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I'm Faiza Zakaria from the Indian Technological University and your host for today. It is a pleasure to have with me today Farabi Faki, the author of Authoristic Modemization in Indonesia's Early Independence Period, the foundation of the New York City 1950-1965 published by Briel in 2020. Dr Farabi is lecturer at the History Department at the Gajama University in Dr. Krakakar, Indonesia, and he's a head of the graduate program there.
He received his PhD in Leiden in 2014 and is an expert on information urban history, the political economy, the street of the Indonesian state and Indonesian businesses. I'll be welcome to the podcast. Welcome, Faiza. Thank you so much for being here.
Let me first give a quick overview of your fascinating book before we begin. Authoristic modernization in Indonesia's Early Independence Period offers a historical analysis of the foundational years leading to Indonesia's new oldest state. During the early Independence Period, the study looked into the structural and ideological state formation during the so-called liberal democracy and so-called democracy period. Running from 1950-1965 in both of them.
In particular, it analyzes how an international technical aid network and the dominant managerial list ideology of the period legitimized the new managerial elite. This book discusses the development of education in the civil and mutual success in Indonesia and from a solid basis of empirical sources. It includes the Karnos Constitution Reform here in the Data Democracy, universally provided a strong technocratic blueprint for the new order development. So I think this book is very timely since there has been a resurgence global interest in the origins and formation of authoritarian regimes.
As many states around the world drift away from the liberal democracy, Indonesian experiences to have a session authority of intern in the 1950s and 1960s offers many lessons from history and I'm excited to learn about them from the top of the party. So let's start with the time period of the book and that's Karnos' opportunity to be part of the emergence of the authority of the other. So for listeners who might not be familiar with Indonesia, can you tell us more about this period of history? Who are the main players and why is it so interesting and significant in the Indonesian history?
Thank you for the question. So the Guide to Democracy period is a period between 1957 until 1966, usually people referred to those years. And it's a series of institutional reforms were initiated by presidents who Karno and the army that really ended Indonesia's first experiment with liberal democracy since 1950 until 1957. So the presidential decree by Sukarno in 1959, but others including me, I look at it as starting since the end of the second Alistair's to on the Jojo cabinet and the series of anti-corruption measures implemented by the army.
What it did was that it arranged in Indian state and society in accordance to Sukarno's division of a revolution guided by the Republican leadership and the plant and managed by the Indian population with the help of experts. There are three elements that make up the democracy revolution. The first idea, expert class, the managerial class which my book focus on. The managerial class are composed of civilian and military public administrators and business managers.
The second is a political class in particular, communist, but also various political leadership groups in society. Both party or side groups and affairs of course Karno himself, who tried to manage this seemingly oppressing elite class of managers and experts on one side and political class on the other side. So this period is interesting because while the democracy revolution is seen to end in a spectacular hail of violence with the collapse of Sukarno's government and the decimation of Indonesia's communists, the period in my opinion is essentially an understanding the structural foundation of the new order. Definitely.
And is that the reason why you became interested in this topic and how do you find the pressure and how do you do this? Well, you know, I had conducted my bachelor's research on Square Notes Nation Building Project in Jakarta, how he symbolically built up the city as the capital of the nation. So I've always had a fondness for the 1950s and 1960s because of its generational potential in Indian history. The period was always rather opaque in the eyes of many Indian historians, although more interested have come to light nowadays.
The reason for the apackness has been the hegemonic narrative developed by the new order which defined the period as one of chaos with societal and economic breakdown. This narrative was developed in a way to absorb new order from the Sukarno Project. By putting distance from Sukarno, the new order made its case for legitimacy exactly through that contrast. So instead I want to put back, I did democracy as a central and foundational feature in understanding the new order.
Sukarno's guided democracy is central in understanding the spirit. It is the foundational years that determine the kinds of nation state and state society relations that Indonesia would adhere to for the rest of the 20th century. The start of the developmental state is thus, I would argue, it didn't come from the rise of the new order, but from the tentative and increasingly assertive position of experts within the guided democracy state. So the enmashing of civilian and military managers also created during the spirit.
So this core blessing of managerial elite which allowed the new order of development to rise. Because what really started my question, what animated by research was, how is it possible that such a weak and chaotic guided democracy state suddenly transformed into a strong developmental state of the new order? That was what guided by research. And I think it is very interesting that you are intervening on this sort of idea of 1950s as chaos and 1965 onwards as a kind of new order so to speak.
So how do we connect them the 1950s back to sort of revolution and the sort of more conventional ways in which we define revolution as major, for example, the colonization against the Dutch in 1945 or social revolution in it. Does do these revolutions sort of feed into each other, the different ways each other and how did the guided democracy revolution come connected with these other concepts of revolution? Right, a very interesting question, Phaiza. Well, you know, my focus on the 50s was in reading the discourses and the narratives produced by inclusion elite.
And when I read like Sukarno's speeches and the main documents of the regime, it helps a lot in deciphering what he meant by revolution. There's a tendency to look at Sukarno as an ideologue whose speeches carry more, you know, the spirit and political conviction instead of a blueprint for future Indonesian society. It was seen as an orator whose words were its hearts and minds of millions of Indonesians. And by his critics, it was also criticized as a demagogue who incites fear and hatred.
Yet, you know, underneath his bravado and fiery theatrical perlocation is sort of a program for the future of Indonesia. His level of movement is in nature. And in a way, if you look at his speeches during the Indonesian revolution, the independence revolution of 1945 to 1950, it very much is replicating this kind of spirit of which are developmentless in nature. It is based on a reconfiguration of a managerial state.
So this revolution with Sukarno pushed forth in the end of the 50s, was very much sort of thinking along the lines of creating a managerial state with national planning, with industrialization and economic growth, yet combining this managerial approach with a sweeping political program to move people and a political leadership under state-guided development regime. This revolution was to ensure that the political position of the people for the political leadership class was to have a guiding seat in a new managerial based developmental state. So in this, he probably saw that the political class, the leadership that had obtained an education within the nationalist movement, was slowly to lose their role in the newly educated technical class, manages an expert. So there's this transition between the old leadership and the new leadership of managers and experts.
And Sukarno's revolution can be seen as a means to preempt this to the creation and integration of experts and politicians within a guided democracy state. Now, although this aspect failed, his revolution really paved the way for the ordering of the Indonesian state in which experts gained the upper hand in particular sites within a highly centralized state. So in terms of looking at how the revolution of 1945-1946 affected Sukarno's ideas of revolution later in the end of the 50s, there's very much a strong correlation in the sense that he wants to place political class within a developmental state model, which has always been the case, even during the period of wartime of the 40s. So we've talked about the democracy revolution and linked to various concepts of revolution.
The main argument in your book is that development of a new managerial class during the 1950s and the 1960s resulted in the creation of both the ideological and institutional basis for a military dominated managerial state. Can you tell us a bit more about these developments and whether they were specific to Indonesia or representative of the equalization states as a whole? Well, you know, what I meant by the managerial class here really do not so much as to the know their particular efficacious nature. So it's not really about whether they're like efficient managers or not.
It's really more of a denitatation of a particular new identity of state elite that appeared in the 1950s. And Indonesia in this case was not unique. The rise of a managerial ideology was something that occurred globally. This was something that it's used in the rise of public administration and management science since the late 19th century.
But the tooling of all economies during the total wars of World War II had provided an impetus for America to model its modernization theory on. So America had a major role in sort of exporting this managerial ideology. And this ideology was something really to counter the state-led developmentalism that was brought up by the Soviet Union, by China and others, by communist states. So as you can see, both the East and the West within this Cold War dynamic opted to support the kind of state-led model of development.
In a sense, as one famous American social scientist noted, ideology in the 1950s had really died. In particular, the ideology of liberalism had taken back seat to the ideology of managerialism and disentrality of the state. In this regard, it is important to define Indonesian developmental ideology and institutional reforms that were implemented prior to and during the kind of democracy within this managerial ideology, that was really global in nature at the time. The Cold War divided between capitalism and communism didn't matter much anymore because there was an agreement to the weaknesses of liberal democracy to achieve development.
Instead, the period was counted in agreement on the need to achieve a managerial state or at least a developmental state. That's the managerial ideology and the necessary institutional forms to make this happen. This is when I focus on analyzing the requirements of evolution. We often forget the supremacy of this ideology today because of the shift backwards, liberalism in the 1970s, end up with and the proclamation of the end of history with the liberal victory by the early 90s.
So the shift back to neoliberalism at the end of the 20th century. Yet, you know, making a mistake, the vision of the people in the 50s, including Indonesia, was that of a developmental state ran partially by managers and experts. And that also brings us to another central concept to your book, which is authoritarian modernization. And I think from your previous answer, it does seem that it's a global development in its ideology that's potentially appealing to many different states.
So can you tell us a bit more about authoritarian modernization in particular and how did it become a set of theoretical framework for your book? Obviously, the idea of modernization, especially today, is seen by many to be inherently authoritarian. I really want to show in this book that Sukarno's effort, his so-called revolution, while resulting in the death of Indonesia's liberal democracy experiment in the 1950s, was one that was animated by what he saw as a form of democratic oversight against the looming threat of expert control. So in this sense, Sukarno had been adamant to stress the democratic nature of his evolution.
It's going to be seen in its name, guided democracy, right? It was an effort to position the people in the process of planning and its implementation through institutional innovations in the national planning board, government, and corporations, and so forth. Even its implementation had obviously catered a lot of problems, including corruption and the adoption of efficiency, but the democratic nature of his project, as Sukarno, sold it, was very clear. While he saw democracy not through a liberal lens, seeing liberalism as an extension of Western imperialism, it was nevertheless democratic in its conception.
The implementation of the managerial state, the managerial ideology that was championed by the United States through their aid program, was inherently authoritarian as well. Sukarno understood this undemocratic nature of the new ideology of managerialism. Yet what is interesting is that despite the machination of the guided democracy to achieve some sort of balance between development and popular representation, the end result would still be the formation of authoritarian development of the state. The question is did Sukarno fail?
Or was this a normal result of implementation of developmental state, despite the effort by Sukarno and others to institutionally encompass political oversight by the people as Sukarno had wanted to do? And yet inherently resulting in a form of authoritarian democratization. This is why the link between development and authoritarianism becomes a focal period of this research. Right, and I think it is really interesting that you point out that Sukarno's conception of the state was democratic in its core, right?
And your question about did Sukarno fail? And that reminds me of the debate between the help that feeds Harry Jivenda about the state of democracy in Indonesia where feeds saw the advent of the democracy as the decline of the first education democracy, which you know he means the carnal field. And then I'm going to saw it as a re-azession of traditional, international, political systems. So I'm wondering, since in the introduction in your book you refer to me as a member says why would Indonesia be able to ask democracy when it was never part of their culture or repertoire?
Would it be right to say you are on the side of the vendor in this debate? Yeah, interesting question, Faiza. I would say I'm actually more along the lines of Herbert Fieden disregard. Ben's argument was that Indonesia's cultural memory of Japanese or traditional statehood, which lacked a liberal democratic component made the possibility of creating a real liberal democracy impossible.
You know, since the fall of Sohar to Indonesia has been quite a successful democratic state and implementing a roquoist chaotic democracy, but which at the end of the day is considering many to still sort of work. My argument would be a bit similar to faith in that the circumstances of the 1950s really was the reason for the demise of Indonesia's first experiment with democracy. In particular, I see the Cold War hegemonic imaginary of the managers as an important component in this regard as a backdrop or vessel for change in many societies throughout the third world. While many people blame this on American modernization theory, which is too large extent, I think it's also important to focus on the importance of local agency.
The 1950s fixation on the managerial ideology provided the impetus, motivation and model for changing democracy. But as we can see with Sukarno, it was a choice made by locals, local agency with central, and the definition of the Indonesian managerial state on the one hand. Sukarno's politician and military and managerial model, versus the new order, purely manager model, which was both realized and defined by local individuals on the ground. So, you know, while the process of making a local seem to support vendors pieces going back to the traditional Japanese statehood, what I really want to provide is actually a more nuanced picture, which would provide, which would combine both this international ideological support for managerialism and a pragmatic local approach that very well uses some cultural description of power and state society relations.
So, I guess in a sense, my answer is that both sides really do matter, but the conditions, the global conditions and the local conditions of the 1950s and the writing ideology at the time really provided impetus for the shift towards the authority and the authority and states of the order. Because, you know, one thing which we cannot answer in the negative is, you know, we wouldn't, we don't know why, had liberal democracy continued in Indonesia in the 50s, it would have created a normal state as well, you know. The fact that liberal democracy failed in the 50s, that's what's important to understand why did it fail, and in this case, I feel like the most brilliant answer to that has to lie within this context of the managerial ideology that was permeating the global at the time. And I want to pick up on your point about international support, I think, for all this sort of managerial, the development of this managerial class, and we see that I think in the nations of the global north and the global south connecting through the circulation of technocrats.
And that's not going to be associated with the new order period, but could you tell us a bit more about how global powers are supporting or challenging political developments in Indonesia, and how we can see that. And how do you think political developments in Indonesia during this kind of democracy as well as maybe the liberal democracy period? Yeah, well, you know, the advent of the democracy in Indonesia and many other parts of the world was, well, especially in Indonesia's case, developed through international aid structure in the context of the Cold War. And so Soviet and communist aid mainly supported military procurement of weapons and engineering education.
It was really the American aid in providing secondary and fishery education in America and Indonesia which focused on social science, including education and business management and public administration. So there's definitely a strong global component in allowing this generation to appear. And so, first we emphasize that American aid did not inculcate Indian experts to be supporter of dictatorships. Such supports came in the form of logical conclusion to the needs of state-led development.
So, in many ways, the ideological tool that was offered by managerialism was met with Indian ideas of pragmatism and a new state along with a new bureaucratic elite and their effort to regain control from non-state elements, including from the various political elites that have developed during indigenous nationalist movements up to independence. So I guess it's a mixture of American aid and the need of the state to implement a strong form of development. And so, in that sense, global power is a core component in understanding why they appear. And I'd always be support from global powers also took a bit of a doctrine in the sense that you argue that the Indonesian state became a kind of counter-insurgency state.
Could you tell us a bit more about that? Why do you make this argument? And how does a Condé's agency state function? When I started doing my research, it was focused on managers or on the administration of the administration, business managers and so forth.
What I found immediately was just the presence of the military managers within both public and business management in Indonesia during that time. In a way, both military and civilian managers and experts shared insights, the same insights that were important in understanding indigenous state regulations that were developed in the 50s. And really, that insight was the need to remain in what they considered to be a highly politicized society. Now, this is a central narrative in Indian history that indigenous society was chaotic, and thus they failed to develop as a result of the politicization of society.
If we read into the books of both military managers, especially those within the army officer schools and the various management magazines that were published in the 1950s, they often featured military leaders like the head of the Indonesian army, Genoa Ahana Supeon, or some of the commanders of the military command, particularly the commander of the West Java, the commander of the Command Yibem Ajhi. And oftentimes, they point out the need to form population control. Within this vision, which are shared by indigenous economies and experts as well, indigenous society was seen as being infiltrated by enemies from communism, radical Islam, Western liberalism, and so forth. So this kind of doctrines defines the population as enemies, which require various avenues of control.
At this point, to the idea of conconsurgency as a central part of the managerial state in which population would be redefined as potential threats for insurgencies. In this corridor, I atmospheric, there was a belief amongst some Indian army that the formation of the development of state acquired integration of the army within that state in order to allow for population control. And this of course happened by the mid 50s upwards, and but especially during the Geith Democracy where the army came into all various parts of society and state in Indonesia. And this idea was something shared by experts.
So in this regard, Indonesia's developmental state and its managerial ideas and ideology very much incorporated ideas of conconsurgency in which they saw the population as a field for applying disciplinary actions to allow for control, which they saw as central to providing development for Indonesia. New books in the Southeast Asian Studies has the generous support of the ANU Southeast Asian Institute connecting you with the Australian National University's wealth of expertise in the politics, languages, societies and economics of Southeast Asia through research, teaching events and more to get details visit se. Welcome back to the podcast. We have Dr.
Farabi Faki talking about authoritarian modernization in Indonesia's early independence period published by Brill in 2020. And in the earlier part of this episode, we have talked about the concept of guided and quasi revolution, how this was supported by a during the Cold War and the emergence of an Indonesian managerial state. Let's build up on that. Because as I understand from your book, the development of science also grew and was enabled by this sort of politics of authoritarian modernization during this period.
Can you tell us more about this process and also why you saw this modernization also as a process of free traditionalization, which is a very concentrated observation? Yeah. Well, I guess going back to our previous discussion, the way in which many religion leaders, including Sukarno, but also Nasuti on others in defining a new relations between state and society, is often based on traditional ideas, right? Just Japanese notions of citizens within a familial context.
The familial ideology of the New Order State and its roots in continental legal ideas, which has been expounded by David Bueshi among others, and Bueshi has shown that it has roots in other ideas developed during the Dutch colonial period. That's pointing it to actually being partially Western, in particular Dutch or German origins. In this regard, I focus on the discourse of Indonesian elites. Regardless of its hybrid Western Indonesian roots, the idea of controlling Indonesian population through a new form of relationship between the state and society, or a familial one, was something that was voiced as a form of going back to tradition.
So, yet importantly, this engagement with traditions, i.e. with feudal traditions of society in which people were under the past of their leaders, were conjoined with modern ideas of managerialism, and they saw no problem in this context. That's the ideology of scientific managerialism, which was conjoined with the idea of traditional state who drew it in the history. The idea of the role of Indonesian society, especially those under the masses, discussed both in managerialist terms, but also in traditional Japanese terms.
So, in that sense, the root reason for this is because the end point is still the same. The creation of a strong state with various means of the full population, which is the end goal of the idea. This points out to the way in which such global ideologies are localized, whereby local agencies, particularly in this case, Indonesian leadership, which for the most part has their roots in Japanese aristocracy, played the most decisive role. They've sort of conjoined ideas of Japanese aristocracy, which either developed, which is something which, as Mende has mentioned, is rooted much deeper in the Japanese statehood, which, as Morschied has shown, has colonial roots as well, sort of ideology of the colonial period, but also present period, where the 50s, where it can be conjoined into these modern notions of managerial ideology.
Is this specifically Japanese traditionalization, do you see, or is it also happening in other parts of Indonesia? Well, I don't look at it. My main focus is on leading the discourse that is produced by leaders, Indonesian leaders, and what's really interesting, of course, is that in a lot of ways, the kind of feudal notions that are used to support the other managerialist claim, for the most part, they use Japanese ideas of statehood or citizenship, kawu-la-gusti and so forth. And the idea of the sort of no-blessable, bleige ideas of the Japanese aristocracy placed in a different context.
So in that sense, it's very much it, from what I read so far, it's a very strong Japanese roots to this discussion, used by now so-called modern Indonesian managers, but they still use it, and they use it very Japanese notions, Japanese philosophies, Japanese assaysings, which became prevalent in the new order period, right? But you see this in the 50s already, by people who are supposedly Westernized, not supposedly highly Muslim managers. Right, and there's a fascinating aspect of this concept that I think has not been centralized much in the literature. I just want to kind of pick up on it earlier point that we talked about, that you mentioned briefly, I think in the earlier segment, which is about the rise of a military elite during this period, and there were three chapters, I think, in your book that concerned the formation of the city.
Could you also share with us some of your key findings about the position of the military elite during the liberal democracy and the United Democracy period? And do you see in the beginnings of the oligarchy that the new order was mostly used for? Well, I look at the Indonesian military elite, as I've described them as central to the creation of the developmental state through a couple of means. So, on the one hand, from an institutional point of view, the military's role in, for instance, nationalizing Dutch owned companies at the end of the 1950s, they really strengthened their position as a poor component in the Indian energy management class.
That's why if you go to the various management courses that appeared in the end of the 50s, it's always a collection of military and civilian managers, running companies that are now being taught these various management courses. On the other hand, the army itself, of course, developed its doctrine, which focused on the idea of what's known as the karia doctrine, or the military dual function role that was sort of the backbone of the new order military state, right? So, the expansion of army positions into various sectors of Indonesian lives isn't the new order phenomenon. In fact, it's really started under the democracy.
In fact, if you look at the number of governors, army governors of provinces during Sukarnos last year in power, in comparison to Sartos early years of the European Union, there were more military governors on this part of the end of Sartos. Now, I don't really focus on the oligarchy, which is really looking at the relationship between army and private sector, which is definitely a form of the backbone for the relationship, which would later on create the new order oligarchy. But definitely, at the institutional level, at the expanding military role in companies during the 50s, and the creation of new relationships with a lot of, mostly, for instance, Chinese business management, we can see very much that the focus of my research, that the oligarchy is very much doing this video. Thank you.
I like the anti-cantonesome completion in my question, the conflict state society relation with the army of private sector. I think I have to be right that these are two different set of connections that perhaps should be done separately. I think I want to also look at how you disrupt some of the well established categories such as leftist, liberal, communist, and so on. So, when you push back the study that the template for them literally was set in the 1950s, then the emergence of the kind of progression of the politics of the military, and the political system.
So, the kind of progression of the political left in the new order takes on the difference in the political system. So, can you tell us more about how in your last set of the book you asked you, to the history of how these categories like this liberal, communist, and political, came to reply to Indonesian politics? And how did they illustrate, as you argue with that, the difference between the guy who did democracy and the new order, not between capitalism and liberalism, and communism, but between the states and the participatory of the type of ideology. Tell us a bit more about that.
Yeah, thank you. So, my main argument really is on this level in that, to understand this period in the religion history, we really need to require to rethink about the Cold War divide, because, I mean, there certainly was a divide, in particular the divide between the politicians versus the experts. And this is something that's not unique to Indonesia, as we've seen. And this is, of course, the discussion by Herbert Fiedt, right, about the vision between the solidarity maker and the administrator.
But you can see that in high analysis of the Burmese leadership, or elite, and also, Shurman's analysis of the Chinese, communist Chinese leadership in the 50s as well in China. But what's really important is that it wasn't an ideological divide between the West and the East as commonly described, but between what's carnified in mind with this, the democracy and a particular form of political participation. So, as Carnot wanted to, in a way, save the politician in this new managerial mode of statehood, versus a more state-centered one that required a more obedient form of relationship between state elites and society. So, it is important not merely to define Squareness ideas as being to the left or on the East side, right?
Because, for instance, Soviet A to the public was mostly the level lines of military hardware, and the Soviet development was the indigent army. They also provide lots of aid for industrial development and provide engineering education to some Indonesians. The Soviet was just as state-centered as the Americans. So, in this regard, the division between capitalism, which is communism, by kind of understanding of the Indonesian history during this period, instead of helping them, because the question really then becomes what happens to efforts to create participative ideology, participative type of ideology, which is a part of the implement, and which, in a way, was expressed most succinctly in the 60s in Indonesia with the Communist Party, the Indonesian Communist Party, trying to enter into the state.
It was interesting about Indonesian Communist Party, despite being the third largest Communist Party in the world, but it is not a controlling party, right? I mean, you compare that to the Chinese Communist Party, or the Soviet Communist Party, which controls the state, the Indonesian Communist Party is outside of the state. And this is where the Soviet democracy evolution tried to sort of open up society, and thus open up ability by organizations like the Communists to participate in the state. So, it is in a way to implement both a managerialist state form, but also one that would increase participation, increase a kind of idea of democracy, which Squareness had, and the destruction of the Communist Party in 1965, that's in a way, can be looked at, of course, as a destruction of the left.
But it could also be looked at within the context of the destruction of that participative type of ideology in comparison to the state-centered one, which was supported by the managers. Exactly, and I find it really interesting, I think, as Singaporean interested in Indonesian politics, I can find a lot of parallels, I think, between what you're describing just now about the demise, so to speak, of participative type of ideology, dating also back from, to the 1950s and the 1960s. So, I'm trying to know, and this is departing a little from your book, whether when we looked regionally, do you think that the South Asian authoritarianism, or the authoritarianism of the South Asian are learning from each other? Yeah, I think they do, definitely, yeah, because, particularly if you look at the new order period, for instance, there are a lot of similarities between the New Order and the military regime of Myanmar under the SLO, the SLO RC.
And then, of course, going back to Karno's vision of statehood itself, which he always positioned as a vision against what he saw as Western imperialism, in which, in his mind, liberalism is very much part of Western imperialism. And, of course, in the later years of his rule, in which he envisioned an arc of non-Western forms of third world development model, his Pyongyang Beijing, Hanoyi, Jakarta, Axis, which, of course, never went anywhere, which was the latest of his foray into creating a different model for development in the third world, so-called new emerging forces. So, in a way, this arc of experimental non-liberal developmental state that was participatory, and it's demise towards a strong military state in the third world, is shared by many other nations. It's interesting how much parallel it is there are, so it allows in some form of mimicking and learning from each other.
Of course, the question that really is important is to understand why is this participatory of democracy that Karno's vision failed? And again, it really depends on the local conditions, because I would imagine it's very difficult to replicate Singaporean version of authoritarianism within Indonesia, just merely by looking at how different the two countries are, but definitely it's a transnational process. There's a lot of mimicking, there's a lot of borrowing, and this aspect is something which I think has potential to be developed in understanding why the Third World Project failed the way it did in the 60s, 70s operates. Definitely, and one of the legacies that we're dealing with in terms of the sort of authoritarian history is a current research environment in some ways.
And what is sort of moving to your personal experiences in this direction? What kind of difficult researching and authoritarian, I mean, the history of authoritarian past, and what advice would you advise me to look into the same thing in South Asia or in the nation? Well, my advice would probably be from what I've learned, but one thing which I haven't really developed much further is the potential of looking at it as a transnational or global processes, but one in which it is very much in response to the local dynamics. So I suppose the better approach would be to conduct a comparative historical analysis as is usually conducted by political scientists with a historical approach.
And many books have been developed within this comparative approach, which are Lindelow and so forth, and these are very insightful. So my book is not this type of political science approach because I'm a family and historians and my focus has been mainly to develop a more nuanced understanding of Indonesian history during this interesting period, but obviously I think we can sort of develop this further in a more comparative, international approach which I think has more potential for saying something new on this topic. And I think moving so transnational is going to generate maybe 10 pieces of motivation, hopefully. So thank you for that too.
As you sort of refer to the literature that you used in your book, could you really share with us some of the interesting books that you found in your research, which you think could be under red or under red that you would like to recommend to the listeners at the new book that were? Yeah, well, you know, and this is probably one of the most difficult questions actually because there's so many interesting stuff. I would really argue we should go back to reading the old classics, in particular, I would argue, you know, rereading stuff like Herbert Feats' book in the 1950s, and the political history of the 1950s with a fresh perspective that we now have today, right? In doing so, we're able to sort of reread it in a different manner because in a sense also these books were part of history.
They really historical sources because they shaped in part how not only academics, but now Indonesians, elite view or engage with the subject at the time, with the state, with the society. I mean, obviously, in that level, a lot of modernization theory books that have been published, Michael Adam and so forth, who sort of criticized the modern modernization theory. That kind of work is interesting and it would be included within so we can then read these older texts more critically. I guess maybe, yeah, so going back to the classics and sort of the engaging with them, that's really, you know, I'm obviously that's what we're going to have to do anyway, but I would stress on the sheer importance of that act, I guess.
That reminds me, I'll cut it by it to do that as well because you've made quite a persuasive case for that. Before we end, could it tell us a bit more about your next research project? Yeah, well, you know, currently I'm writing a paper on the revolutionary period, and that's the Indonesian Revolution for Independence 1945-1950. And I'm looking at the city of Jukkara, the capital city, the revolutionary capital of the Republic of Indonesia at that time during the war for independence between 1946 and 49, and it's actually currently my place of residence.
And in that research, I look at it the way the spaces of the city is used involiply by the Republic and elites at that time, including Presidents of Karna, but also by other parties, for instance, by political groups, to effectuate the Republic as a real thing, because we have to remember that during this period, there was a war with the Dutch, and the state itself doesn't really exist. And that's to sort of be conjured. And this happened in the war time period, but the earnestness in Indonesia to perform the idea of independence within the capital was something that really informed us of how the capital, the state itself would eventually be affected in the post-colonial period. So I look at how exactly life was like there in the capital.
Another aspect which I look at is in particular are stuff like sports or the public culture life, where the Republic of the elites in the capital. So we're going to be using the plays and the theatres to perform, and what themes they explored during a period of duress on the threat of a Dutch attack. And that sounds super fascinating. And I think sports, in particular, is a new angle to which to think about the revolution.
Do you want to tell us a bit more about that? There's a kind of chase level what's to come. What really animated the idea of re-reheating the history of the revolution in the context of the revolution in capital, for me was really the idea of Judith Butler in analyzing performativity in this relation with identity, how people perform their identity within the space. So the idea of performing the nation was something that always had been interesting to me because doing my bachelor's degree, my research was into looking at how Sukarno performed to create the spaces in order to be performed as a Republican, but also as a global and only players capital.
So the performance identity in space was a feature that always interested me. There's one thing that can be tied to the book project which I'm doing now on the research on youth and sport during the revolution. So the idea of participation and how one class of control participation is something which I think Sukarno intuitively saw as central to state power. So, you know, he's a very interesting person.
Sukarno's idea always had a very strong element of theatricality. He's an orator. He looks at the world as a stage. And this is something which continues from the after independence, but really including the formation of diversity of new institutions in the name of development.
So, what I saw, one of the major interests I saw was how exactly did Sukarno saw Dr. Karga as a theater? How did he, how did he, and you know, not just Sukarno, but also other elements, youth elements. How did they sort of use Dr.
Karga to sort of proclaim the legitimacy within the new republic? And it's interesting because, and then you can see that the developmentless ideas that Sukarno envisioned later on in during the 50s, these ideas already existed during the revolution period. But also the kind of participatory nature in that indigent society would, you know, be expressed within its politicized civil society that existed as well during this period in which there was a major war between the Dutch and the indigent republic. So, why was this performance of the nation within that small space of the capital?
Why was it so important? And why was it, why was it performance in its enunciation so central to making it real to the indigent audience but also to the audience outside of Indonesia? So, it had to, it really didn't have a place, but it had to be performed so that people knew that it was there before indigent independence. Yes, it sounds like really groundbreaking research and I'm really excited about it.
Thank you so much for sharing that with us. Yeah, thank you. It's been really like to share with you. Thank you.
And thank you to all the SNLs you have been listening to new books and stories. The podcast channel on the new book, Netflix, the campaign for our be-focused authoritarian modernization in Indonesia's early independence period, the foundation of the new order state, 1950 to 1965. Available and published by Bill in 2020. I hope you have enjoyed the conversation.
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