On December 31, 2015, the ten-member Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) ushered in a new era with the founding of the ASEAN Community (AC). The culmination of 12 years of intensive preparation, the AC was both a historic initiative and an unprecedented step toward the area's regional integration. Political commentators and media outlets, however, greeted its establishment with little fanfare. Implicitly and explicitly, they suggested that the AC was only the beginning: Southeast Asia, they seemed to say, was taking its first steps on a linear process of unification that would converge on the model of the European Union. In The Indonesian Way, Jürgen Rüland challenges this previously unquestioned diffusion of European norms. Focusing on the reception of ASEAN in Indonesia, Rüland traces how foreign policy stakeholders in government, civil society, the legislature, academe, the press, and the business sector have responded to calls for ASEAN's Europeanization, ultimately fusing them with their own distinctly Indonesian form of regionalism. His analysis reframes the nature of ASEAN as well as the discipline of international relations more broadly, writing a narrative of regional integration and norm diffusion that breaks free of Eurocentric thought.

Introduces the land, people, and regional cooking of Indonesia and includes recipes for such dishes as pork sate, corn fritters, and chicken in coconut cream sauce.

NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF 2020 BY NPR, THE FINANCIAL TIMES, AND GQ The hidden story of the wanton slaughter -- in Indonesia, Latin America, and around the world -- backed by the United States. In 1965, the U.S. government helped the Indonesian military kill approximately one million innocent civilians. This was one of the most important turning points of the twentieth century, eliminating the largest communist party outside China and the Soviet Union and inspiring copycat terror programs in faraway countries like Brazil and Chile. But these events remain widely overlooked, precisely because the CIA's secret interventions were so successful. In this bold and comprehensive new history, Vincent Bevins builds on his incisive reporting for the Washington Post, using recently declassified documents, archival research and eye-witness testimony collected across twelve countries to reveal a shocking legacy that spans the globe. For decades, it's been believed that parts of the developing world passed peacefully into the U.S.-led capitalist system. The Jakarta Method demonstrates that the brutal extermination of unarmed leftists was a fundamental part of Washington's final triumph in the Cold War.

First published in 1978, The Indonesian Tragedy is a controversial book that argues that Indonesia’s lack of economic development is due to the blind attempt to force a Western economic model on a population, whose culture and psychology are unsuited to it. The author demonstrates the ‘Indonesian Tragedy’ not so much by argument, as by depicting the country as he experienced it day to day. In developing his conclusion, he draws on history, and the works of sociologists, some of whom he disagrees with. In this way he sheds light on the predicament of Indonesia and helps to illuminate a problem common to much of the Third World. This book will be of interest to students of history, sociology, journalism, and Southeast Asian studies.