Royal Netherlands Institute of Southeast Asian and Caribbean Studies

Are the questions we have been asking the past to answer still questions worth having answers to? Are the stories we have been telling about the past's relation to the present still relevant? David Scott does not think so. In this book he strongly argues that it is not the answers but the questions that demand scrutiny: he stresses the need to identify the difference between the postcolonial questions that informed former presents and those that inform our own present. This study is a follow-up to his previous book, Refashioning Futures: Criticism after Postcoloniality (1999), in which Scott discussed the limits of postcolonial criticism. Scott's picture of the postcolonial present, after the collapse of the socioeconomic and political hopes that animated anticolonial and independence movements, is bleak. He identifies an “acute paralysis of will and sheer vacancy of imagination, the rampant corruption and vicious authoritarianism, the instrumental self-interest and showy self-congratulation” as symptoms of a utopian project that has run out of steam and turned into a “nightmare” (p. 2).

1. Introduction 2. Why Now? Temporal Contexts 3. Why Here? The Town beyond Java 4. Identity Formation in West Kalimantan 5. Escalation in Poso 6. Mobilization in Ambon 7. Polarization in North Maluku 8. Actor Constitution in Central Kalimantan 9. Concluding Reflections

For decades almost the only social scientists who visited Indonesia’s provinces were anthropologists. Anybody interested in politics or economics spent most of their time in Jakarta, where the action was. Our view of the world’s fourth largest country threatened to become simplistic, lacking that essential graininess. Then, in 1998, Indonesia was plunged into a crisis that could not be understood with simplistic tools. After 32 years of enforced stability, the New Order was at an end. Things began to happen in - the provinces that no one was prepared for. Democratization was one, decentralization another. Ethnic and religious identities emerged that had lain buried under the blanket of the New Order’s modernizing ideology. Unfamiliar, sometimes violent forms of political competition and of rentseeking came to light. Decentralization was often connected with the neo-liberal desire to reduce state powers and make room for free trade and democracy. To what extent were the goals of good governance and a stronger civil society achieved? How much of the process was ‘captured’ by regional elites to increase their own powers? Amidst the new identity politics, what has happened to citizenship? These are among the central questions addressed in this book. This volume is the result of a two-year research project at KITLV. It brings together an international group of 24 scholars – mainly from Indonesia and the Netherlands but also from the United States, Australia, Germany, Canada and Portugal.

Small states are conspicuously absent from mainstream comparative political science. There are a variety of reasons that underpin their marginal position in the established cannon, including their tiny populations, the fact that they are not considered “real” states, their supposedly insignificant role in international politics, and the absence of data. In this article, we argue that the discipline is much poorer for not seriously utilizing small states as case studies for larger questions. To illustrate this, we consider what the case study literature on politics in small states can offer to debates about democratization and decentralization, and we highlight that the inclusion of small states in various ways augments or challenges the existing literature in these fields. On this basis, we argue that far from being marginal or insignificant, the intellectual payoffs to the discipline of studying small states are potentially enormous, mainly because they have been overlooked for so long.

Mega-damming, pollution and depletion endanger rivers worldwide. Meanwhile, modernist imaginaries of ordering 'unruly waters and humans' have become cornerstones of hydraulic-bureaucratic and capitalist development. They separate hydro/social worlds, sideline river-commons cultures, and deepen socio-environmental injustices. But myriad new water justice movements (NWJMs) proliferate: rooted, disruptive, transdisciplinary, multi-scalar coalitions that deploy alternative river-society ontologies, bridge South-North divides, and translate river-enlivening practices from local to global and vice-versa. This paper's framework conceptualizes 'riverhood' to engage with NWJMs and river commoning initiatives. We suggest four interrelated ontologies, situating river socionatures as arenas of material, social and symbolic co-production: 'river-as-ecosociety', 'river-as-territory', 'river-as-subject', and 'river-as-movement'.

This Analysis presents a recently developed food system indicator framework and holistic monitoring architecture to track food system transformation towards global development, health and sustainability goals. Five themes are considered: (1) diets, nutrition and health; (2) environment, natural resources and production; (3) livelihoods, poverty and equity; (4) governance; and (5) resilience. Each theme is divided into three to five indicator domains, and indicators were selected to reflect each domain through a consultative process. In total, 50 indicators were selected, with at least one indicator available for every domain. Harmonized data of these 50 indicators provide a baseline assessment of the world's food systems. We show that every country can claim positive outcomes in some parts of food systems, but none are among the highest ranked across all domains. Furthermore, some indicators are independent of national income, and each highlights a specific aspiration for healthy, sustainable and just food systems. The Food Systems Countdown Initiative will track food systems annually to 2030, amending the framework as new indicators or better data emerge.

What kind of economic development curtails clientelistic politics? Most of the literature addressing this relationship focuses narrowly on vote buying, resulting in theories that emphasize the importance of declining poverty rates and a growing middle class. This article employs a combination of ethnographic fieldwork and an expert survey to engage in a first-ever, more comprehensive comparative study of within-country variation of clientelistic politics. I find a pattern that poorly matches these dominant theories: Clientelism is perceived to be less intense in rural, poverty-prone Java, while scores are high in relatively wealthy yet state-dependent provincial capitals. On the basis of these findings, I develop an alternative perspective on the relationship between economic development and clientelism. Emphasizing the importance of societal constraints, I argue that the concentration of control over economic activities fosters clientelism because it stifles the public sphere and inhibits effective scrutiny and disciplining of politico-business elites.

L'etude des periodes de la fin de la prehistoire et du debut de la protohistoire sur la formation des Etats maritimes de l'Asie du Sud-Est a partir des travaux et theories anterieures montre (1) que le detroit de Malacca et les ports du sud de la mer de Java sont les deux premieres regions a avoir connu un Etat, (2) que la deuxieme periode du processus de formation de l'Etat s'est deroulee entre 200 av. J.-C. et 300 apr. J.-C. lors des changements economiques et politiques des partenaires commerciaux, (3) qu'entre 300 et 600 les liens commerciaux entre l'Inde et l'Asie du Sud-Est se renforcerent alors que des differences entre les Etats de la cote du Detroit de Malacca, Java et Bali s'etablirent

Many complex networks show signs of modular structure, uncovered by community detection. Although many methods succeed in revealing various partitions, it remains difficult to detect at what scale some partition is significant. This problem shows foremost in multi-resolution methods. We here introduce an efficient method for scanning for resolutions in one such method. Additionally, we introduce the notion of "significance" of a partition, based on subgraph probabilities. Significance is independent of the exact method used, so could also be applied in other methods, and can be interpreted as the gain in encoding a graph by making use of a partition. Using significance, we can determine "good" resolution parameters, which we demonstrate on benchmark networks. Moreover, optimizing significance itself also shows excellent performance. We demonstrate our method on voting data from the European Parliament. Our analysis suggests the European Parliament has become increasingly ideologically divided and that nationality plays no role.

In 2013 Indonesia, the world's fourth most populous country, declared that it would provide affordable health care for all its citizens within seven years. This crystallised an ambition first enshrined in law over five decades earlier, but never previously realised. This paper explores Indonesia's journey towards universal health coverage (UHC) from independence to the launch of a comprehensive health insurance scheme in January 2014. We find that Indonesia's path has been determined largely by domestic political concerns – different groups obtained access to healthcare as their socio-political importance grew. A major inflection point occurred following the Asian financial crisis of 1997. To stave off social unrest, the government provided health coverage for the poor for the first time, creating a path dependency that influenced later policy choices. The end of this programme coincided with decentralisation, leading to experimentation with several different models of health provision at the local level. When direct elections for local leaders were introduced in 2005, popular health schemes led to success at the polls. UHC became an electoral asset, moving up the political agenda. It also became contested, with national policy-makers appropriating health insurance programmes that were first developed locally, and taking credit for them. The Indonesian experience underlines the value of policy experimentation, and of a close understanding of the contextual and political factors that drive successful UHC models at the local level. Specific drivers of success and failure should be taken into account when scaling UHC to the national level. In the Indonesian example, UHC became possible when the interests of politically and economically influential groups were either satisfied or neutralised. While technical considerations took a back seat to political priorities in developing the structures for health coverage nationally, they will have to be addressed going forward to achieve sustainable UHC in Indonesia.

Many complex networks exhibit a modular structure of densely connected groups of nodes. Usually, such a modular structure is uncovered by the optimization of some quality function. Although flawed, modularity remains one of the most popular quality functions. The Louvain algorithm was originally developed for optimizing modularity, but has been applied to a variety of methods. As such, speeding up the Louvain algorithm enables the analysis of larger graphs in a shorter time for various methods. We here suggest to consider moving nodes to a random neighbor community, instead of the best neighbor community. Although incredibly simple, it reduces the theoretical runtime complexity from O(m) to O(nlog〈k〉) in networks with a clear community structure. In benchmark networks, it speeds up the algorithm roughly 2-3 times, while in some real networks it even reaches 10 times faster runtimes. This improvement is due to two factors: (1) a random neighbor is likely to be in a "good" community and (2) random neighbors are likely to be hubs, helping the convergence. Finally, the performance gain only slightly diminishes the quality, especially for modularity, thus providing a good quality-performance ratio. However, these gains are less pronounced, or even disappear, for some other measures such as significance or surprise.

The idea that Malagasy is related to the languages of insular Southeast Asia is very old. It can be traced back to 1603, when Frederick de Houtman published his Spraeck ende Woordboeck, inde Maleysche ende Madagaskarsche talen. This work was basically a textbook for those interested in learning Malay, but it also contained a Malay-Malagasy Dutch wordlist which clearly demonstrated some of the similarities between Malay and Malagasy. But, as Dahl points out, although De Houtman provided ample evidence for the idea, he did not state in so many words that there was a relationship between Malagasy and other Austronesian languages. It is therefore the Portuguese Luis Mariano to whom the credit should go for being the first to observe that there is a linguistic relationship between Malagasy and the languages of Southeast Asia. Mariano mentioned that the Malagasy came partly from 'Malacca', and partly from

Regional' performing arts are those linked by history, language, or culture to a particular region (daerah) of Indonesia. Since ethnicity is generally not acknowledged by the Indonesian government, 'regional' often serves as a euphemism for 'ethnic'. To refer to the regional arts of, say, West Sumatra, is to refer, by implication, to the arts of the Minangkabau, who are the predominant ethnic group in that region. 'Regional' arts may be contrasted with 'pan-Indonesian' arts, which are performed using the national language, Bahasa Indonesia, and are addressed to Indonesians without regard to geography or ethnicity. (It is tempting to call these pan-Indonesian arts 'national', but since this paper deals in part with ideas of 'national culture', the usage might introduce unnecessary confusion. Such confusion has sometimes arisen in my conversations with Indonesians, for whom 'national' when applied to, say, music, often means 'patriotic'.)

The Caribbean was one of the last regions of the Americas to be settled by humans, but where they came from and how and when they reached the islands remain unclear. We generated genome-wide data for 93 ancient Caribbean islanders dating between 3200 and 400 calibrated years before the present and found evidence of at least three separate dispersals into the region, including two early dispersals into the Western Caribbean, one of which seems connected to radiation events in North America. This was followed by a later expansion from South America. We also detected genetic differences between the early settlers and the newcomers from South America, with almost no evidence of admixture. Our results add to our understanding of the initial peopling of the Caribbean and the movements of Archaic Age peoples in the Americas.

Nodes in real-world networks are repeatedly observed to form dense clusters, often referred to as communities. Methods to detect these groups of nodes usually maximize an objective function, which implicitly contains the definition of a community. We here analyze a recently proposed measure called surprise, which assesses the quality of the partition of a network into communities. In its current form, the formulation of surprise is rather difficult to analyze. We here therefore develop an accurate asymptotic approximation. This allows for the development of an efficient algorithm for optimizing surprise. Incidentally, this leads to a straightforward extension of surprise to weighted graphs. Additionally, the approximation makes it possible to analyze surprise more closely and compare it to other methods, especially modularity. We show that surprise is (nearly) unaffected by the well-known resolution limit, a particular problem for modularity. However, surprise may tend to overestimate the number of communities, whereas they may be underestimated by modularity. In short, surprise works well in the limit of many small communities, whereas modularity works better in the limit of few large communities. In this sense, surprise is more discriminative than modularity and may find communities where modularity fails to discern any structure.

Abstract The island of New Guinea, located to the north of Australia, is one of the world’s major centres of early agriculture and plant domestication. At the same time, a large number of the languages of New Guinea and adjacent areas share a common origin and are believed to belong to a single language family, the Trans-New Guinea family. This paper presents a first attempt to apply the farming-language dispersal hypothesis to the New Guinea case. While the archaeological literature on early agriculture in New Guinea has focused mainly on taro, there is reason to doubt that taro was associated with the Trans-New Guinea expansion. In this paper, I instead consider the role of banana and sugarcane. The occurrence in many Trans-New Guinea languages of related terms for these two crops suggests that these were part of the “farming package” which fuelled the expansion of the family and its speakers.

Despite the growing body of research on ‘hybrid regimes’, few studies address the issue of their domestic legitimacy. Targeting this gap in the literature, this article explores the legitimation strategies of three hybrid regimes around the globe: Russia, Venezuela, and Seychelles. Although these countries differ markedly in almost every aspect that can be thought of, the political systems of all three cases combine formally democratic institutions with authoritarian political dynamics. The qualitative, comparative analysis presented in this article uncovers a number of remarkable similarities between the regimes’ respective legitimization strategies. However, while the strategies for engendering legitimacy are similar across the cases, the content of these strategies is different: the Russian leadership mainly relies on preserving order and nationalism, the Venezuelan regime employs a more populist strategy, and the Seychellois regime uses a more personal and particularistic approach. Our findings not only provide insights into the mechanisms hybrid regimes use to consolidate their authority, but also highlight important differences and similarities between hybrid regimes around the world.

The emergent field of ‘sensory urbanism’ studies how socio-spatial boundaries are policed through sensorial means. Such studies have tended to focus on either formal policies that seek to control territories and populations through a governance of the senses, or on more everyday micro-politics of exclusion where conflicts are articulated in a sensory form. This article seeks to extend this work by concentrating on contexts where people deliberately seek out sensory experiences that disturb their own physical sense of comfort and belonging. While engagement across lines of sensorial difference may often be antagonistic, we argue for a more nuanced exploration of sense disruption that attends to the complex political potential of sensory urbanism. Specifically, we focus on the politics of sensation in tours of low-income urban areas. Tourists enter these areas to immerse themselves in a different environment, to be moved by urban deprivation and to feel its affective force. What embodied experiences do tourists and residents associate with urban poverty? How do guides mobilise these sensations in tourism encounters, and what is their potential to disrupt established hierarchies of socio-spatial value? Drawing on a collaborative research project in Kingston, Mexico City, New Orleans and Rio de Janeiro, the article explores how tours offer tourists a sense of what poverty feels like. Experiencing these neighbourhoods in an intimate, embodied fashion often allows tourists to feel empathy and solidarity, yet these feelings are balanced by a sense of discomfort and distance, reminding tourists in a visceral way that they do not belong.

For many citizens in postcolonial states like Indonesia, the reality and experience of citizenship depend not just on the content of laws and regulations but also on the strength of their personal social networks. In this introduction to the special issue, we argue that instead of being antithetical to citizenship, this reliance on personal connections to deal with state institutions should be seen as a constitutive dimension of citizenship. Drawing on the articles in this issue, we illustrate this argument by discussing how informality in its three dimensions – mediation, the invocation of social norms and the use of social affiliations – shape the character of everyday state–citizen interaction in Indonesia. The cultivation of personal connections constitutes an important form of political agency. It enables citizens to deal with the unresponsive and unpredictable nature of Indonesia’s state institutions.

Clientelistic vote mobilization is a prominent electoral strategy in many of the world’s democracies and electoral authoritarian regimes. Yet the comparative study of this practice, which involves exchanging personal favours for electoral support, remains strikingly underdeveloped. This special issue makes the case that clientelistic politics takes different forms in different countries, and that this variation matters for understanding democracy, elections, and governance. By comparing clientelistic vote mobilization in several countries – Mexico, Ghana, Sudan to Turkey, Indonesia, the Philippines, Caribbean and Pacific Islands states, and Malaysia – we unpack the concept of political clientelism and show that it is possible to identify different types of patronage democracies. In this introductory essay, we develop a comparative framework for this endeavour, showing that clientelism can be fruitfully compared in terms of the character of the networks that facilitate clientelistic exchange, the benefits that politicians offer in exchange for votes, and the degree to which politicians, and especially parties, control the distribution of state resources. These comparisons lead to the identification of different types of patronage democracies, notably community-centred and party-centred varieties. Building on this framework, this special issue shows that the comparative study of clientelistic politics offers analytical promise for scholars of democracy and democratization.