This text presents an accessible introduction to the most significant problems facing Indonesia and raises issues for further investigations. It addresses such questions as: how has Indonesia managed to remain one country?; and is there a truly national Indonesian culture?

This book responds to the critical need of policymakers, practitioners, and scholars for current research on Indonesia.

This revised third edition provides an analysis of Suharto's New Order from its inception to the emergence of B.J. Habibie as President. The author reassesses the New Order's origins and its military roots and evaluates the considerable economic changes that have taken place since the 1960s. He examines Suharto's politics and, in a new chapter, the reasons behind the crisis and Suharto's fall.

When a reluctant President Sukarno gave Lt Gen Soeharto full executive authority in March 1966, Indonesia was a deeply divided nation, fractured along ideological, class, religious and ethnic lines. Soeharto took a country in chaos, the largest in Southeast Asia, and transformed it into one of the “Asian miracle” economies—only to leave it back on the brink of ruin when he was forced from office thirty-two years later. Drawing on his astonishing range of interviews with leading Indonesian generals, former Imperial Japanese Army officers and men who served in the Dutch colonial army, as well as years of patient research in Dutch, Japanese, British, Indonesian and US archives, David Jenkins brings vividly to life the story of how a socially reticent but exceptionally determined young man from rural Java began his rise to power—an ascent which would be capped by thirty years (1968–98) as President of Indonesia, the fourth most populous nation on earth. Soeharto was one of Asia’s most brutal, most durable, most avaricious and most successful dictators. In the course of examining those aspects of his character, this book provides an accessible, highly readable introduction to the complex, but dramatic and utterly absorbing, social, political, religious, economic and military factors that have shaped, and which continue to shape, Indonesia.

Annotation. This book explores the position of Islam as one of the domestic political variables in Indonesia's foreign policy during the Soeharto era. It argues that the foreign policy of Indonesia toward the Muslim world under Soeharto was increasingly the result of political struggles between domestic actors, particularly the Muslim community and the State.

Opposing Suharto presents an account of democratization in the world’s fourth most populous country, Indonesia. It describes how opposition groups challenged the long-time ruler, President Suharto, and his military-based regime, forcing him to resign in 1998. The book’s main purpose is to explain how ordinary people can bring about political change in a repressive authoritarian regime. It does this by telling the story of an array of dissident groups, nongovernmental organizations, student activists, and political party workers as they tried to expand democratic space in the last decade of Suharto’s rule. This book is an important study not only for readers interested in contemporary Indonesia and political change in Asia, but also for all those interested in democratization processes elsewhere in the world. Unlike most other books on Indonesia, and unlike many books on democratization, it provides an account from the perspective of those who were struggling to bring about change.