Southeast Asia Collection Blog

State of authority : the state in society in Indonesia / Gerry van Klinken and Joshua Barker, editors. Ithaca, N.Y. : Southeast Asia Program Publications, c2009.

This monograph is part of a larger, “revisionist” trend in the scholarship on post-colonial Indonesia. Whereas in the past, the bulk of Western-language scholarship on Indonesia depicted the State as monolithic, centralized, and separate from society as a whole, recent scholarship has put forth the view that the post-colonial State was both a natural outgrowth of and deeply embedded in the very fabric of Indonesian society. That is to say, state and society are inextricably linked. The case studies presented here champion this view.