries - Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, South Korea and Thailand - on an annual basis from 1950 to 2010. We estimate nine dimensions of subnational authority and find wide variation both across countries and across time. We detect a close temporal relationship between democratization and decentralization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite enjoying a relatively high level of economic development and other apparent advantages, democratization was quickly reversed in Russia. In contrast, in Indonesia, which has a much lower level of economic development as well as myriad other liabilities, open government is surviving and even thriving. This paper will investigate the causes for this divergence in Russia and Indonesia, which, along with Brazil, are the largest and most socially heterogeneous of all countries that participated in the "third wave" of democratization. We hypothesize that high levels of public support for democracy, confidence in state institutions, and the strength of autonomous political associations in Indonesia, and the weakness of these variables in Russia, help explain the success of democratization in the former and the failure of it in the latter. This argument is formed by comparing several indicators in Indonesia, Russia, and other third-wave democratizers using data from the World Values Survey as well as published results from Keio University's Research Survey of Political Society in a Multi-cultural and Pluri-generational World, the International Foundation for Electoral Systems (IFES) National Public Opinion Surveys in Indonesia, the Asian Barometer, and the Russian National Election Study (RNES). ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although a series of labor law reforms that strengthened basic labor rights were passed in Indonesia soon after the fall of Suharto, attempts to pass comprehensive reforms affecting issues related to labor flexibility have for the most part failed. While labor has secured stronger political rights, employers have been unable to roll back the majority of provisions that defend labor protection. Perhaps the most puzzling aspect of the politics of labor reform is that while labor played little role in bringing down Suharto and is still quite weak and fragmented, it managed to secure many gains in labor law. I argue that labor success in the immediate post-Suharto years can be explained by international pressure to restore basic labor rights and the early remobilization of labor, in contrast to employers, in the wake of the Asian financial crisis. Although unions were weak they managed to organize large and disruptive protests whenever changes that promised to increase flexibility were enacted. In contrast, employers were caught off-guard and showed few signs of acting as a coherent interest group. By the end of 2000, however, employers had counter-mobilized, and they made rolling back some of these early gains for workers a primary goal. This reactivation of the peak business association boded poorly for labor. However, the strenuous opposition of both employers and unions to two draft bills in the latter half of 2002 led the committee overseeing the bills in the legislature to institute a bipartite process to revise them, and both business and many unions chose to participate in this process. This bipartite structure of negotiations leveled the playing field between unions and employers, and labor was thus able to defend its political gains, while employers were only partially successful in achieving their goal of increased labor flexibility. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ethnonationalist violence constitutes a particularly difficult challenge for democratic consolidation. Groups mobilized along ethnic lines contest an existing state and its political institutions. Once mobilized, ethnonationalist movements are unlikely to yield on their objectives. This problem raises two sets of questions. First, what are the processes by which ethnonationalist violence impedes democratic consolidation? Second, what are the conditions under which ethnonationalist movements accept a new set of democratic institutions and abandon their objective of a separate state? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Under Suharto, the state demobilized labor and only permitted one state-backed union, the All-Indonesia Workers Unions (SPSI, Serikat Pekerja Seluruh Indonesia) to exist. Since SPSI was an ineffective advocate for workers, organized only a small percentage of the labor force, showed few signs of reforming, lost much of its financial support from the government, and was shunned by international funders, most labor activists wrote off SPSI following the transition to democracy, surmising that members would abandon SPSI and join new unions in droves. Yet seven years later, SPSI, while not flourishing, remains the largest confederation in Indonesia. I explore the resilience of SPSI as a way to both understand their continued dominance in Indonesia to reflect on the broader theoretical issue of legacy unions. I argue that SPSI has maintained its ascendancy primarily through preventing exit rather than as a result of fundamental reforms. It has been able to prevent exit through collaboration with management, intimidation of opponents, continued government favoritism, and through conceding autonomy to lower levels of the organization. In addition, since few unions have offered dynamic alternatives to SPSI and labor legislation has facilitated the fragmentation of these unions, many SPSI affiliates are not tempted to exit and the new independent unions are divided into dozens of federations and thousands of unaffiliated plant-level unions. ..PAT.-Conference Proceeding [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]