The Press in New Order Indonesia is the most comprehensive book available in English on the print media during the Suharto presidency. Based on detailed and investigative research, it provides a succinct introduction to the political and economic forces shaping this dominant sector of the Indonesian media at a pivotal time in its development. The study documents the history of the press prior to the rise of President Suharto, surveys the changing New Order policies to the media, and analyses the various modes of control exercised through powerful government agencies and industry bodies. Throughout this critical historical period of political tension and economic transition, The Press in New Order Indonesia traces the development of huge media conglomerates which began to rival military muscle in shaping the media landscape of Indonesia. This study explains how the student press spilled off the campuses to play a unique political role. By contrast, a distinctly Islamic press achieved only very modest success. Focusing on Indonesian-language national daily newspapers, it also discusses news weeklies, periodicals and magazines, as well as publications in regional languages, English and Chinese. Brought back to life in Equinox Publishing's Classic Indonesia series, The Press in New Order Indonesia is required reading for students of Indonesian languages and cultures, Asian studies, Southeast Asian studies, media studies, journalism, and contemporary politics. David T. Hill is Professor of Southeast Asian Studies and Fellow of the Asia Research Centre, Murdoch University, Perth, Western Australia.

Indonesia's President Soeharto led one of the most durable and effective authoritarian regimes of the second half of the twentieth century. Yet his rule ended in ignominy, and much of the turbulence and corruption of the subsequent years was blamed on his legacy. More than a decade after Soeharto's resignation, Indonesia is a consolidating democracy and the time has come to reconsider the place of his regime in modern Indonesian history, and its lasting impact. This book begins this task by bringing together a collection of leading experts on Indonesia to examine Soeharto and his legacy from diverse perspectives. In presenting their analyses, these authors pay tribute to Harold Crouch, an Australian political scientist who remains one of the greatest chroniclers of the Soeharto regime and its aftermath.

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.

Gangs and militias have been a persistent feature of social and political life in Indonesia. During the authoritarian New Order regime they constituted part of a vast network of sub-contracted coercion and social control on behalf of the state. Indonesia’s subsequent democratisation has seen gangs adapt to and take advantage of the changed political context. New types of populist street based organisations have emerged that combine predatory rent-seeking with claims of representing marginalised social and economic groups. Based on extensive fieldwork in Jakarta this book provides a comprehensive analysis of the changing relationship between gangs, militias and political power and authority in post-New Order Indonesia. It argues that gangs and militias have manufactured various types of legitimacy in consolidating localised territorial monopolies and protection economies. As mediators between the informal politics of the street and the world of formal politics they have become often influential brokers in Indonesia’s decentralised electoral democracy. More than mere criminal extortion, it is argued that the protection racket as a social relation of coercion and domination remains a salient feature of Indonesia’s post-authoritarian political landscape. This ground-breaking study will be of interest to students and scholars of Indonesian and Southeast Asian politics, political violence, gangs and urban politics.

This book explores the evolving political culture in Indonesia, by discussing the country's dominant political philosophies, then showing how those philosophies affect the working lives of ordinary Indonesian citizens. It focuses in particular on the working lives of news journalists, a group that occupies a strategic social and political position.

Successful transitions to enduring democracy are both difficult and rare. In Scandal and Democracy, Mary E. McCoy explores how newly democratizing nations can avoid reverting to authoritarian solutions in response to the daunting problems brought about by sudden change. The troubled transitions that have derailed democratization in nations worldwide make this problem a major concern for scholars and citizens alike. This study of Indonesia's transition from authoritarian rule sheds light on the fragility not just of democratic transitions but of democracy itself and finds that democratization's durability depends, to a surprising extent, on the role of the media, particularly its airing of political scandal and intraelite conflict. More broadly, Scandal and Democracy examines how the media's use of new freedoms can help ward off a slide into pseudodemocracy or a return to authoritarian rule. As Indonesia marks the twentieth anniversary of its democratic revolution of 1998, it remains among the world's most resilient new democracies and one of the few successful democratic transitions in the Muslim world. McCoy explains the media's central role in this change and corroborates that finding with comparative cases from Mexico, Tunisia, and South Korea, offering counterintuitive insights that help make sense of the success and failure of recent transitions to democracy.

Indonesia is undergoing a process of rapid change, with an affluent middle class due to hit 141 million people by 2020. While official statistics suggest that internet penetration is low, over 70 million Indonesians have a Facebook account, the fourth highest group in the world. Jakarta is the Twitter capital of the world with more tweets per minute than any other city around the globe. In the past ten years digitalisation of media content has enabled extensive concentration and conglomeration of the industry, and media owners are wealthier and more politically powerful than ever before. Digital media is a prominent place of contestation between large, powerful oligarchs, and citizens looking to bring about rapid and meaningful change. This book examines how the political agencies of both oligarchs and ‘netizens’ are enhanced by digitalisation, and how an increasingly divergent society is being formed. In doing so, this book enters this debate about the transformations of society and power in the digital age.