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between the consensual politics of national, elite, institutional politics (Ellis and Yudhini
2002) and the fiercely contested, zero-sum politics in the country’s regions. Whereas the
former may give the impression that Indonesia has eased into a democratic consolidation
phase, the latter struggle with an arduous bloody transition. In short, I argue that, in the
incipient post-Suharto state, Indonesia is experiencing a decentralization of
authoritarianism, belying the façade of democratic strides made at the national level.
II. Transitions on the Periphery
In a recent essay, Richard Robison (2002), a respected political economist, uses Indonesia’s
transition as an occasion to swipe at the transitions literature. He cites this literature’s
failure to explain why “democracies harboring repressive, corrupt and rapacious systems of
social power have shown a great capacity for survival” (98). Its shortcomings, for Robison,
are twofold. First, it overstates the role of agency and elite strategizing at the expense of
“the circumstances in which choices are made.” Second, its fastidious concern for
“efficiency, stability, order and integration” foregoes critical investigations into the issue of
“the concentration of power and its distribution” (98). In other words, the transition
literature takes for granted the fact that “elites are both constrained by configurations of
power and interest and are themselves embedded in such structures in various ways.”
Alternatively, Robison puts forth that “regimes are forged in processes of social conflict”
(98), contentious processes and outcomes that demand uncovering and exposing.
While sympathetic to Robison’s critique, I am less so about the orthodoxy of
evidence used to support his case. In the main, Robison’s analysis is representative of the
dominant framework in which to discuss Indonesian politics, that is, a tight focus on
national, Jakarta-situated elites and processes (Singh 1999; Emerson 1999; Hefner 2000;
Convention