Decolonization and the Making of Middle Indonesia (A Gerry van Klinken Public Lecture)

Decolonization and the Making of Middle Indonesia

(A Gerry van Klinken Public Lecture)

June 17, 2010 (Thursday), 2:30 p.m.-4:00 p.m.

PH 207 Audio-Visual Room

College of Social Sciences and Philosophy

University of the Philippines, Diliman, Quezon City

PROGRAM

2:15 – 2:30 REGISTRATION

2:30 – 2:35 WELCOME REMARKS

Maria Ela L. Atienza

Director

Third World Studies Center

College of Social Sciences and Philosophy

University of the Philippines-Diliman

2:35 – 2:40 INTRODUCTION OF LECTURER

2:40 – 3:10 LECTURE

Gerry van Klinken

Senior Researcher

Royal Netherlands Institute of Southeast Asian and Caribbean Studies

3:10 – 3:25 REACTOR

Asiri J. Abubakar

Professor

Asian Center

University of the Philippines-Diliman

3:25 – 4:00 OPEN FORUM

MODERATOR

Maria Mercedes G. Planta

Associate Professor

Department of History

College of Social Sciences and Philosophy

University of the Philippines-Diliman

CO-ORGANIZERS

Third World Studies Center

Department of Political Science

About the Public Lecture

Indonesia contains about 200 provincial cities with populations between 50,000 and one million, yet they have attracted far less scholarly attention than the country’s few million-plus cities. Recent democratization and decentralization have brought to light patterns of communal and local mobilization in these cities, centered on elections and other political events, that have not been seen in Indonesia since the 1950s and early 1960s. Provincial cities have talked back to the central state in ways that belie their supposed passivity as expressed in the term “urban involution.” This study attempts to build a synthetic and historical explanation for those patterns by examining the social embeddedness of the state in the provincial city. Most of Indonesia’s towns and cities, particularly beyond Java, became urban only through the formation of the modern colonial state from the mid- to late 19th century onward. After decolonization began in 1945, the expanding but chronically underfunded bureaucracy became an arena for contestation among the emerging middle classes in these urban centers, which lacked manufacturing. The new provincial classes were politically significant because of their numbers and their mobilizing skills rather than their wealth. They successfully seized the state at the local level. The central state, anxious to establish political stability, appeased them with substantial political transfer rents, particularly during the oil boom years of the early to middle New Order.

About the Lecturer
Gerry van Klinken (1952) is a permanent research fellow at the Royal Netherlands Institute of Southeast Asian and Caribbean Studies (KITLV). He coordinates the Dutch-Indonesian research program “In Search of Middle Indonesia”, which studies middle classes and youth in provincial towns.

After gaining a MSc in geophysics (Macquarie University, Sydney, 1978), Van Klinken taught physics in universities in Malaysia and Indonesia (1979-91). In 1996 he moved into Asian Studies with a PhD in Indonesian history (Griffith University, Brisbane, 1996). After that he taught and researched in this field at universities in Brisbane, Sydney, Canberra, YogyakartaIndonesia), and now Leiden.

Since 1998 he has been a frequent media commentator on Indonesian current affairs in Australia. He was editor of the Australian quarterly magazine Inside Indonesia between 1996 and 2002 and remains on the editorial board. From late 1999 to 2002 he was resident director in Yogyakarta for the Australian Consortium of In-Country Indonesian Studies (Acicis). In 2002-2004 he spent nine months as research advisor to the Commission for Reception, Truth and Reconciliation in East Timor (CAVR).

Click here for the video of the lecture.