How contemporary power relations in Indonesia are maintaining the oligarchy

By Dr Trissia Wijaya, Dr Diatyka Widya Permata Yasih, Dr Yoes C. Kenawas, and Dr Fakhridho Susilo

Twenty years ago in 2004—the year Indonesia’s first directly-elected president, Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, was inaugurated—prominent experts Vedi Hadiz and Richard Robison published Reorganising Power in Indonesia: The Politics of Oligarchy in an Age of Markets.  

Unlike those who widely celebrated the wave of democratisation in Indonesia, Hadiz and Robison highlighted that since the fall of the authoritarian regime of Suharto in 1998 old forces had reconsolidated dominance while ‘new ones were drawn into predatory practices which had defined politics in Indonesia for decades.’

The book popularised the so-called ‘oligarchy framework’, which has sparked lively and critical discussions among academics, civil society and beyond. However, the ‘oligarchy framework’ is commonly reduced to being about a troop of powerful elites, instead of being about a more complex structural relationship of power that coherently sustains the wealth-rulership nexus. In contemporary Indonesia, it has found expression through varying institutional forms, mainly through political technocratic machinery and the development of forms of statism, such as economic nationalism and techno-industrial policy, as well as the concomitant expansion of state capitalism.

The aim of this article is to revisit the ‘oligarchy framework’, make sense of it, and draw out its relevance to the contemporary context, which includes economic (de)globalisation, the crisis of inequality and precarity, the commodities boom, the energy transition imperative, inter-state war, the rise of right-wing extremism, and climate change and environmental destruction. These dynamics have reshaped the nature of the oligarchy in Indonesia.