Security, Democracy, and Society in Bali: Trouble with Protection [1st ed.] 9789811558474, 9789811558481

Table of contents :
Front Matter ....Pages i-xv
The Trouble with Protection (Andrew Vandenberg)....Pages 1-22
The People Answer Back: A Case Study in the Balinese Asserting Their Opinion About the Ormas (Kadek Dwita Apriani, Translated by Elisha Montgomery)....Pages 23-49
The 2015 Billboards Campaign: What Was That All About? (Ni Nyoman Dewi Pascarani, Translated by Miriam Ramsay)....Pages 51-74
The Historical Construction of Bali’s Security Groups (Andrew Vandenberg)....Pages 75-110
“A Combination of Extortion and Civic Duty”: A Comparative Criminological Perspective on Informal Security Organisations in Bali (Richard Evans)....Pages 111-131
Paradise Fabricated: Networking of Local Strongmen in Bali (Nazrina Zuryani)....Pages 133-154
The Transitional Democracy Trap: Democracy, Complexity, and Local Oligarchy in Bali (Ali Azhar Muhammad, Translated by Abigail Robinson)....Pages 155-175
The Internal Governance of Civil Militia (Tedi Erviantono, Translated by Augustina Wayansari)....Pages 177-208
Power and the Security Organisations in Bali: Drug Gangsters, Neighbourhood Watch Groups, or What? (Andrew Vandenberg, I Gusti Agung Oka Mahangganga)....Pages 209-232
Gender Dualism as Degendering Cosmic Multicultural Tolerance of Wargas: Community Security Practices in North Bali (Nazrina Zuryani, Tedi Erviantono, Translated by Hannah Mansfield)....Pages 233-252
Digital Activism in Bali: The ForBALI Movement (Fiona Suwana)....Pages 253-284
Elected and Non-elected Representative Claim-Makers in Indonesia (Michael Hatherell)....Pages 285-303
Contesting Indonesia’s Democratic Transition: Laskar Jihad, the Islamic Defenders Front (FPI) and Civil Society (Greg Barton)....Pages 305-331
Back Matter ....Pages 333-345

Citation preview

Security, Democracy, and Society in Bali Trouble with Protection Edited by

a n dr e w va n de n be rg n a z r i n a z u rya n i

Security, Democracy, and Society in Bali

Andrew Vandenberg · Nazrina Zuryani Editors

Security, Democracy, and Society in Bali Trouble with Protection

Editors Andrew Vandenberg Faculty of Arts and Education Deakin University Geelong, VIC, Australia

Nazrina Zuryani Faculty of Social and Political Science Udayana University Denpasar, Indonesia

ISBN 978-981-15-5847-4 ISBN 978-981-15-5848-1 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-5848-1 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2021 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. The registered company address is: 152 Beach Road, #21-01/04 Gateway East, Singapore 189721, Singapore

Foreword

The community organisations—organisasi masyarakat, known as ormas — are a complex problem in Indonesian society. Since the end of the Suharto regime and the decentralisation of public administration, local politics have become more important. This was an opportunity for the ormas, which are local security groups. They have many strong and fit young men as members working as security guards, bouncers, debt collectors, body guards, and prison guards. With so many members, they can help political parties to attract voters for legislative assembly elections and for directly elected mayors and provincial governors. In return, elected politicians help the security groups with work contracts and various jobs for their members in the public administration. The groups can then attract more members. This is not a matter of outright bribery but it is a form of money politics. The security organisations operate in a moral grey zone. They are not organised crime gangs but nor are they harmless neighbourhood watch groups. These groups operate all over Indonesia. In Bali, the prosperity derived from tourism complicates the money politics. The deep legacy of Dutch orientalism about “the island of the gods” also complicates how the Balinese maintain our own culture and do our own politics. This edited collection of chapters addresses many faces of the problem around the security groups in Bali. The authors draw upon diverse disciplines to problematise the security groups in a wide range of ways.

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FOREWORD

Different authors reflect on: the current security groups’ historical forebears; the way their operations resemble ‘twilight policing’ by security groups in other developing countries; the political sociology of oligarchy and money politics; the discursive construction of citizenship and civil– militia membership; the gendered politics of magico-realist protection of the community; the groups’ relationship to orientalism about the ‘island of the gods’; their standing in opinion polls and a democratic public sphere; the way social media works within them and similar groups; the peculiar phenomenon of their public relations campaigning; their relations with the police and the regulation of criminality; their relationship to the political parties’ claims to represent voters and the national interest; and their relationship to illiberal politicians and populist tendencies in national politics. The research that went into these chapters derives in large part from collaboration between researchers from Udayana University in Bali and Deakin University in Australia. Permission to interview security group leaders, prominent journalists, senior police, and party leaders came from both the Faculty of Social and Political Science at Udayana and the Deakin University Human Research Ethics Committee. Deakin funded transcription of the interviews and Udayana provided the transcription personnel. For chapters drafted in Indonesian, language students and tutors at Deakin have translated them into English in collaboration with the editors and the authors. This is an unusual edited collection of chapters. The collection has the usual mix of senior and junior researchers, and a problem orientation rather than a discipline orientation is not so unusual. However, the collaboration between Indonesian and Australian researchers conducting joint interviews is unusual for an edited collection. Initially, prison riots between security-group inmates and a dramatic assassination in a small village generated considerable apprehension about approaching leaders of the security organisations. I understand the presence of an international researcher in a group interview helped allay anxieties and the joint process became very productive for all involved. I warmly recommend this

FOREWORD

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edited collection of diverse, interesting chapters about an important and complicated problem in Indonesia and Bali today. November 2019

I Gst. Pt. Bagus Suka Arjawa Dean of the Faculty of Social and Political Science Udayana University Denpasar, Indonesia

Contents

1

1

The Trouble with Protection Andrew Vandenberg

2

The People Answer Back: A Case Study in the Balinese Asserting Their Opinion About the Ormas Kadek Dwita Apriani

23

The 2015 Billboards Campaign: What Was That All About? Ni Nyoman Dewi Pascarani

51

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4

The Historical Construction of Bali’s Security Groups Andrew Vandenberg

5

“A Combination of Extortion and Civic Duty”: A Comparative Criminological Perspective on Informal Security Organisations in Bali Richard Evans

6

Paradise Fabricated: Networking of Local Strongmen in Bali Nazrina Zuryani

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111

133

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CONTENTS

The Transitional Democracy Trap: Democracy, Complexity, and Local Oligarchy in Bali Ali Azhar Muhammad

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The Internal Governance of Civil Militia Tedi Erviantono

9

Power and the Security Organisations in Bali: Drug Gangsters, Neighbourhood Watch Groups, or What? Andrew Vandenberg and I Gusti Agung Oka Mahangganga

10

Gender Dualism as Degendering Cosmic Multicultural Tolerance of Wargas: Community Security Practices in North Bali Nazrina Zuryani and Tedi Erviantono

11

Digital Activism in Bali: The ForBALI Movement Fiona Suwana

12

Elected and Non-elected Representative Claim-Makers in Indonesia Michael Hatherell

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Contesting Indonesia’s Democratic Transition: Laskar Jihad, the Islamic Defenders Front (FPI) and Civil Society Greg Barton

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177

209

233

253

285

305

Glossary

333

Index

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List of Contributors

Kadek Dwita Apriani Udayana University, Denpasar, Indonesia Greg Barton Alfred Deakin Institute, Deakin University, Melbourne, VIC, Australia Tedi Erviantono Faculty of Social and Political Science, Udayana University, Denpasar, Indonesia Richard Evans Arts and Education, Deakin University, Geelong, VIC, Australia Michael Hatherell Strategic Studies, Deakin University, Melbourne, VIC, Australia; Australian Defence College, Canberra, ACT, Australia I Gusti Agung Oka Mahangganga Faculty University, Denpasar, Indonesia

of

Tourism,

Udayana

Ali Azhar Muhammad Faculty of Social and Political Science, Udayana University, Denpasar, Indonesia Ni Nyoman Dewi Pascarani Faculty of Social and Political Science, Udayana University, Denpasar, Indonesia Fiona Suwana University of South Australia, Adelaide, SA, Australia

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LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS

Andrew Vandenberg Arts and Education, Deakin University, Geelong, VIC, Australia Nazrina Zuryani Faculty of Social and Political Science, Udayana University, Denpasar, Indonesia

List of Figures

Fig. 2.1 Fig. 2.2 Fig. 2.3 Fig. 2.4 Fig. 2.5 Fig. 2.6 Fig. 2.7 Fig. 2.8 Fig. 2.9 Fig. 2.10 Fig. 3.1 Fig. 3.2

Fig. 3.3

Sampling process Community views on the ormas billboards that appeared in public areas in 2016 Resident assessment towards three big security organisations in Bali 2016 Opinions of the Balinese public regarding action that should be taken by the government towards the ormas Those who had heard of the ormas clash in the Kerobokan prison at the end of 2015 Have you, or have you not seen ormas billboards on the side of the road in the last six months? Community views regarding ormas billboards in 2017 Citizen’s assessment of the big three ormas in Bali 2017 Community assessment about whether the ormas contribute to the development of Bali Government attitudes towards ormas as expected by the community Baladika Bali Ormas billboard (Source Author—Ni Nyoman Dewi Pascarani) Billboards of the leader of Ormas “Pemuda Bali Bersatu”, now elected as a member of the House of Representative, Denpasar City (Source Author—Ni Nyoman Dewi Pascarani) An example of an Ormas member’s tattoo (Source Andrew Vandenberg)

32 34 36 38 39 40 41 43 44 46 60

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LIST OF FIGURES

Fig. 3.4

Fig. 4.1 Fig. 6.1 Fig. 6.2 Fig. 9.1 Fig. 9.2

Fig. 9.3 Fig. 9.4 Fig. 10.1

Fig. 10.2

Fig. 11.1 Fig. 11.2 Fig. 11.3 Fig. 11.4

The United Youth of Bali’s Ormas logo on a T-shirt worn by an Ormas Leader (Source Author—Ni Nyoman Dewi Pascarani) An argument about the history of Indonesia’s societal organisations—ormas Income of Denpasar city in 2017 ($1 USD = 14,031 rupiah IDR) (Source Widyaswara [2016]) A statue against gangsterism and illicit drugs (Source Nazrina Zuryani) Posters from Laskar Bali and Bali Baladikan 2015 (Source Andrew Vandenberg) 14th anniversary, Laskar Bali 25 October 2015, Event agenda: home surgery, blood donations, nursing home social service, praying together at pura besakih, evening peak event, lottery drawn at Renon (Source Andrew Vandenberg) Chief of Police Golose: Narcotics gangs, No way!!! (Source Andrew Vandenberg) Pecalang in Tanjung Bungkaka Village (West Denpasar), 2018 (Source Andrew Vandenberg) Activities and lobbying of political parties and organisations (Source The photo is given by MS from her Instagram) Prayer and attraction of the community leader before extinguishing the incense sticks in her mouth (Source Nazrina Zuryani) Images courtesy of official website of ForBALI Forum Images courtesy of official account ForBALI on Facebook and Instagram Images courtesy of official account ForBALI on Twitter Images courtesy of official account ForBALI on YouTube

65 78 148 149 221

222 223 227

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248 261 263 264 264

List of Tables

Table 2.1

Table 2.2 Table 2.3 Table 2.4 Table 2.5 Table 2.6

Table 2.7 Table 2.8 Table 2.9

Table 3.1 Table 8.1 Table 9.1

Cross tabulation between regency or city of residency and perceptions about the emergence of the ormas billboards in 2016 Cross tabulation between education level and views about the emergence of the ormas billboards Cross tabulation between assessment of the Laskar Bali ormas and the respondent’s gender Cross tabulation between assessment of the Pemuda Bali Bersatu ormas and the respondent’s gender Cross tabulation between assessment of the Baladika ormas and the respondent’s gender Cross tabulation between regencies/cities of residence and perceptions of the emergence of ormas billboards in 2017 Cross tabulation between respondent’s gender and perception of ormas billboards in 2017 Cross tabulation between respondents’ districts and assessments about ormas contributions to development Cross tabulation between respondents’ district and attitudes about actions the government should take regarding the three largest ormas in Bali Ormas billboards A chronology of violence between militia in Bali 2012–2017 Criminal acts in the jurisdiction of the Bali regional police 2013–2017

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CHAPTER 1

The Trouble with Protection Andrew Vandenberg

… the word “protection” sounds two contrasting tones. One is comforting, the other ominous. With one tone, “protection” calls up images of the shelter against danger provided by a powerful friend, a large insurance policy, or a sturdy roof. With the other, it evokes the racket in which a local strong man forces merchants to pay tribute in order to avoid damage – damage the strong man himself threatens to deliver. The difference, to be sure, is a matter of degree… Which image the word “protection” brings to mind depends mainly on our assessment of the reality and externality of the threat. (Tilly 1985: 170–171)

Some of Bali’s security organisations do offer protection from genuine threats to people’s livelihoods and this is appreciated by the local community. In the north of the island, for example, one organisation of transgender guards provides genuine protection for sex workers and clients around gay and transgender bars near the port. They also promote tourism, offer counselling, and promote campaigns for HIV awareness and anti-homophobia (see Zuryani and Erviantono Chapter 10). Similarly, in the south, village authorities (banjar) in Seminyak hire supposedly traditional guards (pecalang) to patrol the streets and ensure public safety

A. Vandenberg (B) Arts and Education, Deakin University, Geelong, VIC, Australia e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2021 A. Vandenberg and N. Zuryani (eds.), Security, Democracy, and Society in Bali, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-5848-1_1

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around a string of gay and transgender bars. The Seminyak bars cater to a small but lucrative niche in the Western tourist market that can obviously attract trouble from all manner of homophobes or violent religious extremists. However, matters are less clear when it comes to the big three security organisations—Laskar Bali, LB (“Soldiers of Bali”), Bali Baladikan, BB (“Balinese Army”), and Pemuda Bali Bersatu, PBB (“Bali Youth Union”). These much larger groups garner community support through offering “social services”, such as makeshift housing for internal migrant workers from north and eastern Bali and around Indonesia, blood donation centres, help with ceremony costs, help with the cost of their children’s school clothes and books, and conducting searches of greater Indonesia immigrant neighbourhoods to check for Bali residency permits. For newcomers looking for work in the tourist areas, they offer a sense of community—keluarga besar, literally a “big family”, according to their motto—in the form of work contacts, associates, and friends (see Erviantono Chapter 7). Obviously, this sense of community is a weak, modern, and urban substitute for the strong community “at home” among the extended family and childhood friends of village life, but it is still valued. They also offer low-paid work for marginal members of Balinese communities (Santikarma 2007). The big security organisations do wield their power responsibly. A senior informant1 from one of the big three organisations told us about authorities complaining that his organisation had taken work as security guards for a newly opened prayer room run by a militant Islamist. The informant accepted the criticism, ended the contract, and saw to it that the other organisations would not do the work 1 On a dozen occasions during 2016–2018, colleagues from Deakin and Udayana universities conducted joint interviews. Each of us also conducted some interviews solo. Given the potential harms to researchers or interviewees that might flow from discussion of alleged crime, we promised ethics committees at both Deakin and Udayana to: make all interviewees anonymous; directly cite nothing said to us; and publish first in English before possibly later publishing in Indonesian. Our method was to look for the ideas that circulate among the security organisation leaders, journalists, local politicians, local government officials, and the police. This conforms with fieldwork techniques deployed by researchers working in authoritarian regimes in southeast Asia. See Morgenbesser, L. & M. L. Weiss (2018). “Survive and Thrive: Field Research in Authoritarian Southeast Asia.” Asian Studies Review, 27 June, https://doi.org/10.1080/10357823.2018.1472210. Some authors also drew upon their own interviews conducted prior to this project and separate from the ethics committees’ authorisations noted above. Further footnotes specify these separate interviews.

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either. Given the obvious risk to public safety and the Western tourist industry, everyone agreed that the Muslims should look after themselves. Without local guards, the prayer room could not attract adherents and closed. On an island of three million residents, and presently almost six million tourists annually, LB has around 40,000 members, BB around 30,000 and PBB around 10,000. A dozen or so smaller local security organisations have between a couple of hundred and a few thousand members. All up, these are small membership numbers compared to the much bigger comparable groups in Java and Sumatra but they are certainly much bigger than the political parties and large enough to be significant actors in the community and in local politics. The protection offered by the larger groups is not always obvious or entirely genuine because they allegedly also run protection rackets around their guards maintaining order in large bars, restaurants, and dance clubs. In the same vein, it is said that the security organisations take a cut from the gambling around cockfights, buffalo racing, and card games (see Azhar Chapter 7). In another form of gangsterism, they have allegedly threatened violence when they assist local property owners in dispute with international investors (Bachelard 2014) and visit news rooms in person to intimidate journalists reporting their activities in ways they dislike. Further cause for concern is the extensive engagement of the large security groups in politics. Particular security-group leaders support particular politicians who give them bekking —from the English “backing”—in the form of public-sector jobs, junkets, and security contracts (Barker 2001: 52; Hadiz 2010: 141). In return, the groups ensure big crowds at their campaign rallies, ensure people turn out to vote for their backer, and allegedly harass voters supporting their backer’s rivals (Lipson 2019). More controversially, several of their members and some of their leaders have been convicted of smuggling and trafficking street drugs. The groups’ leaders insist that only particular individuals have committed crimes and their organisations on the whole are not organised-crime gangs. Nonetheless, the leaders of LB and BB were called into help their members among the prison guards and end rioting between their young members (and former members) serving sentences in the heavily over-crowded Kerobokan prison in 2012 and again in 2015–2016 (Harvey 2015; Topsfield and Rosa 2015). LB and BB are alleged to control the trafficking of drugs in the prison but they have fulfilled a promise to ensure no more rioting among the inmates because bad media reports about violence in Bali harms the tourism industry.

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More recently, an increase in the number of Balinese convicted of drugsrelated crimes prompted an incoming Inspector General of Police to launch a campaign against preman narkoba—drug gangs (see Zuryani Chapter 6; Mahangga and Vandenberg Chapter 9). Consequently, two successive Governors have declared they will withdraw the big three security organisations’ licences to operate as community organisations, if any of them are proven to have been involved in any forms of gangster violence, extortion, damage to any public infrastructure, or disruptions of public order. Given this diversity in the implications of what “protection” means, there are of course a range of approaches to understanding these security organisations and similar groups around Indonesia and the world. This chapter surveys primordial, instrumentalist, and constructivist schools of thought on collective violence (Tilly 2017 [2003]), reflecting on various authors’ views about: the security organisations’ relationship with their social and cultural context; their relationship with the state; what they do rather than what they are; and finally, what to call them.

Primordial Collective Violence---Culture and Society-Oriented Accounts Approaches to understanding collective violence based upon tribalism, communalism, extended kinship, race, language, region, religion, custom, or any combination of such ties presuppose that primordial violence challenges modernity. Primordial violence challenges the legitimate violence of the police, courts, and military following the rational rules and due procedures of a modern, bureaucratic nation state. In his early work, Geertz surveyed a wide range of forms of primordial identities that can undermine the “quest for modernity” (Geertz 1963). Within Indonesia, regional identities provoke tensions between the Javanese and the other islands and Balinese custom certainly diverges from Javanese custom and so might be a source of tension, but he thought it notable that Bali suffered no “sense of primordial discontent at all” (Geertz 1973 [1963]: online, unpaginated). A 1973 postscript to that comment (from 1963) noted that in 1965 “extraordinary popular savagery” targeted communists in Java, Bali, and parts of Sumatra. The postscript followed the Suharto regime’s account, attributing the violence to Javanese villagers massacring other villagers “mainly along …primordial lines – pious Moslems killing Indic syncretists” with some anti-Chinese massacres but

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mostly Javanese massacring Javanese and Balinese massacring Balinese (Geertz 1973 [1963]: online, unpaginated). Writing in the same period, Benedict Anderson (1996) concluded that the mass killings in 1965–1966 had been largely orchestrated by nationalists in the armed forces purging communists within their ranks and then within society at large. When he published this view, Anderson was denied a visa and barred from entering the country. Subsequently, the CIA (Associated Press 2017; Central Intelligence Agency 1968), historians (Cribb et al. 1990; Robinson 2018), and international jurists (International People’s Tribunal on Crimes Against Humanity Indonesia 1965 [2016]) who later investigated the 1965–1966 mass killings have all concurred with Anderson’s rather than Geertz’s contemporary assessments. In his later work, including a famously engaging essay about Balinese cockfighting and the difficulties of ethnographic fieldwork, Geertz (1972) abandoned the conventional epistemology of modernisation theory and developed the precepts of interpretative anthropology (White 2007). This involved abandoning explanation and prediction in favour of discerning how people see the meaning of their own practices. From his extensive writing on Bali and Indonesia, the argument most relevant here is about the pre-colonial “theatre state” (Geertz 1980) in which the nine royal houses, Puri, competed against each other in terms of the ceremony and cultural output they could achieve. From 1343 to 1906 in classical Bali, “Power served pomp, not pomp power” (Geertz 1980: 13). He sought “to elaborate a poetics of power, not a mechanics” and the Balinese state’s “semiotic capacity to make inequality enchant” (Geertz 1980: 123). In the classical Balinese state—the negara—the struggle for power involved competitive displays around a cult of royal divinity because it was basically a religious organisation rather than a social, political, or economic organisation (Geertz 1980: 125). In many ceremonies: … the king was the prime “guardian,” “custodian,” or “protector,” ngurah,2 of the land and its life, sheltering it as the royal parasol sheltered him and as the “vault of heaven” sheltered them both. (Geertz 1980: 129)

The tranquil spirit of such a protector was meant to be always impassive whether acting benevolently towards followers and the virtuous or 2 Visitors to Bali will recognise Ngurah from the airport, which is named after the independence war hero and Ksatria (warrior) caste leader I Gusti Ngurah Rai.

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deploying violence against rivals and evil spirits (Geertz 1980: 131). This emphasis upon interpretation rather than explanation and prediction applauded analysing how states are embedded in a society and a culture (Geertz 2004: 580). Aside from the change in epistemology, the quest for modernity among the citizens of new states in old societies remained an abiding interest in Geertz’s anthropology. In American political science, another widely influential author, Joel Migdal (2001) followed a comparable path from the modernisation theories of Talcott Parsons, Edward Shils, Gabriel Almond, David Eastman, and Samuel Huntington through neo-Weberian arguments about the relative autonomy of the state vis à vis the dominant social class (Evans et al. 1985) to what he termed a state-in-society approach (Migdal 2001: 3–15). This approach understands domination and collective violence in the classical Weberian sense of one actor causing another actor to do something they otherwise would not do. It also notes that Weber’s formal definition of the state was only ever meant to be an ideal type against which to criticise actual states. Migdal argues for a focus on how state and social structures interact, conflict, and constitute each other. There is considerable overlap between Migdal’s approach and later versions of the next school of thought but critics (Sidel 2004: 52–54) insist that Migdal’s approach remains embedded in the modernisation school’s founding assumptions about the primordiality of violence in old societies with new states.

Weak States: Strong Gangs---State-Oriented and Instrumentalist Accounts It makes sense that if states are weak then gangsterism is strong, whether states are weak due to poor economic activity, low taxes, extensive criminality, military forces operating without democratic oversight, or corruption among the police, politicians and public officials, and whether gangsterism involves banditry, piracy, war lords, civil militia, mafia, drug lords, gangs of petty criminals, and so forth. This inverse correlation between the power of states and the power of gangsters has existed all over the world since the rise of empires, kingdoms, and feudal orders (Hobsbawm 1969; Moore 1973: 214). In contemporary developing countries, it follows that weaker states will have less capacity to prevent corruption, promote economic activity, levy taxes, provide social welfare, and sideline if not eliminate gangsterism (see Evans Chapter 5). The logic

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of this argument is instrumental in that it can predict the extent of gangsterism at either end of a spectrum between weak and strong states. It can highlight the presence (in weak states) and absence (in strong states) of routine vigilante violence and everyday inter-group brawling (Tadjoeddin 2014: 6, 19–20, 112–152) but it is arguably less help appreciating either nuances or dynamics of change in the middle of that spectrum. In the widely influential collection Bringing the State Back In (Evans et al. 1985; Skocpol 1985), Charles Tilly developed a neo-Weberian argument that politics matters when thinking about collective violence. States are more than merely a reflection of underlying economic interests or merely a tool for powerful socio-economic actors to manipulate the less powerful. From a European feudal order in which kings and lords treated their subjects in much the same way as protection racketeers treat local merchants, the Western, bureaucratic nation state gradually emerged as public authorities promoted capitalism in order to raise the taxes to finance standing armies and wage war. Rather than regard the state as either a neutral arena, an actor with its own agenda, or any form of a thing in itself, Tilly (2006) worked with a notion of the regime as an historically evolving configuration of organisations and institutions (cabinet, parliament, departments of civil administration, public authorities, police, armed forces, parties, lobby groups, and so forth). The nature of any particular regime depended upon its historical context and its relatively autonomous relationship to societal forces. In his outstanding history of violence in Bali, Geoffrey Robinson (1988, 1998) deploys Tilly’s neo-Weberian notion of relatively autonomous regimes as he pursues the instrumentalist argument about weak regimes and strong gangsterism. Robinson starts from an observation that in the nineteenth century, Bali suffered regular violence in the internecine feuding between its small royal houses or Puri. The Balinese Raja were something like war lords (if also enchanting according to Geertz) and the absence of a single kingdom governing all of Bali can be taken to indicate a weak regime. This is a reasonable characterisation because when the Dutch finally managed to establish their imperial control over the whole island, the Balinese enjoyed 35 years of relative peace under a strong regime. When the Japanese invaded, they retained most Dutch procedures but they abandoned conservative cultural policies in favour of promoting pro-regime local organisations (see Vandenberg Chapter 4). However, as military setbacks saw the Japanese regime begin to crumble and become oppressive, vigilante resistance emerged. During

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the war of independence (1945–1949) and the first fifteen years of the Indonesian republic (1950–1965), a series of weak regimes struggled to control guerrillas, local vigilantes, party youth wings, civil militia, and finally death squads during the massacre of communists in 1965– 1966. Between 1967 and 1998, the stronger Suharto regime abolished the communist and socialist parties’ youth wings, unions, and any other groups allied with them, reined in the Muslim organisations of civil society, and allowed some pro-regime civil militias to continue. The Suharto regime was also strengthened by US military aid, oil revenue, and the return of tourists. In the Asian financial crisis of 1996–1997, however, that strength evaporated during a sudden decline in the value of the currency, which saw the middle-class sympathise with student protestors demanding Suharto’s resignation. The armed forces declined to clamp down violently on the protestors and democratisation began to unfold. In all of these episodes, the inverse correlation between the strength of a regime and the strength of gangsterism held. In the twenty years since Robinson’s (1988, 1998) work, reformasi has instituted a democratically legitimate and arguably stronger regime but at the same time the decentralisation of administration offered local security organisations many opportunities to work with local politicians. In recent decades, as both the regime and the gangsters have garnered power it is not entirely clear how weak or strong the post-reformasi regime is relative to how strong or weak the gangsters are. Henk Schulte Nordholt (1996, 2002, 2004, 2015) has also analysed the history of collective violence in Indonesia and Bali in particular, focussing on the material relations and social forces in which relatively autonomous state apparatuses and security organisations have been embedded, from the colonial era through to post-Suharto reformasi. Nordholt (2007) has reflected on the way local elites, the local media, and the security organisations have deployed cultural tropes around quazi Hindu notions of virtue and Balinese uprightness, or ajeg, both to defend the Balinese culture against globalisation and consumerism and to sell the culture to ever increasing numbers of tourists flocking to their resorts, hotels, restaurants, and so forth. This contradictory ambition is well captured in an image of the island as an “open fortress”. There is appealing subtlety in this illumination of the contradictions around the ajeg Bali campaign, but the way it strengthens both the state and gangsterism poses some doubt about a negative correlation between the two.

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Comparison is one way of clarifying the instrumentalist argument. Vedi Hadiz among others (Bourchier and Hadiz 1985; Chalmers and Hadiz 1997; Hadiz 2003, 2007, 2010; Hadiz and Robison 2013) argues that despite the freely contested elections and the drama around the unexpectedly effective anti-corruption commission, the Indonesian state remains weak and gangsterism has been strengthening, even if both have changed form (see also contributions to Ford and Pepinsky 2013; Kapferer 2005; Nordholt 2015; Sidel 2004) and some pro-democracy movements made headway (Djani et al 2017). Since the early post-Suharto period of reformasi, neither the horrors of 1965–1966 and the militia violence in East Timor, Aceh, Ambon, or Papua, nor several violent episodes during post-Suharto reformasi have been addressed (Editor 2019). A predatory capitalism under the aegis of a highly centralised oligarchy around Suharto has fallen, only to be supplanted by local versions of predatory capitalism, oligarchy, and clientalism at the provincial level across Indonesia. In this new regime, local forms of gangsterism have flourished. The absence of organised labour and effective middle-class protest means that Indonesian democratisation has resembled processes in Thailand and the Philippines rather than South Korea and Taiwan (Hadiz 2007; Hadiz and Robison 2014). These are strong points but to some extent, presupposition of a negative correlation means that if gangs exist then ipso facto, the state is weak. The uncertainties around how to regard Indonesia’s democratisation, how to gauge the state’s strength, and how to gauge the extent of gangsterism mean the negative correlation cannot readily predict what will happen. Will Indonesia go the way of Thailand or might it become more like South Korea? Another tack has been to question if not reverse the logic, moving away from the state orientation of the instrumentalist argument about weak states and strong gangsterism. Where Tilly argued that the leaders of early European nation states acted like protection racketeers, Taylor and Botea (2008) noted that waging war had not helped Afghanistan make a strong state and control internal war lords, but in the long run it had helped Vietnam make a strong state, promote capitalism, and reduce gangsterism. The difference between those cases is that Afghanistan is racked by ethnic conflict but Vietnam is not; in short, society matters. In Colombia (Grajales 2016), Nicaragua (Rodgers 2006), Latin America (Moncada 2019), Bangladesh (Jackman 2019), South Africa (Diphoorn 2015, 2016), and everywhere (Schulte-Buckholt 2001), various authors have taken up the idea that not only do states act like gangs, but gangs

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act like states. As the gangsters move from local robbery and thuggery to predatory racketeering and on to symbiotic integration with corrupt police and money politics around political parties, they need to garner the local community’s consent to their rule. In his work on the “street politics” of gangs in Jakarta, Ian Wilson (2006, 2011, 2015) argues that the local protection rackets have not only organised networks of opportunity among the poor but also suppressed unions, radical groups, and any challengers to their backers or their revenues, thus constituting a “protection-racket regime” (Wilson 2015: 170). Similarly, Nordholt (2015) argues that: Despite important political reforms and a well-functioning electoral democracy, central features of the old patron-client system remain firmly in place in Indonesia because clients prefer strong patrons who deliver more than the weak and unreliable rule of law of an abstract and often distant nation-state. (Nordholt 2015: 179)

These more recent contributions to the state-oriented approaches to understanding collective violence within state-like gangsterism have begun to converge with the state-in-society approach. Below, constructivism departs from both the logic of explanation and prediction in the state-oriented instrumental school and all remnants of modernisationschool assumptions about primordial violence in old societies.

Constructions of Collective Violence Constructivism sets out to understand the effects of things that are made up, imagined, or constructed, but are powerful because many people believe in them. This includes gods, corporations, nations, nation states, societies, money, and much else. Belief in these things is central to organising collective action. Yuval Harari observes that: Of all human collective activities, the one most difficult to organise is violence. To say that a social order is maintained by military force immediately raises the question: what maintains the military order? It is impossible to organise an army solely by coercion. At least some of the commanders and soldiers must truly believe in something, be it God, honour, motherland, manhood, or money. (Harari 2011: 125)

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He goes on to make three points, which we can use to organise this review of constructivist approaches to collective violence in Indonesia. One, “the imagined order is deeply embedded in the material world” (Harari 2011: 127). A pertinent example here is the nation. In his well-known book, Imagined Communities, Benedict Anderson (1991) notes that where liberals install statues commemorating particular civic leaders and great individual men, nationalists build tombs to the unknown soldier, who is no particular person but also any person who died fighting for their country. In each country, everyone assumes that the unknown soldier hails from their nation, whether that is French, British, German, and so forth. From this starting point, Anderson argues that print capitalism was central to the construction of imagined nations among very large numbers of people who never meet each other. Reading about current affairs concerning the national government welded diverse local dialects together around common concerns expressed in a common language. In the Dutch East Indies, the decision by communist, socialist, and nationalist opposition parties in the 1920s to use Malay as the language of “Indonesia” fed into the way print capitalism would construct the future nation state. Nationalism had a particularly powerful effect upon young men, pemuda, in the 1940s during the Japanese occupation and the war of independence (Anderson 1972). It inspired violent rebellion against the Japanese, extensive guerrilla warfare against the Dutch when they returned, and the mass killing of communists in 1965– 1966 (Anderson 2001). In a later essay, Anderson (1990) argued that as a constructed community the “nation” offered pertinent complications around the long-standing issues of old societies and new states in a changing world order of nation states. Such complications could interpret exactly how the Suharto regime attracted US aid, relied upon US military support rather than a properly financed domestic army, benefitted from OPEC oil revenue, encouraged multinational investment in resources, and made itself stronger than the Sukarno regime or the Japanese regime had ever been. Nationalism remains a powerful rationale for the deployment of violence by the military, aided by civil militias, in areas of uprising against Indonesia (Aceh, Ambon, East Timor, West Papua). As an imagined community, the nation certainly has powerful effects and is embedded deep in reality. Second, “the imagined order shapes our desires” (Harari 2011: 128). Travelling abroad to experience the “real” Bali is a pertinent example. A desire to travel arose in the 1700s among young English aristocrats going

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on “grand tours” of Europe. Joseph Banks outdid his aristocratic counterparts when he joined Captain Cook’s voyage into the Pacific Ocean. His exotic traveller’s tales of sexual freedom and getting a tattoo in Tahiti effectively founded modern tourism (White 2005). A combination of romanticism about one’s own human potential to learn from travel and consumerism about exotic experiences is what constructs the desires that drive the tourism industry. In Bali, these desires have a distinctly orientalist spin. In the nineteenth century, Adrian Vickers (1989: 2) notes that the Dutch saw the Balinese as dangerous, prone to “run amok”, and governed by oriental despots who burnt widows, smoked opium, and traded in slaves (see Isakhan 2012: 15–36 on the long, extensive, and comprehensively Eurocentric relationship between ‘western’ democracy and ‘eastern’ despotism). Following the template of English orientalism about Hindu despotism in India, this construction of Bali developed between 1842 and 1908 during the Dutch efforts to colonise the archipelago beyond Java. Ten years after finally colonising southern Bali, the Dutch wanted to erase memories of their ruthless conquest and they set about constructing a paradise. In order to attract wealthy tourists who could afford the passage through the Suez Canal or across the Pacific, they constructed a particular paradise that combined the beautiful beaches, coconut palms, refreshing trade winds and half-naked women of Banks’ and Gaugin’s Tahiti with the sophisticated culture of India practiced by charming, peaceful, deeply religious, and creative commoners. Illustrious visitors, including Margaret Mead, Charlie Chaplin, Miguel Covarubius, and Walter Spies, and a series of Hollywood movies all contributed to this new tourist-oriented construction of Bali as an exotic and erotic paradise. The locals themselves have for generations now been heavily invested in “Balinizing” Bali for the tourists as they maintain both a living culture open to influences from elsewhere and a “touristic” culture aimed at making money from visitors (Picard 1996). One consequence of this imagined order is that the Balinese like to see themselves as peaceful and are reluctant to recognise or discuss violence (see Apriani Chapter 2). Third, “the imagined order is inter-subjective” (2011: 131). That is to say, it is not objective, existing independent of what we believe (like, say, radioactivity), nor is it subjective, consisting in individual, personal delusions (like a child’s imaginary friend). An inter-subjectively imagined order consists of the shared beliefs, ideas, and practices that circulate among large numbers of people. Here various authors have

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taken up Foucauldian notions of governmentality to understand how inter-subjective discourse can control both governors and the governed. Joshua Barker (1999, 2001) studied how a discourse of assertive state authority shaped both the police and gangs of youths during two strategies known as siskamling (environment security systems) and petrus (mysterious killings). In the early 1980s, the assertion of authority arose in response to anxieties about increased criminal activity during a sharp downturn in economic growth. The police were worried that gangs of “wild youth”, gali-gali, might evolve along the lines of the yakuza in Japan or the mafia in the US. Consequently, they instituted new procedures to count, inspect, and improve all guard posts at bus stations, market places, and large car parks. They also set out to register all guards and ensure none of them were former prison inmates. All members of local gangs were expected to attend their nearest police station, fill out forms, carry a special card, and cease any criminal activity. These procedures were a clear example of the discipline around the surveillance that Foucault had studied in prisons, which unlike mediaeval dungeons are supposed to aim to reform inmates and turn them into law-abiding citizens. At the same time, the Indonesian police also deployed extra-judicial killings that resembled gangsterism. Any gang members who refused to register or did initially but then failed to comply with the rules were hunted down and summarily executed. Many were buried in shallow graves but some “tattooed corpses” were left in prominent public places, creating a spectacle that was reported approvingly in the press as “mysterious killings”. The threat of a grisly death and public shaming, in the manner of retribution from a rival gang, had a powerful effect on the gangsters. They soon realised no bribes could get their names off a police black list and submission to the surveillance was their only option. In later work, Barker (2016) clarified his argument that the performance of spectacle and how an audience interpreted it was more important than the political economy of strongmen and political patrons because such an approach could interpret unexpected events that complicated or challenged the negative correlation between the strength of the state and the power of gangsterism. Along the same line of argument, Lee Wilson, Lauren Bakker, and others (Bakker 2016, 2017; McDonald and Wilson 2017; Wilson 2015; Wilson and Bakker 2016; Wilson and Nugroho 2012) have focussed on how the martial art pencak silat shapes both the security organisations and Indonesia at large as it constructs both individual practitioners’ bodies

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and the Indonesian body politic. Many other authors look at comparable constructions among security organisations in other parts of the world (Diphoorn 2015, 2016; Lund 2006; Rodgers 2006; Tilly 2017 [2003]). Focussing on the power of martial arts offers a clearer alternative to the debates about the state and society, modernisation and political economy. Constructions of the nation and of the state have powerful effects on regimes and citizens (Vandenberg 2000, 2009; see Hatherell Chapter 12), but pencak silat more obviously embodies discipline in individuals, organisations, and the body politic (see Erviantono Chapter 8). Adherents learn about the mystical prowess of ancient masters at the same time as they attend gyms and regularly practice techniques to compete in the modern, international sport. Many soldiers and police attend the pencak silat gyms and since 2004, Prabowo Subianto has been the president of the Indonesian Pencak Silat Association, which develops athletes and organises local, national, and international competitions. Wilson reports that many pencak silat adherents and former special forces soldiers work for Prabowo, who resembles a charismatic jago at the head of his own personal militia. Prabowo’s political history shows how the discipline of pencak silat shapes the body politic. As a Major General in the Armed Forces he was intimately involved and allegedly responsible for human rights abuses in both East Timor and West Papua and allegedly involved in provoking violence during the student protests that led to the resignation of Suharto in May 1998. His rival, General Wiranto who was the Minister of Defence, refused to order troops to restore law and order and Prabowo was dishonourably discharged from the army for misinterpreting orders. He has since run unsuccessfully for direct election as president twice in 2014 and 2019, and at the end of 2019 the re-elected President Jokowi appointed him Minister of Defence. In most countries a history of alleged crimes against humanity and dishonourable discharge from the army would not lead to appointment as Minister of Defence. Clearly, Prabowo’s deep popularity among his followers inspired his presidential campaigns and remains a political asset. In Bali, we met adherents of pencak silat in both the three largest security organisations and in the small local groups. These groups generally embody an assertive, patriarchal masculinity, especially among the wellbuilt leaders in tight t-shirts on the publicity billboards during 2015 (see Pascarini Chapter 3) but pencak silat also embodies a transgressive femininity in the transgender leader of a group in the north of the island.

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Her father was a pencak silat instructor and she had been teenage champion fighter herself, so she is fully capable of standing up for herself and her community’s rights (see Zuryani and Erviantono Chapter 10). The various security organisations also had extensive contacts with popular campaigns against the extensive development around Benoa Bay (see Suwana Chapter 11). Let us now wrap up this review of schools of thought about security organisations in Bali, Indonesia, and around the world with some reflections on what to call them.

What to Call the Security Organisations? The main issue is whether to use a neutral or a pejorative term. The neutral terms include “security organisations”, the literal “community organisations” (for “organisasi masyrakat”), or the Indonesian contraction “ormas”. The pejorative phrases range from “informal” security organisations, which invokes an implicit contrast against the formal authority of a police force, to an explicit contrast against the legitimate state in “civil militia”, “paramilitary groups”, “gangs”, “thugs”, “preman”, “strongmen”, and “bosses”. It was tempting to use “gangs” in the title of this collection. Several contributors use the term or cognates and it might have built on what many readers already assume about developing countries and so might have readily attracted attention. The first reason for preferring the neutral term “security organisation” here is that these groups are not like radioactivity. They have no reality independent of what they are called, so the term that is used shapes how they are imagined and constructed. It is noteworthy that the police spoke about “gali-gali”, wild youth, in the past and “narkoba preman”, drug gangs, recently in Bali. They use qualifiers rather than condemn “gangs” per se. A second reason for using “security organisation” here is that rather than bake in assumptions about East versus West, democratic versus despotic, informal versus formal and so forth, such a term leaves open how to think about force, violence, the regime, and the state. These issues are important everywhere but they are fraught in Bali because the Dutch used orientalism about the local culture to enforce their law and order (Vickers 1989, 1998, 2003, 2005), and that orientalism has become very deeply entrenched in a touristic culture (Picard 1996), which is of course pervasively lucrative for many people. In this context, “gangs” are what you would expect of politically incompetent “natives”. Colonialism had different consequences in Java, Sumatra, and Sulawesi where large

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plantations required guards who were central to controlling the local labour force. Bali never had plantations and the local Raja led violent resistance to colonisation until as late as 1908. This meant that the subsequent Dutch efforts to create an image of the island as an untouched paradise, the “real Bali”, with charming, peaceful natives was all the more intense in the 1920s and 1930s and has been powerfully revived since the 1960s. It is, therefore, equally important to insist that using the phrase “security organisations” does not mean asserting that they are part of an intrinsically peaceful culture, and so something like boy scout troops or neighbourhood watch groups. The main reason for preferring “security organisations” is that it can cover both the negative and the positive things they do but avoid questions of definition and what they are “really”. As noted at the beginning, the larger security groups allegedly have some involvement in smuggling and trafficking street drugs, (inside and outside of the prison in Kerobokan), prostitution (largely for wealthy Indonesian visitors to the many conferences), gambling (on cock fights, buffalo racing, and card games), and the repossession of properties where the local land owners are in dispute with foreign investors. They are also extensively involved with the political parties and candidates for direct election as City Mayor and Provincial Governor, who “back” the security organisations, providing them with security contracts and jobs for their members, allegedly in return for harassing rivals and mobilising votes for them. At the same time, the groups are involved in protecting gay and transgender bar precincts from homophobic and religious extremist attacks. They have also made it difficult for extreme Islamist clerics to establish prayer rooms in Bali when they cannot recruit local security guards. More generally, they provide a sense of family and group belonging in an urban setting for the many internal migrants from north and eastern Bali and elsewhere in Indonesia who have come to southern Bali to find work in the tourist industry. They provide their low-earning members with makeshift housing, money for children’s school books and shoes, and money for cremations, weddings, and tooth-filing ceremonies. Whatever they are, they do both bad and good things. They can contribute to populist, illiberal, and de-democratising trends in Indonesia (see Hatherell Chapter 12; Barton Chapter 13). They can also contribute to community-strengthening, liberal, and democratising possibilities.

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Wilson, L. & E. Nugroho. (2012). “For the Good of the People?” Inside Indonesia 109(July–September), http://www.insideindonesia.org/for-thegood-of-the-people.

CHAPTER 2

The People Answer Back: A Case Study in the Balinese Asserting Their Opinion About the Ormas Kadek Dwita Apriani Translated by Elisha Montgomery

Bali is synonymous with a culture of silence. Open, physical conflict is very much avoided by Balinese people. Opposition to the opinions of others is often represented through silence and avoidance. Traditionally this culture is called “puik”. This culture was coupled with the political silence that occurred in Bali during the Suharto era as a consequence of the development of tourism and trauma over the events of 1965. Consequently, the Balinese tend to be reluctant to openly express their opinions about public matters and tend to accept things without protest. After the fall of Suharto, various complaints and protests in Bali began to surface, but were not widespread. Being silent and not openly confronting others remained an approach adopted by the majority of Balinese. Under these conditions, it is very difficult to know how the Balinese

K. D. Apriani (B) Udayana University, Denpasar, Indonesia © The Author(s) 2021 A. Vandenberg and N. Zuryani (eds.), Security, Democracy, and Society in Bali, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-5848-1_2

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public will react to particular social phenomena. The emergence of what are known as societal organisations—organisasi masyarakat, or ormas — and their symbols in the public space is one example. When various large flags, posters, and billboards about the societal organisations laden with symbols of violence emerged en masse throughout Bali, no one openly protested and there was no action to remove billboards, which somewhat disrupted regional aesthetics. This caused all parties concerned to think that the community accepted the presence of the organisations and their symbols in the public space. Was it true that the Balinese people did accept their presence and their various symbols of violence displayed in the public domain? To understand the Balinese public reaction to the recent societal organisation phenomenon, public opinion research was undertaken. Surveys were carried out by members of the Faculty of Social and Political Science, University of Udayana in September 2016 and July 2017. The survey sampled 800 respondents in 2016 and 940 respondents in 2017 in all districts of Bali. The sampling technique used was multi-stage random sampling, with a margin of error (MoE) within a range of 3%. The survey findings show that in 2016, around 58% of Balinese people felt uncomfortable with the presence of various flags, posters, and billboards displayed by the societal organisations in public spaces. Respondents’ level of education was one of the important factors evident in the survey results. The higher the level of education of the respondents, the more they felt ill at ease with the presence of the organisations’ publicity in public spaces. The majority (more than 50%) of the public gave a negative assessment of the organisations in Bali. When asked to offer recommendations to the government about what the government should do about them, the majority of the public did not recommend disbanding them. They only wanted the organisations to be regulated and more orderly. Data for the following year showed a significant shift in numbers. The organisations’ roadside billboards had become a rare public sight because the police had reduced their use. After regulation of the billboards, the number of people who felt ill at ease with the billboards declined to 35.9% from the previous year’s figure of 58%. Negative assessments of the organisations also decreased to 34% in 2017. A figure that did not change was the public’s recommendations about what the government should do about the organisations. In 2017, the number of people who felt that the organisations should be regulated remained around 50%. These findings of public opinion towards societal organisations show that the Balinese, who tend to remain silent, do have opinions about social

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phenomena around them. They carefully choose the manner in which to convey their wishes. They tend to prefer not to offer an opinion that is confrontational but silence among the Balinese does not mean acceptance. It is more a matter of waiting for the appropriate opportunity to respond.

The Phenomenon of Societal Organisations in Bali Currently, Indonesia has 250 thousand entities called societal organisations, nevertheless there are only around 4000 that have a certificate of registration. The phrase organisasi masyarakat often shortened to ormas, is defined in law 17, year 2013 as: An organisation which is voluntarily established and shaped by the community based on common aspirations, wills, needs, interests, activities and aims for participating in the development for the achievement of the goal of the Unitary State of the Republic of Indonesia.

On this definition, professional organisations, NGO associations and so forth can all be included under the heading of ormas. It is only recently that the word “ormas” underwent change in meaning among the community because of an association between the ormas and things that are negative, like violence, extortion, harassment and so on. It is no surprise that the public thinks that the ormas are not the same as professional clubs, associations or NGOs. The ormas are thought to be an association or organisation that is more directed to issues that smell of repression. The difference between the definition of ormas in the legislation and what is understood as an ormas entity by the community cannot be separated from a series of violent images displayed by such ormas. Especially in Bali, the term “ormas” tends to be attached with several words and phrases, including riots, murders, (Baladika, Laskar Bali and Pemuda Bali Bersatu). The last three phrases are the names of three ormas that are certainly referred to by Balinese citizens when we mention the term “ormas”. These three ormas have the greatest number of members in Bali. They are well known in the community because of the various billboards containing the logo, ormas name and photos of high-ranking ormas officials lined up wearing black clothes accentuating their arm muscles, which were strategically placed at almost every main road intersection and corner in public areas throughout Bali simultaneously. The phenomenon of ormas billboards was not only seen as “strange” because its appearance gave a “hair-raising” impression about this group,

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but the locations in which they popped up in public areas made various parties ask questions. Tourists who come to Bali with the expectation that its population is friendly would ask about the outdoor props belonging to the ormas that have certainly only recently been seen on the island of the Gods (Bali). In other areas throughout Indonesia, people perhaps have not been confronted by so many ormas billboards distributed in such an onslaught, all at once, with similar designs, and for a long time without advertising any specific event. Even when compared with legislative candidates and political party billboards just before an election, the ormas billboards stayed out for longer and were spread more widely. Questions would often emerge from tourists upon arrival in Bali enjoying a road trip around Bali: what is Baladika and Laskar Bali? Who are they? Why are there so many billboards just now? Are they dangerous? Why do they need to put up billboards? Did no one forbid them? Among the local population, the questions posed were: Who are these people? Why is the colour used dominantly dark? Do they pay advertising taxes? When were they put up? How long will they be installed there? Who gave permission to install the billboards? Are they friends or enemies with one another? Will there be another quarrel? Many more questions were stored away in the hearts and minds of the Balinese at the time of seeing the giant posters, but no stream of public discourse came up on social media expressing these questions. There has also been no action to reject ormas symbols or take down ormas billboards undertaken by the Balinese community. Does no expression of rejection from the community signify public acceptance? Does the public feel disturbed or happy with the presence of the ormas symbols? Is it true that the Balinese public who are quiet, automatically do not have an opinion or have a neutral attitude to the ormas phenomenon going on around them? To answer these questions, we need to understand how the Balinese people express themselves and we need the right method to know the community’s opinion. The first thing that needs to be explained is the Balinese culture of silence and then we need to look at the development of ways to capture people’s opinions in Indonesia after the fall of Suharto. Opinion polls have become an alternative way to find out the Balinese community’s views about a phenomenon. After a section of Balinese silence, and a section on opinion polls, we look directly at Balinese public opinion regarding the ormas and their expectations regarding government actions related to the phenomenon of societal organisations.

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Silence as Balinese Expression Bali is a beautiful island well-known with tourists but its culture has a side that has not been revealed much yet and is not widely known to the public. Behind the world-renowned friendliness of the Balinese can be found as an apolitical character, which is marked by a silent attitude, avoiding open conflict and a dislike of expressing opinions. This character derives from various transformational events experienced by the Balinese community since the colonial period, including national independence, rapid population growth, quite sudden modernisation, globalisation and the international tourist industry. One of the more prominent transformational events happened in 1965 and 1966. Bali was the province that was most affected by the “cleansing” of the PKI (Indonesian Communist Party). Mass killings occurred in various places on the island, which is now so widely known for peacefulness. After the mass killings, topics regarding politics were taboo—not to be discussed in Balinese society. Apart from the extraordinary fear, various reasons were also offered by the government under Suharto. Bali’s economy is supported by the tourism sector. If the public talks too much and makes too many political demands, then Bali will no longer be known as a peaceful island for a holiday. That was the logic used by the New Order government to keep the Balinese community from talking about politics, and caused the spread of apolitical attitudes in Bali. An apolitical attitude led to reluctance to reveal opinions, and not liking to discuss problems in an open manner already had deep roots in Balinese society. The Balinese very much avoid direct confrontation and physical force when solving problems. Methods like silence and avoidance are the preferred ways to express a person’s dislike for others. This method is called puik in Balinese. The Balinese people’s social condition became far more complex after the Suharto era. Expressions of dissatisfaction long suppressed during the New Order period were revealed after the fall of Suharto. There are important examples of the ways in which the Balinese expressed themselves after freedom had displaced the pressure of authoritarian rule. In his chapter “Being Modern In Bali After Suharto”, Adrian Vickers (2003) captures the way Balinese people express their anger through a demonstration outside the office of the Balinese governor on the 29th of April 1999. This demonstration was performed by a group of people claiming to be representatives of 180 Bali Garden Hotel (BGH) workers recently

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fired. They brought posters written in very harsh tones, like “we are not Balinese dogs who can be abused; take the military away from BGH; and give legal guarantees to the people”. However, there were no loud voices in the fashion generally used at demonstrations. The action was very calm and quiet. It was a Balinese demonstration. This event is very important because it shows how Balinese people express themselves. When pressed they tend to be silent. When they do not agree, they avoid things and are reluctant to speak up. Open conflict is something that is very much avoided until their tolerance runs out and momentum gathers, then they will react strongly but still without creating a commotion in the form of noise. Twenty years have passed since the incident captured by Vickers above. There has been no change in the way the Balinese prefer to express themselves, and the ormas phenomenon that appeared in the middle of the Balinese community prompted no exception. The presence of the ormas has become very prominent. Groups deploying violence have even emerged in public areas in ways that are perhaps rare in other places. Ormas representation of themselves in the form of giant billboards and street banners appeared alongside streets in crowded centres. Various symbols of repression came back into the public domain. In these conditions, no shrill voice of the Balinese community demanding the billboards be taken down was audible and there was no vandalism on those billboards. Why was that? Does the community truly accept the situation? The answer is very much related to the way in which the Balinese express their opinions. Disagreement is expressed by avoidance and dislike is shown by silence. In the era of democracy, there must be a way to bridge the gulf between the people’s wishes and the regulation of public affairs by the government. One of those mechanisms is a public opinion survey. Public opinion surveys become a channel for the people to convey their opinion and attitudes and substantiate the essence of democracy.

The Development of Public Opinion Surveys Public opinion surveys in Indonesia have only been undertaken since the reform era, reformasi. This is entirely reasonable given two fundamental preconditions for the birth of professional public opinion surveys in any country. First, public opinion surveys will only exist in a country that already has civil freedoms and substantial politics. This is related

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to whether or not a country is democratic. Professional public opinion surveys do not grow in non-democratic countries. In authoritarian, totalitarian and pseudo-democratic countries, public opinion surveys are often forbidden because they will allow expression of the community’s dissatisfaction. On the contrary, in democratic countries, public opinion surveys that set out to monitor elections often become instruments for politicians to determine their strategy, platform and self-image in accordance with the public’s desires. The second fundamental requirement for the existence of public opinion surveys in one country is the availability of sufficient funding. Funding plays a very important role in professional public opinion surveys because they are very expensive to finance, especially if the country’s territory includes regions that are geographically difficult to reach. Apart from that, substantial costs arise because public opinion surveys rely on a methodology that is rigid, requiring experienced researchers and large samples. From Indonesia’s independence in 1945 up until close to the end of the New Order period in 1998, professional public opinion surveys barely existed. This is because before 1998 Indonesia did not enjoy civil freedom or substantial politics and there were insufficient funds to pay for them. LP3ES (the Research, Education and Economic and Social Information Institute) passed a historical milestone for public opinion surveys in Indonesia when it started to run quick counts in the 1997 election and continued with a series of public opinion surveys in Java before the 1999 election, which led to predictions about the results of the first democratic election in Indonesia after 1955. At that time, LP3ES was one of the few non-government organisations that were highly regarded in Indonesia. This institution has experience with statistical sampling methods, but it still lacks staff and funding. After the public opinion survey organised by Mietzner as a semiprofessional public opinion survey undertaken by LP3ES, other public opinion surveys undertaken by international institutions also appeared. The IFES (International Foundation for Electoral Systems) in Indonesia supports the community’s attitudes to elections and democracy generally. This signifies that professional public opinion surveys are not just for measuring election results; they have also become a method to measure levels of public support for democratic procedures. The development of public opinion surveys in Indonesia did not stop there. Their quality improved between the elections of 1999 and 2004. Between these two

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elections, political survey institutions in Indonesia showed encouraging methodological development. However, political elites are still sceptical of the presence of public opinion surveys and are yet to take advantage of them as material for strategic consideration in political parties in real time. The reason is simple. At that time executive and legislative decisions were determined not by the public vote in a voting booth, but by elite negotiations. On the other hand, public opinion surveys began to appear periodically and pointed to measures of the government’s performance under presidents Abdurrahman Wahid and Megawati Soekarno Putri. These surveys did suffer from sampling bias and errors in the data but what needs to be noted in this development is that public opinion surveys gave prominence to topics outside the election voting results. An important stage in the development of public opinion surveys in Indonesia came with the 2004 election. The direct election of the president saw surveys become an important part of political interactions. Ahead of the election momentum, survey institutions improved the sophistication of their statistical methodology, predicting voter’s preference for Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono (SBY) over Megawati, yet political party elites were still reluctant to trust the survey results. The 2004 presidential election fulfilled predictions about SBY’s victory as a popular candidate from a new party. The 2004 election became an important reference for the predictive power of a scientific study. The party elites who were originally very sceptical of public opinion surveys were forced to learn from their improved capacity to predict outcomes. They had to accept that candidates put forward by the big parties will not always win the election. At that time, survey institutes in Indonesia began to introduce terms such as popularity and electability, which went on to become very influential terminology in the regional election rounds the following year. In 2005 the process of electing regional heads at the local level (governors, mayors and regents) began to be implemented with a direct election mechanism by the community rather than representative institutions selecting leaders. The local elections used the same logic as the presidential election. Popular candidates are important in regional contestation. Since then the role of survey institutions has been important for electoral contestations in order to measure the popularity of prospective regional heads in the eyes of the voter. The description regarding the development of public opinion surveys above implies that there has been a development of public opinion surveys

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in Indonesia since 1999 up until the present. The public opinion surveys themselves are more seen as a tool to measure candidate popularity, predict election results and assist in determining the strategy and image that politicians must build. Although these public opinion surveys do indeed measure people’s attitudes towards democracy or people’s satisfaction with government performance, they do not put much forward. There is often a small part of surveys that canvass more substantial electoral objectives. It is very rare for professional public opinion surveys to present a list of social issues. The cause is not difficult to guess. Surveys are expensive. Public opinion surveys genuinely can capture many issues. It can be a channel for the people to express opinions and attitudes towards a phenomenon, and viewing the Balinese community’s attitudes towards the rather unique ormas phenomenon is no exception. Public opinion surveys related to the community’s perception of ormas in one area has never been undertaken before. Public opinion surveys perhaps become one of the ways to understand the views of societies with special characteristics like the Balinese community who are reluctant to be polemical in a public space and choose to avoid conflict.

Methodology Just like some of the public opinion surveys in Indonesia that are explained above, the public opinion survey regarding ormas was not undertaken solely to capture the public opinion about ormas. The data findings in the following section come from parts of two professional public opinion surveys of the Balinese community ahead of the regional head elections in these provinces in 2018. Funding came from one of the candidates in the regional head election. The writer is a research director at a public opinion survey institute based in Jakarta, Indonesia and has more than ten years’ experience in public opinion research. Questions about ormas were included in the public opinion survey because they were a unique phenomenon that required the measurement of citizens’ opinions across Bali as a whole and that was possible with this mechanism. The inclusion of questions about the ormas in the questionnaire was endorsed by the funder. The questions were judged as not interfering with the main objectives of the survey. The findings presented in the following section come from two surveys that form one series. They were undertaken in September 2016 and July

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2017, sampling 800 respondents in 2016 and 940 respondents in 2017. The sample was spread proportionately across all regencies or cities in Bali. The surveys used multi-stage random sampling. The margin of error was within 3%. The graphic illustrates the process of multi-stage random sampling conducted in both studies (Fig. 2.1). The picture below shows that all of the regencies or cities of Bali comprised the sample area. The sample number from each regency or city was proportional to the total population in the particular regency or city. In each regency or city, several villages or political electorates were selected at random. Within each village or political electorate, five hamlet councils—banjar—were selected at random. From each banjar, two family heads were selected using a simple random sampling technique. At the selected family level, the Kish grid mechanism was used to pick the respondent. To maintain the gender balance, odd numbered questionnaires went to male family head respondents and even numbered questionnaires went to females. With such sampling techniques, respondents in this study can be said to represent the Balinese population at the time the data was collected. Respondents in this study are residents who hold a Balinese identity card (KTP) and are over 17 years old. Children were not included in this survey because only adults are considered to have opinions and the adult benchmark is possession of an identity card.

Bali

Regency/ City

Village

Hamlet

In each village/ electorate, five hamlets were selected. In each hamlet, two respondents were selected

Regency/ City

Village

Hamlet

Respondent

Fig. 2.1 Sampling process

Village

Hamlet

Hamlet

Respondent

Hamlet

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The survey involved a face-to-face interview with an interviewer. The number of interviewers involved in the data collection process was 80 in 2016 and 94 in 2017. Each pollster was assigned to conduct face-to-face interview with 10 respondents a week. To ensure the quality of the data obtained, there was layered supervision from several area coordinators and supervisors.

Balinese Public Opinion About the Ormas Below, this section considers and interprets the data about public opinion on the existence of the three largest security organisations in Bali and the various phenomenon around them before survey dates in September 2016 and July 2017. In the realm of democracy, public opinion regarding matters related to public space has become very important. This section presents shifts in the Balinese community’s perspective over less than a year regarding the specific phenomenon related to three big organisations that call themselves ormas.

2016 Data One of the research findings about ormas in the 2016 survey was that a majority in Bali saw the presence of competing security organisations’ numerous billboards in public areas as a problem. As many as 58.4% of the total respondents said that they were disturbed by the presence of the ormas billboards. Those who said that this matter was not an issue came to 27.9%. The rest did not know or did not answer. The data is represented in Fig. 2.2. Interestingly, although the majority of citizens felt that the billboards were problematic because they were seen as disturbing, no residents, protest movements, or community representatives had done anything to reduce the billboards or question specific ormas about the installation of these billboards. A territorial break down of the data in Fig. 2.2 was obtained through cross tabulation between opinions regarding the ormas billboards and regency or city. The cross-tabulation results are presented in Table 2.1. The table shows the distribution of respondent’s perceptions of the ormas billboards based on regency or city. The number of those who perceive the emergence of the ormas billboards as something that forms

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Fig. 2.2 Community views on the ormas billboards that appeared in public areas in 2016 Table 2.1 Cross tabulation between regency or city of residency and perceptions about the emergence of the ormas billboards in 2016 Regency or city

Proportion of respondents (%)

Not a problem (%)

A disturbing problem (%)

Do not know, no answer (%)

Badung Bangli Buleleng Denpasar City Gianyar Jembrana Karang Asem Klungkung Tabanan

13.8 5.0 16.3 20.0 12.5 6.3 10.0 5.0 11.3

30.0 35.0 34.9 31.9 10.0 28.0 30.0 17.5 28.1

65.5 37.5 53.5 60.0 64.0 56.0 56.3 62.5 58.4

4.5 27.5 11.6 8.1 26.0 16.0 13.8 20.0 13.5

a problem because it is disturbing, is consistently more than those who do not have a problem with the emergence of the billboards. A striking number from the above table is the percentage of the Gianyar community who stated that the appearance of these billboards is not a problem. The number is far smaller than other regencies. The Gianyar regency is a tourist area where the people do not feel comfortable if the presentation of the region is disturbed by the emergence of

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these billboards but Badung regency has more tourism and respondents there followed the island-wide pattern. An issue likely to have caused the disparate perceptions about the ormas billboards within the Gianyar regency was the dramatic ormas violence that occurred there in June 2016. The data collection took place soon after the murder of ormas members in the village of Batuan in Sukawati, Gianyar. This incident attracted a lot of attention in the local media for some time. The media exposure of a negative image of the ormas generated by the murder probably contributed to the Gianyar residents’ unusual perceptions when this survey was conducted. Apart from distribution based on regencies, it is important to break down the opinions of Balinese residents about these ormas billboards according to the level of education. Data from the cross tabulation of results between education and views about the existence of the ormas billboards is shown in Table 2.2. Data from Table 2.2 shows that the higher a person’s level of education, the more they tend to see the existence of the ormas billboards in public areas as a disturbing problem. More than 70% of the Balinese community who have a high level of education (Bachelor’s degree) find the ormas billboards disturbing. By contrast, less than 50% of respondents who have low education (no school and primary school graduates) are disturbed and see ormas billboards in public spaces as a problem. Table 2.2 Cross tabulation between education level and views about the emergence of the ormas billboards Level of education

Proportion of respondents (%)

Not a problem (%)

A disturbing problem (%)

Do not know/no answer (%)

Never attended school Primary school Junior high school Senior high school Diploma Bachelor’s degree

7.30

31.0

39.7

29.3

21.10 18.30

32.1 26.2

49.4 56.6

18.5 17.2

39.80

28.6

62.5

8.9

4.20 9.30

23.50 20.6

67.60 72.1

8.80 7.4

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As we have seen, a majority of the Balinese people feel disturbed by the communication pattern chosen by security organisations to promote their existence. Outdoor props such as banners and billboards, which were for the most part installed independently by local ormas members, actually infuriated many community users of public facilities. Nevertheless, the ormas benefited from the publicity. They enjoyed an increase in their popularity. Especially effective was promoting the names of the leaders of these organisations. The public now know they exist. Security organisations enjoy high popularity, despite the image formed in the community tending to be negative. To gauge the community’s views about ormas, the public was asked to assess three specific organisations in Bali, namely Baladika Bali (Bali Army), Laskar Bali (Balinese Warriors) and Permuda Bali Bersatu (United Balinese Youth). The tabulated results from the public’s assessment of the ormas are presented in Fig. 2.3. A majority of citizens regard each of the three largest security organisations negatively. The proportion of those who view these security organisations negatively is not far from those who see the security organisation’s billboards in public spaces as a problem that disturbs the public domain. Those who see the existence of ormas billboards as something

Fig. 2.3 Resident assessment towards three big security organisations in Bali 2016

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that is disturbing is as high as 58.4%, and those who see the ormas as entities with a negative image is around 51–55%. It can be assumed that the people who feel disturbed by the ormas billboards tend to give a negative rating to the ormas concerned. In other words, the public’s evaluation of the ormas is influenced by the meaning of messages derived from the ormas billboards. The messages shape the citizens’ perceptions of the ormas concerned. Figure 2.3 does not mean that there is one ormas that is ranked better compared to the other ormas or alternatively, that there are ormas judged worse than the other ormas entities, because the differences are still within the three per cent margin of error. This means that the public see the three ormas above as similar. The number of those who see Balidika Bali, Laskar Bali and Pemuda Bali Bersatu as negative entities is not significantly different. Likewise, for those who see them as positive entities. It is interesting to look at the evaluation tendencies of Ormas in Bali based on gender. The data from the cross tabulation of results from citizens’ assessment of ormas in Bali with results from the respondents’ gender shows that male respondents were more willing to express their judgements than female respondents. In the evaluation of these three ormas, more females answered that they did not know. Data regarding this issue can be seen in Tables 2.3, 2.4 and 2.5. Although the ormas generally tend to be valued negatively by the Balinese public, the discourse on sanctions for ormas in the form of disbandment which it was rumoured would be done by the Balinese Table 2.3 Cross tabulation between assessment of the Laskar Bali ormas and the respondent’s gender

Table 2.4 Cross tabulation between assessment of the Pemuda Bali Bersatu ormas and the respondent’s gender

Assessment of Laskar Bali Positive Negative Don’t know

Assessment of Pemuda Bali Bersatu Positive Negative Don’t know

Male (%)

Female (%)

50.9 52.6 44.5

49.1 47.4 55.5

Male (%)

Female (%)

52.3 52.3 45.0

47.7 47.7 55.0

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Table 2.5 Cross tabulation between assessment of the Baladika ormas and the respondent’s gender

Assessment of Baladika Positive Negative Don’t know

Male (%)

Female (%)

53.6 52.0 45.6

46.6 48.0 54.4

provincial government after the occurrence of various violent events at the end of 2015, evidently did not receive support from the community. The Balinese public were more supportive of actions that foster ormas, compared to disbanding them. Data regarding public opinion in relation to action that should be done by the government towards these ormas can be seen in Fig. 2.4. From the diagram, it is shown that as many as 50.8% of the Balinese public want the attitudes taken by the government towards the entities known as ormas in Bali to be fostered or empowered. The discourse of ormas disbandment in Bali that emerged after the ormas clash in the Kerobokan prison was only supported by 37.8% of the Balinese community. The remaining 11.2% said that they did not know. The ormas clash in the Kerobokan prison that occurred at the end of 2015 and was widely reported on by various local and national media was evidently known by three quarters of the Balinese public. The September 2016 survey results shown in Fig. 2.5.

21.0

41.0

38.1

Disband

Foster

Don't know, no answer

Fig. 2.4 Opinions of the Balinese public regarding action that should be taken by the government towards the ormas

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Fig. 2.5 Those who had heard of the ormas clash in the Kerobokan prison at the end of 2015

Even though this incident had happened nine months before the collection of the data for this survey, the public still remembered the event that caused Denpasar to feel tense for some time. The community worried about aftershocks or retaliatory attacks from certain ormas outside of the prison, causing harm to innocent bystanders or destruction of public facilities. Consequently, New Years Eve 2015–2016 in Denpasar and surrounds felt quieter than in previous years. The figure of 75.2% recall after nine months had passed illustrates that event had lodged in the memory of the Balinese public who remembered it as one of the worst events involving ormas as of 2015.

2017 Data Within about 10 months of the first survey, the second survey about ormas was carried out with an increase in the sample number to 940 respondents, which again were spread across the nine regencies or cities of Bali. This second survey was done because of the presence of several phenomenon at a local and national level in 2017 that might have influenced the perception of the Balinese public towards the ormas. There were at least three important moments, namely, a declaration by the head of the Balinese that the police would curb the ormas billboards, the arrest of one of the ormas members by the Balinese regional police for alleged

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extortion in Denpasar, and the Government Regulation in Lieu of Law (PERPU) No. 2, 2017 concerning ormas, which was issued by President Joko Widodo in July 2017. These three developments are related to law enforcement and the role of the state in regulating these organisations called ormas in Bali. The data from the survey results show that the police force’s call to curb the ormas’ use of billboards was not especially influential. As many as 65.4% of the Balinese people said that they still saw ormas banners and so forth on the side of the road in 2017, even though the call to curb the ormas billboards had been issued by the Bali Police Chief in January 2017. The graphic shows the frequency of respondents’ answers to the question: Have you, or have you not seen ormas billboards on the side of the road in the last six months? (Fig. 2.6). Even though the community still saw the ormas billboards in public spaces in Bali after official action against them, their views towards these billboards can be said to have improved since than the year before. In 2016 the number of people who were disturbed by the ormas billboards exceeded 50%, but in 2017 the number of people who said that the billboards or outdoor props from these ormas was disturbing was only as many as 35.9%. Data on public views about the ormas billboards still present in public spaces in Bali in 2017 can be seen in Fig 2.7. The decreased percentage of the Balinese community who felt disturbed by the existence of the ormas billboards on the side of the

Fig. 2.6 Have you, or have you not seen ormas billboards on the side of the road in the last six months?

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Fig. 2.7 Community views regarding ormas billboards in 2017

road was probably due to policing. After the policing declaration, the ormas billboards did not disappear from public spaces altogether but the installation locations were more orderly and regulated so that they did not interfere with the appearance of various public areas in Bali. The data from the cross-tabulation results further showed that the people of south Bali who are more urban (Denpasar, Badung, Gianyar and Tabanan) tend to feel more disturbed by the billboards compared to those in other regions of Bali. While the communities in the east of Bali, such as the Klungkung and Karangasem people tend to hold views inversely proportional to people in the southern regions. Among all respondents, those who stated that the ormas billboards installed on the roadside were not a problem had increased relative to those who still saw them as a disturbing problem. A rather specific case occurred in Bangli. In this regency, more people replied that they didn’t know or didn’t answer. This is probably because the number of ormas billboards installed in this regency is minimal compared to other regions. Bangli is a district with low regional income, few tourist attractions and small population. As a result, the ormas groups did not see Bangli as a strategic region in which to exert influence. The ormas organisers in this regency are more concerned with internal affairs than with projecting their image to the public through billboards. According to one ormas administrator in the Bangli district, each field co-ordinator could only afford to put up one or two billboards and they were busy with internal organisational matters so they were

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terribly concerned with promotion activities. The mountainous topography of the Bangli district around Mount Batur also reduces the mobility of village communities so they less often head into the busy centres where the ormas billboards are usually put up. Consequently, the Bangli people knew less about the ormas. Table 2.6 shows data in regards to this. Public response towards the existence of Ormas billboards in 2016 and 2017 shifted most in the districts of Klungkung and Karangasem. In 2016, the number of Klungkung people who stated that they were disturbed by the ormas billboards on the side of the road was as high as 62%. In 2017, the number had dropped to almost half of that. The same thing occurred in the Karangasem district, where in 2016, the number of those who stated that they were disturbed by the billboards reached 56% but that number dropped to 18% in 2017. Differences in response to ormas billboards can also be seen between gender groups in the data of the 2017 survey results. Data from Table 2.7 shows the difference in views between gender groups about the existence of ormas billboards in Bali. Table 2.7 shows that women in Bali have a higher tendency to regard ormas billboards in public spaces as a problem, while the opposite is true for males although the percentage of women who did not comment was much higher than men. Nevertheless, the difference in attitudes between genders in regards to the ormas billboards can be noted as a finding in this study. The findings regarding differences in responses based on gender Table 2.6 Cross tabulation between regencies/cities perceptions of the emergence of ormas billboards in 2017 Regency/city

Badung Bangli Buleleng Denpasar City Gianyar Jembrana Karang Asem Klungkung Tabanan

Proportion of respondents (%)

10.6 9.6 16.0 12.8 10.6 9.6 10.6 9.6 10.6

of

residence

and

Assessment of the ormas billboards Not a problem (%)

Disturbing problem (%)

Don’t know, no answer (%)

33.0 22.5 30.6 33.9 39.2 40.5 43.5 51.4 26.3

44.7 18.3 28.4 54.2 41.8 35.4 18.8 33.8 37.9

22.3 59.2 41.0 11.9 19.0 24.1 37.7 14.9 35.8

2

Table 2.7 Cross tabulation between respondent’s gender and perception of ormas billboards in 2017

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Gender

Assessment of ormas billboards Not a problem (%)

Disturbing problem (%)

Don’t know, no answer (%)

41.0 28.6

38.1 33.7

21.0 37.7

Male Female

groups underscore the masculine and repressive stigma attached to these ormas that have not changed in the perspective of Balinese society in 2017. Given that perceptions of the emergence of outdoor props such as billboards were the same as the 2016 survey, the 2017 survey also asked about the community’s assessment of the three major ormas in Bali. The results of the frequency table of Balinese citizen’s assessment towards these three Ormas is shown in Fig. 2.8. The data above shows that the three ormas received relatively similar assessments from the community. This fact was already captured in the

Bali Warriors

14.4

34.6

50.9

Bali Army

13.8

34.9

51.3

Bali Youth United

15.1

33.6

51.3

0%

10%

20%

PosiƟve

30%

40%

NegaƟve

50%

60%

70%

80%

Don't know, no answer

Fig. 2.8 Citizen’s assessment of the big three ormas in Bali 2017

90%

100%

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results of the 2016 survey. The positive assessment of the community towards Ormas also did not experience a significant shift within this one year. What did experience a shift was the negative assessment and the number of those who chose to answer “didn’t know”. In 2016, the number of those who saw ormas as a negative entity reached more than 50% and those who did not answer were in the 30s%. In the 2017 data, the negative and neutral positions swapped quantities. Where those who gave a negative assessment of the ormas in 2017 reached as high as 34%, around 51% of citizens chose to respond neutrally to the ormas in Bali in 2017. This is conceivably related to several things: (1) various activities that tend to be more positive were carried out by ormas entities in 2017, such as sporting activities, seminars, social so forth; (2) in the period between September 2016 and July 2017, no further negative events like brawls, killings and so forth had not happened. The extent of positive assessment of the ormas above is consistent with the perceptions of the Balinese community about the ormas’ contributions to the development of Bali. The data from the July 2017 survey results in Fig. 2.9 shows that around 15% of Balinese citizens saw the contributions of the three ormas in the development of Bali.

Contribute, 15 Don't know, no answer, 44

Contribute

Don't contribute, 41

Don't contribute

Don't know, no answer

Fig. 2.9 Community assessment about whether the ormas contribute to the development of Bali

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That number is not so different from the percentage of the community who value ormas as positive entities (in the range of 13–15%). This indicates a link between these two assessments. Those who value ormas as contributing to the development of Bali tend to value the ormas as positive entities. A breakdown of the distribution of communities’ assessments of the ormas’ contributions to Balinese development can be seen in Table 2.8. The people in Karangasem and Jembrana are more likely to look favourably on the ormas’ contributions to development compared to the communities in other regencies. In contrast, the people of Denpasar, Gianyar, and Bangli look least favourably on the contribution of the ormas to the development of Bali. Interestingly, although Ormas can be seen as entities that do not contribute to the development of Bali, the community does not want them disbanded. In 2017, many Balinese citizens stated that the government should foster or regulate the ormas. The data in Fig. 2.10 shows that as many as 52.1% of the Balinese community wants action taken by the government to be in the direction of regulating the ormas. The number of those who want ormas to be disbanded is only 20.8%. This figure has experienced a dramatic decrease from the year before. In 2016, the number of Balinese citizens who wanted the disbandment of ormas reached 37.8%. Table 2.8 Cross tabulation between respondents’ districts and assessments about ormas contributions to development

Assessment of ormas contributions to development Regency or city

Do contribute (%)

Don’t contribute (%)

Do not know, no answer (%)

Badung Bangli Buleleng Denpasar City Gianyar Jembrana Karangasem Klungkung Tabanan

12.0 1.5 17.4 9.6 7.6 22.8 34.8 16.4 12.6

55.4 19.1 38.6 71.3 38.0 26.6 21.2 47.9 32.6

32.6 79.4 43.9 19.1 54.4 50.6 43.9 35.6 54.7

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Fig. 2.10 Government attitudes towards ormas as expected by the community

The high percentage of Balinese citizens who want the government to foster the ormas even if they do not contribute to the development of Bali, means that the community still see an opportunity for better ormas in the future helping to realise the development of Bali. It is important to look into the regional distribution of the data above. Table 2.9 shows a cross tabulation between regencies and the government’s attitudes towards the ormas in the community’s perspective. Table 2.9 Cross tabulation between respondents’ district and attitudes about actions the government should take regarding the three largest ormas in Bali

What the government should do about the three ormas in Bali Regency or city

Disband (%)

Foster (%)

Do not know, no answer (%)

Badung Bangli Buleleng Denpasar City Gianyar Jembrana Karangasem Klungkung Tabanan

12.9 10.1 14.2 43.1

64.5 47.8 53.7 44.8

22.0 42.0 32.1 12.1

31.6 20.3 18.5 10.8 18.9

53.2 38.0 50.8 68.9 48.4

15.2 41.8 30.8 20.3 32.6

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Of all the figures shown in the table, the most striking number can be seen in the city of Denpasar, where 43.1% of the community wanted the government to take the steps to disband the ormas. The number of people in Denpasar who wanted the ormas disbanded or fostered is even. This pattern is not present in other regions, even in Badung which has community characteristics that resemble Denpasar. In Badung, only 12.9% of residents called for the dissolution of ormas, whereas 64.5% thought that the ormas should be fostered. Badung is an area where many ormas members make a living, but several brawls between ormas have taken place in the city of Denpasar. Denpasar’s position as the provincial capital possibly influenced the choice of location for the ormas headquarters. The headquarters’ locations means that ormas brawls are more likely to occur in Denpasar than Badung. The relatively high intensity of brawls in Denpasar often disturbs the sense of security among Denpasar residents. That is a conceivable reason why most Denpasar people say that the government should take action to disband the ormas.

Conclusion Various quantitative data from the survey results throughout the regencies of Bali regarding the community’s perception of the ormas in 2016 and 2017 show that the ormas tend to be regarded negatively. They are thought to have not contributed to the development of Bali, and yet the community does not want the government to disband them. In the period of one year, the Balinese people saw improvement in the image of the three ormas. This showed up in the decreased percentage of people who saw outdoor props installed by the ormas as something that was disturbing for them in 2017 when compared with the same data from 2016. This is related to police efforts to curb ormas billboards. This effort had a positive impact on the image of the ormas because their billboards still existed in public places but in a more orderly way and organised locations that did not interfere with the appearance of public areas. Thus, a state presence in the form of law enforcement and the regulation of shared life particularly in the public domain was noticed by the Balinese community in the period of 2016–2017, especially in this ormas billboard phenomenon. The Bali public expects the state to have a role in developing the ormas of the future without disbanding them. This can be seen as the Balinese public’s trust in democratic values, where law enforcement and the role of the state are important but the freedom of the people

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to gather in ormas entities is also not negated. Various negative events and the three ormas’s poor image with the public do not necessarily mean that they think the ormas needing to be disbanded.

The Balinese Need an Appropriate Way to Express Their Opinions Various findings from the Balinese public opinion surveys on ormas illustrate that Balinese people actually do have opinions on the social phenomena around them, like the ormas and their billboards. Silence by the Balinese does not equate with approval and acceptance. The lack of protest and loud rejection is because they avoid conflicts that are considered unnecessary. The Balinese prefer to convey their opinion indirectly in modes that are felt to be safe and do not hurt other parties. This is because Bali has unique characteristics that tend to avoid open and physical confrontations, which are often categorised as rude. The survey findings show that a large portion of the Balinese community feel disturbed by the existence of the large ormas posters in various public spaces. Interestingly, this was only revealed when a public opinion survey was conducted. For years the discomfort was not voiced by the community throughout Bali, until they saw the right way to express their opinions. In the survey, respondents only gave responses to structured questions that were asked by surveyors; they did not have to directly face the groups that were considered disturbing. They also did not need to shout or speak loudly for their opinions to be heard by the government. Most importantly, in this type of survey, the confidentiality of the respondents’ identity was guaranteed by the survey institute. This is a set of reasons why this mechanism of expressing opinion is deemed appropriate for communities with characteristics like Bali. After they expressed their discomfort with the various ormas’ giant posters, the Balinese did not automatically wish for the thing that made them uncomfortable to be disbanded or removed. They advised the government to regulate the ormas and ensure that the disturbance of public convenience, such as the giant posters present simultaneously in many areas, did not occur again. One of the findings that must be underlined from the two surveys presented above is the matter of evaluating the ormas themselves. In 2016 when the giant posters appeared everywhere, the number of those who

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gave a negative evaluation of ormas was far more than when the government, through the police force, began to curb the billboards in 2017. This implies that the publication of ormas with their billboards made ormas widely known by the public, but with a negative image. Professional public opinion surveys like those mentioned by Mietzner (2009) as one of the products of the post authoritarian era in Indonesia evidently became an important mechanism for the Balinese public to channel their opinions. This particular mechanism of democracy also helps the government in the policy making process, especially when the people have characteristics that are reluctant to voice their opinions openly, like the Balinese. At this point, the survey is very helpful in the process of consolidating democracy.

References Meitzner, M. (2009). “Political Opinion Polling in Post-Authoritarian Indonesia: Catalyst or Obstacle to Democratic Consolidation?” Bijdragen tot de Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde 165(1): 95–126. Vickers, A. (2003). Being Modern in Bali After Suharto. Inequality, Crisis, and Social Change in Indonesia, the Muted Worlds of Bali. T. A. Reuter, Ed. London, New York, Routledge Curzon: 17–29.

CHAPTER 3

The 2015 Billboards Campaign: What Was That All About? Ni Nyoman Dewi Pascarani Translated by Miriam Ramsay

Extensive publicity by the Ormas in Bali received lots of attention not only from Bali’s community itself, but also from foreign communities outside of Bali, especially from tourists. As one of the best tourist destinations in the world, many foreign tourists visit Bali. Subsequently they received an onslaught of information from billboards shown at intersections of the major streets in the districts of Bali. These billboards for the Ormas often displayed the “strongman” figure and drew queries from those who only had a general understanding of the term “Ormas”. From numerous media options for publicity, the Ormas chose billboards as their main medium for a closer and more intimate communication with the public. In contrast with online promotions, advertising signs and billboards out in public view are often considered to be less effective because they cannot permanently reach out to a target audience, nor can they convey their complex messages, and they can be easy to

N. N. D. Pascarani (B) Faculty of Social and Political Science, Udayana University, Denpasar, Indonesia © The Author(s) 2021 A. Vandenberg and N. Zuryani (eds.), Security, Democracy, and Society in Bali, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-5848-1_3

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disregard because of the number of billboards on the same street intersections. Despite this, these permanent billboards were the Ormas’ main choice of publicity medium. In general, there were two reasons for the use of these public mediums. First, for the advertisers, this medium gives a constant reminder for the target audience. Second, billboards are directional, and act as the primary medium when the billboard is near the sale of the product (Moriarty et al. 2015). These two features of directional billboards were prominent when they were used by the Ormas in Bali. When installed, the billboards exposed the existence of the organisation and became markers for their territories, indicating to the surrounding community that they were there. It is remarkable that they did not hesitate to include the name or photo of the Ormas leader in their region. It was not only one Ormas that did this. Others did not want to miss the opportunity to install similar billboards. The Ormas competed to install billboards on one side of the street, as if expressing their battle over territory. There is a lot of evidence demonstrating that the use of media plays an important role in the expression and strengthening of identity for various sub-groups (McQuail 2011). Looking into the use of billboards by the Ormas in Bali for communication with their audience, this chapter attempts to analyse the message the Ormas wanted to convey through the symbols and texts used on the billboards to form the image, identity and reputation of the Ormas.

The Ormas Through Time After the collapse of President Soeharto’s rule in 1998, and what is referred to as the reformation era, Indonesia experienced lots of change, especially in the management of public information and media. In the reformation era, enthusiasm about welcoming democratic life saw elements of social infrastructure, such as interest groups, pressure groups, political media communicators and other community groups, become freely able to use the media and access public information. The community audience during the reformation era had distinctive characteristics because, during that time, they experienced a crisis in the system of political communication. The form of New Order political communication tended to be top down. In Soeharto’s New Order, the general public developed their own interpretations of the information

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engineered by the government. As a result, when they entered the reformation era, society really enjoyed the atmosphere of freedom and hoped an essential change would happen in the life of the nation and the state. Strengthening the process of democratisation brought openness, stronger local knowledge, developments in information and technology, new lifestyles with the new freedom-based value system, high participation from community groups concerning basic human rights, the formation of socio-political associations and the growth of new institutions that had never been predicted or imagined. Freedom of access to public information included the use of outdoor media and seems to have become more prevalent during this era. Many organisations that call themselves Ormas emerged and became known for favouring outdoor media including huge billboards, flags and smaller signs, which adorned the city’s public spaces and confirmed their existence. This phenomenon arose not only in Jakarta, but also in other cities, including the districts and cities of Bali. The Ormas has had a long-standing presence not only in Bali, but also around Indonesia. “Social organisations”, shortened to Ormas, is a particular technical term used in Indonesia to register a form of community-based organisation that does not aim at politics. Indonesia’s path to independence was paved by many Ormas movements like Budi Oetomo; an organisation that was based on the subculture of Java and formed in 1908, Serikat Dagang Islam; organisations of young politically orientated Islamic businessmen formed in 1911, Muhammadiyah; an organisation of modernist Islamic culture with inward-looking qualities that was formed in 1912. The Indische Partij ; an organisation of a mixture of subcultures and reflects a non-racial nationalism with political elements and the slogan: “a place that gives a livlihood that makes Indonesia impervious”, was also formed in 1912. Nahdatul Ulama (NU) is a very large Ormas of Santri (young devotees) and Ulama (Iman or masters). There were an abundance of other movements like the subethnic Jong Ambon, Jong Sumatra, as well as Jong Celebes that gave birth to self-identified Indonesian nationalistic movements formed in 1926, and many other Ormas that participated in and coloured the struggle of the Indonesian people to reach independence and form the Republic of Indonesia. The Ormas of the New Order period has been characterised by Wilson (2015) as a tool for community control. The state did not monopolise coercive power and formed an informal alliance with non-state organisations. Various organisations were subcontracted and loosely allied with

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the state apparatus, but they used force “under the guise of the state and its symbols” (Wilson 2015: 38). The New Order worked with a system of private bribery and managed conflicts that could really only be resolved by the government itself. The state forces created a threat from groups of thugs while also giving protection to its citizens, provided they were loyal and obedient. As well as using some thugs in the community control system around bribery, the New Order also maintained its power through the “Petrus” (mysterious shootings) police operation against other freelance thugs, which caused shock in the community. According to Wilson (2015) that operation saw the state suppress the existence of thugs that had the potential to fight, while simultaneously silencing the thugs they thought could become a threat to the state. The collapse of the New Order, along with the decline in influence of highly ranked troops, changed the pattern of criminal activity. If initially they were fostered by the army and had an ideological role fighting anything considered subversive in the reformation era, then they could determine their own paths. The form of criminal figures changed; the New Order thugs were different from those of the present era. In the New Order era, increasing violence and crime were profitable for the Ormas providing protection to the poor, especially to those who had been marginalised by the processes of modernisation. After the New Order collapsed, they wanted to seize what they considered were their rights. The three main principles of the reformation—democratic government and participation, decentralisation and demilitarisation— faced challenges, as did many of those whose interests were most directly threatened by the new reforms. Difficulties with implementing the reforms were also seen very clearly in Bali. In the middle of the glittering tourism industry, as depicted by Lewis and Lewis (2015), many marginalised native Balinese were suffering cultural and environmental trauma caused by genocide, political exclusion and uncontrolled development. This constituted a very unstable base for the modernisation of Bali. Islamist militancy and the context of wideranging global insecurity accentuated these problems, making the local economy unstable and deepening doubt. When the image of harmony had begun to crack, underlying tension and frustration revealed themselves in a series of political, cultural and ethnic disputes. In reality, policy transition and the reformation were received with suspicion by the people of Bali who had been victims of elite politics and the strong Javanese military for many years. In this new regime of civil order, decentralisation and

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enhancement of provincial autonomy, the people of Bali fought to lift the historic conditions that had already deprived them of their dignity, civil expression and effective political infrastructure (Lewis and Lewis 2015: 144). The Bali Bombing case in 2002 inflicted an intense wound and aggravated antipathy towards Islam in Bali’s society. For example, when H. Bambang, a Muslim who was a Bali Bombing volunteer, did not appear in the rescue of the Bali Bombing victims, antipathy towards Islam was apparent. Many parties tried to calm the Bali communities, hoping they would not judge the Islamic community. The wounds from the Bali Bombing was not only felt by the victims and their families; Bali’s society also felt the effects. Kuta became a dead city, and before the tragedy it was an area that never slept and was a place to make a living for much of Bali’s population. Bali tourism in particular, and Indonesia in general, experienced a severe shock. An exodus of overseas tourists occurred, and the rate of hotel occupancy dropped dramatically. Bali, which relies on the tourism sector as the backbone of its economy, became unstable, right across the upper, middle and lower levels of society. Artist circles, in particular for tourism, complained about this condition. All of this clearly influenced hotel income, travel bureau, and finally, many contracted performances in hotels were not extended or dropped due to the lack of guests. The impact of the Bombing on the economy was clear and continued to be experienced across Bali. Tourism activities that were the backbone (approximately 35%) of Bali’s economy experienced shock. Beyond the cancellation of hotel bookings by tourists, and empty restaurants and shops since the Bombing event, a dramatic drop in revenue and wages for owners of small businesses that relied on the tourism sector also occurred. The principal problem that affected Bali at that time was the sharp decline in community income and shrinking employment rates. The Bali Bombing event also was a hit to the tourism sector in Indonesia more generally, contributing US$5 billion in foreign exchange towards the national balance of payments every year. The drop in the total of tourists influenced many other economic actions. A survey by Statistics Indonesia (BPS) regarding overseas tourists asserted that the sectors that were influenced, among others, were accommodation (hotels), air travel, food and drinks (restaurants), entertainment, tours and sightseeing, souvenirs, health and beauty and services (guides). In each of these

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sectors, tourism in Bali is connected with other regions; a fall in tourism to Bali led to falls in tourism all over Indonesia. An important impact, though difficult to quantify, is the impact on the trust of the economic actors inside and outside of the country. The impact on the trust of these people is very broad because it determines the attitudes and behaviours in various sectors. The change in their level of trust influenced consumer spending, investing, exporting and importing, where all these things are primary sources in the growth of the economy. After the Bali Bombing, Country Risk for investors in, or lenders to, Indonesia grew markedly. Risk calculations and transaction costs in premium insurance, loan interest, debt service burdens all became increasingly expensive. Doubtful investors and foreign buyers hesitated to be further involved in new or existing business in the country. While the government tried to stabilise the situation, communities in Bali were suffering from both social or cultural trauma and economic hardship. The government’s ventures to stabilise good conditions, from tourism to security, were considered slow. The government even displayed commitment to combatting terrorism, that is, by issuing the AntiTerrorism Regulations. However, the community had already felt the impacts of terror on the island, dubbed “Paradise”. The search for solutions to both the economic and security issues then arrived at these non-state organisations called Ormas. In history, it is pertinent to look back on a specific Ormas in Bali, emerging in the 1960s called the Denpasar Youth Movement. The emergence of this movement stemmed from a certain incident when a mob in South Sulawesi, led by Kahar Muzakar, was crushed by the Sukarno regime. Some remaining members of Muzakar’s group received help from supporters in the Indonesian military and were given military education for 6 months in Bali. Unfortunately, several people from South Sulawesi attempted to rape Balinese girls who were bathing. This prompted the paramilitary groups of Denpasar, including Wangaya Kaja, Wangaya Kelod, Panti and Gerenceng to unite and to fight these people, even though they were military personnel. This association called itself the Denpasar Youth Movement and received support from all youths in the city of Denpasar, who then joined this organisation in large numbers. The Governor of Bali at this time, that is, Anak Agung Bagus Suteja, strongly protected the Denpasar Youth Movement from elements in the military, and any mistakes made were covered up and protected by the Governor, who was also the

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Regional Military Commander. After a number of similar incidences were repeated, the Governor of Bali finally took action so that the people from South Sulawesi would not be moved and banned from being educated in Bali. In the end their education ended after only three months. After this incident the Denpasar Youth Movement existed within a vacuum, however members continued to gather in their favourite meeting places, for example, along Gajah Mada road. After the initial controversy, no further problems arose. There were fights between the Denpasar Youth Movement and Indonesian migrants in Denpasar but there were never fights with fellow Balinese youths. There are important differences between the Denpasar Youth Movement of the early 1960s and today’s Ormas, which emerged in 2002. There are three major Ormas in Bali. They are: Laskar Bali (Bali Warriors), Baladika Bali and the Pemuda Bali Bersatu (United Youth of Bali). The Balinese police force even suggested that those Ormas dissolve (Bali Post 2017). The Balinese Chief of Police declared war against thuggery and the selling of narcotics because it was disturbing the Balinese society. He even revealed data that between January and August 2018 almost 70%, or 603 people, involved in narcotics cases were local Balinese or had a Balinese name. In a press conference, the Bali Regional Police announced their success in handling as many as 205 thuggery cases and as many as 679 narcotics cases in the space of the year 2018. Meanwhile 803 suspects were named in cases of extortion and threats and violence, which constitute acts of thuggery. Based on the Regional Police’s data, by contrast there were only eleven recorded incidences in 2015, twelve incidences in 2016 and three incidences in 2017 that troubled the community. The Ormas in Bali attracted the attention of Commander of Korem 163, Colonel I Nyoman Cantiasa. The Ormas had been establishing power and dominating particular regions until a clash with rivals occurred. The potential for inter-gang conflict between those three Ormas was quite high due to several factors, one of which was the competition for control over territory. These three Ormas compete for the same business providing security services for large hotels, restaurants and night-time entertainment clubs. These Ormas have strong connections with many companies providing security services in the tourism sector. They have not only been involved in illegal behaviour like extortion, gambling on cockfights, and the selling of narcotics; they have also been involved in the mass mobilisation of voters in regional elections. Ormas groups have significant roles in getting

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voters to ballot centres, securing their votes and collecting money. At the same time, the post-reformation State can no longer control groups of thugs the way they were controlled in the New Order era. The thuggery that hid behind these Ormas has long seemed unstoppable and ever more popular, especially since 2002 when the membership of the largest Ormas has come to 40,000 in Laskar Bali, 30,000 in Baladikan and 10,000 in Pemuda Bali Bersatu. The popularity of the Ormas cannot be separated from the presence of the billboards installed along roads on every corner of the city. Initially, one Ormas installed a billboard on the Hari Raya, and not long after other Ormas followed suit and installed billboards in the same place. This billboard battle seemed to imply a fight for regional power between legitimate mass-member societal organisations. They did not hesitate to install photos of their leaders on every billboard. There seemed to be a race to display their existence to the public community. Negative reactions were unable to repress the publicity and its claims about the Ormas’ existence. Through these billboards, they competed to increase their popularity and attract the interest of potential members of the Ormas.

The Messages on the Ormas Billboards In a world of fragmented media, the existence of advertisements that avoid the newer technology, such as outdoor advertisement (billboards), plays an important role allowing advertisers to reach cellular consumers who are increasingly difficult to reach. For example, outdoor advertisement rose by 7% in 2007, increasing faster than most traditional media (OAAA 2008). Billboard advertisements are a form of communication that involves the use of large stationary structures and placement along specific streets and other transit routes to display a message to passers-by. This is a component of the advertising category that is known as outdoor advertising or out-of -home advertising that engages audiences when they circulate within their community. Billboards are well placed to utilise a few changes related to development and social progress. In particular, the number of miles travelled by consumers continues to increase and this provides larger opportunities for exposure to billboard advertisement. This media also brings significant value, because advertising boards offer a lower CPM (cost per mile, or cost per thousand viewers) than the main media.

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Like most forms of advertisements, billboards are used to communicate with customers at the moment and recruit them, with aims to persuade them to undertake the advertiser’s desired activities. The term billboard originated as a variation of the old medium of leaflets (or bills) installed onto boards (wooden panels that were erected with the aim of displaying leaflets) to inform passers-by about events, product promotions and other messages. These boards illustrate the way advertising ideology is essentially achieved by building our environment for us and saying who we really are and what we really want (McQuail 2001). Despite smaller contributions for overall expenditure in the advertising industry, outdoor advertisement has become more attractive for advertiser because of its capacity to reach consumers who are very mobile and not too often exposed to traditional forms of media (Francese 2003). In academia, however, outdoor advertisement does not get as much attention as “mainstream” media like television. Studies that have focussed on outdoor advertisements tend to use measures of advertisement effectiveness such as recalling and recognition (Donthu et al. 1993; Fitts and Hewett 1977; King and Tinkham 1989; Wilson and Till 2008), attitude (Shavitt et al. 2004), prevalence of alcohol and tobacco (Lee and Callcott 1994) and audience gauging (Bloom 2000). As a developing media, billboards and outdoor advertisements generally are already facing considerable public scrutiny. The main issues around outdoor advertisement are that billboards are said to be aesthetically unpleasant, act as a disturbance that is unsafe for drivers and display inappropriate products (Taylor and Taylor 1994). These were the reasons for prohibiting Ormas billboards cited by the Governor of Bali in the regulation number 220/26405/Bid.II/BKBP on 23 December 2015, related to decreasing the number of billboards put up by the societal organisations. However, there has been little action to enforce this regulation for many installed billboards (Figs. 3.1 and 3.2). The billboards installed by the three major Ormas, can be categorised in the following way (Table 3.1). The billboard categories above are not just a matter of the message delivered. They have external markers with their own meaning. In the HUT Ormas theme, for example, billboards usually display the existence of the leadership figure of the organisation lined up with a few managers of core organisations. By contrast, the Hari Raya holiday greetings display a message from the organisation’s leadership with related religious symbols and include a photo or name of the coordinator and

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Fig. 3.1 Baladika Bali Ormas billboard (Source Author—Ni Nyoman Dewi Pascarani)

other Ormas leaders. On Ormas billboards seeking election support, there are images of the organisation’s leader, accompanied by logos and national figures or political parties along with certain candidates. Illustrations on the billboards did not vary much from the standard formats outlined above. Beyond the content of the message displayed, the size of the billboard conveyed messages about the billboard wars.

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Fig. 3.2 Billboards of the leader of Ormas “Pemuda Bali Bersatu”, now elected as a member of the House of Representative, Denpasar City (Source Author—Ni Nyoman Dewi Pascarani)

They implied that the installation of billboards in a couple of cities and a few regions of Bali were uncontrollable and separate from any urgency or import of the actual message being displayed. This was the context in which the Governor of Bali published his regulation Number

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Table 3.1 Ormas billboards Theme of billboard

Target audience

Visual content

Ormas’s anniversary

Internal to organisation

Holiday Election Support

External to organisation External to organisation

Membership and programme activities Remembrance of religious holidays Support for one of the candidates in post-conflict local elections

220/26405/Bid.II/BKBP on 23 December 2015, related to Decreasing the Number of Billboards for Social Organisations. This regulation was committed to policing the existence of billboards installed by Ormas. However it provoked controversy, especially because Ormas circles considered the regulation too political. Enforcement of the regulation turned out to be selective. Between 2005 and 2015 Ormas billboard regulation depended only on the intentions of the local government and certain actors operating without clear standard procedures. Billboards, as noted, are an uncommon form of outdoor publicity. They constitute large-scale media attracting the attention of society and so they were ideal for the Ormas seeking to place large images in crowded places. The type of advertisement placed on these billboards included publicity with interesting text and images placed in strategic places. The language used is short so that it can be seen and read at a glance. The content on the billboards was similar for all three of the major Ormas in Bali. First, they named their organisation: Laskar Bali, Baladika Bali or Pemuda Bali Bersatu. “Troops” or “Army” identify the Ormas with the struggle of war. In an interview, one of the founders of these Ormas asserted that the reason for founding the organisation was to protect Bali, which, with all its exoticism, had become a strong magnet to “be enjoyed”. Bali’s adaptability and the openness of the Balinese people to visitors has become Bali’s strength, as well as its weakness. The tragedy of the Bali Bombing pushed Balinese society to strengthen its security. Furthermore, the number of visitors who bring other cultures is also considered a threat, so that Bali’s “steadiness” (ajeg ) or a Bali that is steady, intact, permanent and unchanging can be maintained. The second component displayed on those billboards is the Organisation’s logo. One of the big three Ormas uses the weapon “Dewata

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Nawa Sanga” (nine rulers from every corner of the wind according to the Hindu religion). In Balinese Hinduism, the nine rulers constitute the god Shiva surrounded by eight aspects. Laskar Bali uses the weapon symbol of the trident from the god Sambhu, ruler of the North-East. Pemuda Bali Bersatu uses the Moksala logo, the weapon of the god Rudra, ruler of the Southwest. Differing from these two Ormas, Baladika Bali does not use a weapon logo of Dewata Nawa Sanga but uses Keris, which, in the Balinese Hindu culture, functions as both a weapon and a complementary offering. Visual images are inevitably very ambiguous and have many meanings (polysemy), however they also have certain advantages over words. Icons directly represent a few clear concepts, have strong impacts and enjoy wide recognition (McQuail 2001). The weapon symbols imply not only that they identify themselves as Bala (troops) or Laskar (warriors) but relate to the guardian of the wind direction in certain areas. These Ormas and their symbolism seek to show that they master a regional territory. The organisation’s use of logos is not limited only to billboards but is often also used as tattoo designs on parts of the body of organisation members. Laskar Bali even require their members to get the tattoo on the upper part of their hand between the index finger and thumb. Identification through this tattoo is not used by the Pemuda Bali Bersatu, which formed later and wanted to create a new paradigm of Ormas free from criminal activity. Nevertheless, there are members of the Pemuda Bali Bersatu who also get a moksala tattoo on a clearly visible part of the body, like the neck. The use of this logo is motivated by Ormas members themselves who wish to show that they are part of the Ormas organisation. Members often take pride in belonging to their organisation, not only through tattoos but also wearing T-shirts or sporting stickers on their vehicles or motorbike helmets (Figs. 3.3 and 3.4). The third common component of the billboards’ content was greetings on both public holidays and the organisation anniversaries. Offered by the leader of a particular Ormas, holiday greetings show that they are an organisation that upholds the value of tolerance despite seeking to rule Bali. These Ormas are open to allowing immigrants from the rest of Indonesia to become members. One of the small groups, Flobamora Ormas, specifically organises people who have migrated to Bali from the many islands in the southeast province of the Lesser Sunda islands. During the electoral season, these greeting change into support for the advocated legislative candidates. Photographs of the candidates and Ormas leaders are displayed on these politically supportive billboards. The

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Fig. 3.3 An example of an Ormas member’s tattoo (Source Andrew Vandenberg)

purpose of this is nothing other than to mobilise support from the tens of thousands of Ormas members. The personal closeness between candidates and party leaders are explicitly exposed, while overshadowing negative images of these Ormas. The desire for closeness to a “strongman” displayed on billboards has also become a reason for people to want to join the Ormas. Borrowing a concept from Benedict Anderson’s notion of imagined communities (2008), the Ormas have attempted to establish a form of imagined

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Fig. 3.4 The United Youth of Bali’s Ormas logo on a T-shirt worn by an Ormas Leader (Source Author—Ni Nyoman Dewi Pascarani)

communities, in which individual members actually interact very little, if at all. Ormas leaders claim that their members, numbering in the tens of thousands of people, strengthen the community but it is difficult to imagine how all these members can directly interact. Membership identity is certified with a Membership Card that can be obtained when joining the Ormas, even if the Ormas membership recruitment process differs from one Ormas to another. One of the requirements to become an Ormas member is to not be a member of another Ormas. If someone has previously been a member of one of the other Ormas, then these prospective members must undergo a three-month trial before attaining a Membership Card. During these three months, Ormas administrators investigate whether these prospective members still have connections with the Ormas they had initially joined. If there is any indication or proof that the prospective members are still members or at least have connections to the other Ormas then their membership will be cancelled, and they

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will not be given a membership card. The issuing of membership cards is controlled by the head of each branch with an implication that this leader will also be responsible for all the activities of their members. If there is a problematic member, then the branch leader must take responsibility for resolving that problem. Membership management by the Ormas is relatively neat and organised. Besides having a Membership Card as a tool for members’ data collection, the organisations also have regular scheduled meetings and often have special conferences to discuss other important problems. At these routine conferences attended by a minute-taker, their discussion revolves around the organisation’s social activities framed by celebrating their organisation’s anniversary. Moreover, organisational development issues routinely appear on the agenda at every conference. The number of members is usually the main discussion point, but problems of Membership Card distribution often arise. What is more interesting is that one of these Ormas has a Legal Aid Centre which is intended to assist those members involved in legal issues. The leader of the organisation realised the importance of a Legal Aid Centre, since their main business is security services and as a result their members are often involved in legal matters. Links between Ormas and political parties can be discerned in the interactions between particular political party figures and particular Ormas. Many members of the Ormas, and most of the leaders, have become legislative members at the District and Province levels, demonstrating the role of Ormas in the practice of politics in Bali. As one of the journalists interviewed for this investigation asserted, most reporters understand that no Ormas are stand-alone organisations. Despite the absence of formal links, there are connections between members of parties and various Ormas. They can argue about whether these relationships are part of the social life of their community, but the political relationships do exist. The journalist further stated that these Ormas are not purely a political tool. The relationships are transactional. When the Ormas garner benefits from political parties, they then move to mass mobilise the masses among their members. The involvement of Ormas in wider politics is explicit and recognised by one member of an Ormas board of supervisors who stated that the Ormas played an important role in the victory of a leader in the 2014 regional elections. Ormas members are deployed to generate a voice in that region. Such deployment occurred without intimidation or violence, only involving visits to neighbours’ houses and recommendations about

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choosing one of the candidates. Of course, however, such practices raised concerns. How could people not choose the suggested candidate? Many Ormas members are large and well-built like a bouncer or hitman, so it cannot be denied that the neighbourhoods they visited must have felt intimidated. The later involvement of Ormas members in a number of violent incidences, including fights to the death, caused perception of the growing and developing Ormas in Bali to turn negative. Newspaper reports about fights and violence between Ormas members caused the image of the societal organisations to deteriorate. Based on a 2016 survey by Udayana University staff in 9 districts/cities in Bali (see Apriani Chapter 2 in this collection), more than 50% of the Balinese community hold negative social perceptions of the three major Ormas (Laskar Bali, Baladika Bali and PBB). 70% of the community feels disturbed by the billboards installed in their areas. These perceptions are an effect of the negative reporting about societal organisations in Bali. The publicity these Ormas generate appears to be good enough attention among both local communities and other communities. The Ormas billboards located alongside major roads and often displaying their members appear to be effective. The displayed figure is often a well-built man, bearing predominantly black tattoos, which gives an intimidating impression. It is not surprising, therefore, when community perceptions of these Ormas have turned negative, and become sticky with thuggery and violence. The billboards have perhaps strengthened the image of Ormas as dangerous organisations and threats to safety. However, the publicity through these billboards is still ongoing, and the members of these organisations continue to grow in number. It cannot be denied that these billboards contribute to the development of the organisations. One of the leaders of the Ormas recognises the importance of publicity for the existence of the Ormas and the recruitment of members. By displaying strong-looking men, or those who appear to have strength and influence, the organisations can help both in the improvement of the members’ personal prosperity and their self-security. Basically, they help those who have joined and need work but lack good education to obtain work. As a result, they use assets of physical strength to work and support their family. The publicity of the “strongman” to show who is behind their organisation seeks to develop the community’s trust in the organisation’s credibility. The figure on display is believed to be able to fulfil their expectations if they join the Ormas.

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The billboards’ content reflects the purpose and value of the producer. Direct “meaning” can be found or inferred from the message; and the recipients will comprehend the meaning more or less as it is intended by the producer (McQuail 2001: 79). Ormas billboards, as a form of publicity, are also based on internal organisational agreements about the logos, colours and other elements in those billboards. The domination of black is used to display strength. The use of logos referencing weapons from Dewata Nawa Sanga defers to Hindu teaching because the weapons are used by guardian deities in every direction of the wind. These logos are used as organisational identification. For example, most members of the largest group, Laskar Bali, use the weapon logo as an arm or hand tattoo. The logos and symbols on billboards alongside highways make impressions on people’s perceptions. Communities exposed to publicity via billboards will unconsciously identify the Ormas with weapons, strength and violence. Soemirat and Ardianto (2004) explain the cognitive effect of a very influential communication process on forming a person’s image. The formed image is based on knowledge and information the people receive. The communication does in no way directly generate certain behaviours, however it does tend to influence the way we organise our image of our surroundings. The message to be conveyed finally forms the image and perception of the Ormas in the community, that is, as organisations that have a role in protecting the Balinese community. This is indicated with the projected self-image of the organisations as tolerant of religious diversity, where these Ormas not only recognise the holidays of Hinduism as the major religion in Bali, but also celebrate Islamic, Christian and other religious holidays.

Image, Identity and Reputation Publicity around the Ormas in Bali has been done in two ways: through the mass media and through outdoor publicity—that is, billboards installed on the sides of roads and spread all over Bali. Publicity is an important concept not only in the public relations world, but also in the everyday world. Besides ethical boundaries, there are no formal boundaries for creative space in publicity activities (Lesly 1992). The function of publicity is inseparable from the functions of mass communication. Several attempts have been made to schematise the main functions of

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mass communication. As originally started by McQuail (2001) providing a summary of basic communication functions, the main functions are: environmental surveillance; connection (correlation) between sections of society responding to their environment; and transmission of cultural traditions. The function of social surveillance originally refers to the spread of information and objective interpretation about various incidences that have occurred within and outside of the social environment. The purpose of social control was to stop undesirable things occurring. The function of social correlation originally referred to the allocation of interpretation and information that connects one social group to another, or between one view and another to reach a consensus. The socialisation function originally referred to one generation’s inheritance of values from another generation, or from one group’s inheritance from another. The publicity undertaken by the Ormas has had an impact on the image of the Ormas themselves. Their image is the main objective, but the reputation and accomplishments of the Ormas also feature in the world of public relations. An understanding of the image itself is abstract and cannot be measured quantitatively, however, the form of an image can be perceived in the outcome of good and bad values. The reception of, and response to, the Ormas’ image have been both positive and negative, in the target audience and, in general, within the wider community. Publicity through Ormas billboards can, of course, effectively display the identity of the Ormas. That identity is the actual manifestation of the reality of the organisation, as shown through its name, logo, uniform and social goods produced by the organisation and communicated to diverse constituents. These constituents then form perceptions based on messages sent by those organisations in real form (Argenti 2009). Those perceptions shape the image they have. When these images accurately reflect the reality of the organisations, then the identity campaign succeeds because the company identity and image are consistent, and this forms reputation. Therefore, reputation is a synthesis of many images and many attitudes presented together (Fombrun 1996: 72; Gray and Balmer 1998; Helm 2004). However, the impression of tolerance is presented enclosed in a current image from the organisations. The intended image projected by the Ormas; an Ormas that is friendly and tolerant towards other religions is yet to be achieved. The publicity and current image already used cannot yet be replaced, because there is also an image of the Ormas as organisations to be identified with violence and crime.

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These problems have been caused by schema displayed on the Ormas billboards, like the domination of the colour black, weaponry symbols and figures who often display tattoos and large muscles. The tattoos themselves have negative connotations in Balinese society, where they are normally used by criminal gangs. According to Ruslan (2006), the colour and symbolism or Livery is one of the most effective ways to assign corporate or company identity. Company identity takes a specific visual form and graphic expression displays symbols that reflect the image to be conveyed. Given particular graphic expressions, a company identity can be created and can influence the fate of the company. Regardless of the colours and symbols used, Ormas also used strongperson figures to encompass the strength of the organisation. This “Strongman” then becomes a community magnet for attitudes responding to the billboard exposure of the Ormas; that is, he promotes the recruitment of members for that Ormas. The strongman’s reputation, and his power over economic and political resources, can convince the audience to join the Ormas. The strength over economic and political resources that the strongman possesses is expected to guarantee that the needs of Ormas members will be met. In some of the related literature, several researchers equate image and reputation, despite them being different concepts. The organisations’ image can be seen as a reflection of individual attitudes; therefore, the image can be defined as an external view of the organisation (Hatch and Shultz 1997: 361). This is the reflection of an organisation formed on the basis of individual and subjective attributes perceived by management. Reputation, however, is a basic effect that appears as an important factor in the audience’s judgement regarding attitudes about and behaviour towards the existence of the organisations. Tom Gable, in his book Crisis Communication: Practical PR Strategies for Reputation Management and Company Survival, reveals that reputation can promote company growth and reduce negative impacts on the company during a crisis. According to Gable, organisations that have a good reputation and are known to have big social contributions regarding communication can often endure negative situations well. The Strongmen reputation displayed on billboards became the key to the success of Ormas member recruitment. Strongmen fulfil four aspects of reputation: credibility; trustworthiness; reliability and social responsibility. The credibility in question is the profitability of strongmen: where the audience believes that living in close proximity to a strongman will

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benefit them. Strongmen also win faith from the community and give rise to pride in the organisation members. They are used as icons to maintain the members’ trust that the Ormas can protect both itself and its members, which creates a sense of security in being part of such an organisation. Social responsibility is fulfilled both with internal and external organisational assistance. Internally, the Ormas can help members economically by giving their members work. Externally, Ormas often help the surrounding community with social activities that usually coincide with the celebration of the organisation’s anniversary. These social activities vary, from helping people with disabilities to helping repair temples. Assessment of the strongmen’s reputation by the Balinese community is not free from the habits of the Balinese themselves in assessing the reputation of their community members more generally. Those who have a good reputation in Balinese society are those who are active in the customary “banjar” activities. The banjar is a meeting hall located in every village. Every head of family is required to participate in every customary activity that takes place in their village region. Traditional Balinese activities are very diverse, although it is said that Balinese people are people of ritual ceremony. From womb to grave, the Balinese people are required to perform ritual ceremonies. In every ritual ceremony it is also required to involve all members of the banjar. Uniquely, in Balinese community activities, the banjar is an absolute valuation of Balinese people. There are custom sanctions ready to be imposed on anyone who violates the customary rules. These rules apply regardless of whether violators have public positions in the government. What is most important to them is the participation in the banjar activities. There is no option for Balinese people to be absent or to not follow the customary rules because the consequence is “kasepekang banjar”, expulsion or ostracisation from the banjar. These are the strongest possible sanctions for Balinese people because it means that the entire family is not recognised as members of the banjar. This has tragic results for the whole process of ritual performed around the family. Families that have been “kasepekang banjar” will not be assisted in ritual ceremonies and the saddest part is, at the time of death, there will be no assistance with the Ngaben procession for cremation. Balinese traditional ritual ceremonies are done entirely collectively, involving the community as a ceremony device. This makes it impossible to not be a member of the

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banjar. The Balinese person’s reputation is assessed based upon their effective contributions to the banjar’s activities. Attendance is first. There is a “dedosan” (fine) that can be paid if absent at the time of banjar activities, but there is a limit to absence. A maximum of three times is tolerated. Traditional regulations thus create a bind between Balinese people and their birth village, especially for men who have married and settled down. The banjar tradition values the reputation of what individuals have done for the banjar and the surrounding community. Social dependency is the most important aspect of Balinese reputation. A major part of the concept of reputation is the aggregate perception and the evaluation of organisations by a few parties. Different managers or managerial groups view the reputation of organisations differently (Aruman 2015). From the viewpoint of sociologists, reputation is regarded as the social reception of certain organisations. This point refers to actions (of organisations and individuals) in the past and appears if the actor’s future partner informs on their current behaviour (Ruab and Weesie 1990: 626). On a more abstract level, from this perspective, reputation is regarded as a process of legitimate exchange between agents (organisations and managers) and is obtained through either third-party approval or a cognition process, as a collective process in a social framework. From this perspective, reputation serves an integrative function in society (Imhof and Eisenegger 2008). This is certainly true for the banjar and is central to how the Ormas’ billboards were received by the Balinese community.

Conclusion From the billboards installed by Ormas we can see the messages that the Ormas intended to convey to their audiences. Other than as a marker of strength and their existence, the Ormas also emphasised the presence of “strongmen” in their organisation who serve as patrons in order to increase the organisations’ credibility, demonstrate their reputation and win the community’s trust. The community’s faith in the Ormas is caused by the reputation of the “strongmen” who are known to the community as people who have strength along with economic and political resources. At the same time, the social acceptance of the presence of Ormas in Bali has been shaped both by history and many recent incidences experienced by Balinese society. Culturally, Balinese society is accustomed to “youth

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gathering” as a part of the banjar and traditional communities, so Ormas have long been commonplace and free from illegal activities. The use of billboards by the Ormas can heighten their popularity as indicated by increased recruitment in these Ormas. However, of no less importance is the increasing number of Balinese people in correctional institutions serving a sentence for a criminal activity. This is one of the reasons for the Bali Regional Chief of Police to forbid the installation of Ormas billboards. It was even proposed to the Governor to disband the three major Ormas, that is, Laskar Bali, Baladika Bali and Pemuda Bali Bersatu. Overall, while the negative impacts on Balinese society have yet to be evaluated, these billboards have brought a negative impact on the development of these organisations.

References Anderson, Benedict. 2008. Imagined Communities. Yogyakarta: Insist. Argenti, Paul A. 2009. Corporate Communications, Fifth Edition. New York: The McGraw-Hill Companies. Aruman, Edhy. 2015. Identitas, Citra dan Reputasi in https://mix.co.id/mixinteractive/column/identitas-citra-dan-reputasi/. Balipost.com. Tiga Ormas Besar Di Bali Dapat Warning Kapolda. http:// www.balipost.com/news/2017/12/29/32894/Tiga-Ormas-Besar-di-Bali. Accessed 29 December 2017. Bloom, D. 2000. Measuring the Audience to Poster Advertising. International Journal of Market Research 42, 395–499. Donthu, N., Cherian, J., & Bhargava, M. 1993. Factors Influencing Recall of Outdoor Advertising. Journal of Advertising Research 33, 64–72. Fitts, R. L., & Hewett, W. C. 1977. Utilizing the Before After with Control Group Experimental Design to Evaluate an Outdoor Advertising Campaign. Journal of Advertising 6, 26–39. Fombrun, C. 1996. Reputation Realizing Value from the Corporate Image. Boston, MA: Harvard Business School Press. Francese, P. 2003. More Homeless. American Demographics 25, 40–41. Gable, Tom. 2008. Crisis Communication: Practical PR Strategies for Reputation Management and Company Survival. London and Philadelphia: Kogan Page. Gray, Edmund R., & Balmer, John M. T. 1998. Managing Corporate Image and Corporate Reputation. Long Range Planning 31(5), 695–702. Hatch, Mary Jo., & Schultz, Majken. 1997. Relations Between Organizational Culture, Identity and Image. European Journal of Marketing 31(5–6), 356– 365.

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Helm, Amanda. 2004. Cynics and Skeptics: Consumer Dispositional Trust, in NA. Advance in Consumer Research 31, 345–351. Imhof, K., & Eisenegger, M. 2008. The True, the Good and the Beautiful: Reputation Management in the Media Society. Public Relations Research: European and International Perspectives and Innovation. Wiesbaden, 125–146. King, K. W., & Tinkham, S. F. 1989. The Learning and Retention of Outdoor Advertising. Journal of Advertising 38, 67–80. Lee, W., & Callcott, M. F. 1994. Billboard Advertising: A Comparison to Vice Products Across Ethnic Groups. Journal of Business Research 29, 47–51. Lesly, Philip. 1992. Public Relations Handbook. New York: Prentice Hall. Lewis, Jeff, & Lewis, Belinda. 2015. Bali’s Silent Crisis. United Kingdom: Lexington Books. McQuail, Denis. 2001 [2011]. McQuail’s Mass Communications Theory. Jakarta: Penerbit Salemba Humanika. Moriarty, Mitchell, & Wells. 2015. Advertising. Jakarta: Prenada Media. Outdoor Advertising Association of America, Inc. (OAAA). 2008. Facts & Figures dalam, www.oaaa.org/outdoor/facts. Raub, W., & Weesie, J. 1990. Reputation and Efficiency in Social Interaction; An Example of Network Effects. American Journal of Sociology 96, 626–654. Ruslan, Rosady. 2006. Manajemen Public Relations & Media Komunikasi. Jakarta: PT RajaGrafindo Persada. Shavitt, S., Vargas, P., & Lowrey, P. 2004. Exploring the Role of Memory for Self-Selected Ad Experiences: Are Some Advertising Media Better Liked Than Others? Psychology & Marketing 21, 1011–1032. Soemirat and Ardianto. 2004. Dasar-Dasar Public Relations. Bandung: PT. Remaja Rosdakarya. Taylor, C. R., & Taylor, J. C. 1994. Regulatory Issues in Outdoor Advertising: A Content Analysis of Billboards. Journal of Public Policy and Marketing 13, 97–107. Wilson, Ian Douglas. 2015. The Politics of Protection Rackets in Post-New Order Indonesia: Coercive Capital, Authority and Street Politics. New York: Routledge. Wilson, R. T., & Till, B. D. 2008. Airport Advertising Effectiveness: An Explanatory Field Study. Journal of Advertising 37, 57–70.

CHAPTER 4

The Historical Construction of Bali’s Security Groups Andrew Vandenberg

Introduction The security groups currently operating in Bali were formed twenty to thirty years ago but they resemble older groups including the semicriminal gangs that operated during Suharto’s authoritarian regime, the political-party youth wings of the post-war period up until 1965, and the bands of guerrillas who fought the Dutch during the war of independence. As such, their current iteration is another turn in a dance between formal and informal institutions that began during the Second World War. The argument of this chapter is a contribution to debates about the genesis of institutions during critical junctures, after which path dependency ensues as the institutions reproduce themselves and constrain actors’ possibilities for striking out on a different path. This path dependency is the prosaic definition of what Marx more lyrically expressed as tradition weighing “like a nightmare on the brains of the living” (Marx 1852 [1972]). Rather than regard the critical juncture as a “frozen moment” or a “moment of original sin” (Migdal 2001b: 24),

A. Vandenberg (B) Arts and Education, Deakin University, Geelong, VIC, Australia e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2021 A. Vandenberg and N. Zuryani (eds.), Security, Democracy, and Society in Bali, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-5848-1_4

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the argument below builds upon Mark Twain’s apocryphal quip (echoing Marx (1852 [1972]: 6) on “poetry from the past”) that history does not repeat; it rhymes. This sense of poetry and narrative opens the way to include what Anderson (1972, 1990 [1972]) saw as the cultural context for the historical achievement of state legitimacy, Migdal (2001b: 236– 241) called culturist interpretations within a state-in-society approach, and Tilly (1985) saw as the ambiguity of protection during the historical achievement of state legitimacy (see also Leander 2002; Lindsey 2001; Schulte-Buckholt 2001; Taylor and Botea 2008). Several reviews of an extensive literature about the formation and then reproduction of institutions agree that two impulses for new thinking emerged in the 1990s (Bell 2011; Hay 2008; Hay and Wincott 1998; Mahoney 2000; Rothstein 1991, 1992, 1998; Schmidt 2008, 2010; Stark 2017; Thelen 1999). One impulse emerged from debates about labour movements, neo-corporatism, and varieties of capitalism and led to reflections on how to explain the surprising persistence of irrational outcomes in not only technological history but also economic institutions (among proponents of rational choice and methodological individualism) or social institutions (among proponents of class analysis and methodological collectivism). The other impulse emerged around neo-Weberian ideas in the influential collection Bringing the State Back In (Skocpol 1985) and led to historical institutionalism (among proponents of conflict analysis over time). All three of these “new institutionalisms”—economic, sociological, and historical—focussed on the formal institutions of the state in developed countries. Later a fourth approach, constructivist (Hay 2008) or discursive (Schmidt 2008, 2010) institutionalism built upon historical institutionalism but departed from Euro-centric norms about formal legitimacy, against which informal actors are deviations or threats. Instead, constructivist institutionalism studied histories of interaction between formal and informal institutions (Stinchcombe 1968) whether in Europe’s actual history of state formation, war-making, and capital accumulation (Tilly 1985) or in the contested relations between informal and formal institutions in developing or post-socialist countries (Bakker 2016a, 2016b, 2017; Leander 2002; Schulte-Buckholt 2001; Taylor and Botea 2008; Tsai 2016; Wilson and Bakker 2016; Wilson and Nugroho 2012). Constructivist institutionalism is particularly relevant for understanding the security groups in Indonesia after twenty years of more powerful local government and freely contested democratic elections in a lively public sphere.

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From this large, wide-ranging, and often-reviewed literature about new institutionalism over the past three decades, the argument of this chapter draws, first, upon Mahoney’s (2000) clear analytical review of various approaches to explanation. He reviewed sequences of events before institutional genesis in a critical juncture and then path dependency thereafter. Mahoney notes: first, that sequences of events before the formative moment can be either reactive (each new event reacting against the previous one) or self-reproducing (making the institution more permanent); and second, that when an actor chooses a new path at the confluence of previous paths, this amounts to a critical juncture because the choice is unique, consequential, and only possible there and then. Thereafter, the new path sees the newly minted institution entrench itself and constrain or shape what future generations can do. The argument of the chapter draws, second, upon Tsai’s (2016) analysis of intertwined formal and informal institutions outside of the highly developed countries, but I replace her metaphor about a möbius strip in favour of McAdam and friends’ metaphor about an iterative dance between contending forces (McAdam et al. 2001: 66). An iterative dance between formal and informal institutions offers an appealing allusion to what others, noted above, have called poetry from the past, a Javanese culture of power, culturist interpretations, and state formation as a process of expanding a protection racket to the point that other states recognise a particular state’s monopoly over local violence and thus ordain it legitimate. The argument draws, third, upon Slater’s (2012) analysis of institutional change during the New Order of the Suharto regime but puts that institutional change in the context of a longer perspective. Mahoney’s (2000), Tsai’s (2016), and Slater’s (2012) analyses inform the argument presented in Fig. 4.1. The first part of the chapter discusses cultural developments, political developments, and the critical juncture during the Japanese occupation in 1942–1945. The second part of the chapter runs through the iterative dance of developments since 1945 culminating in 2017 when the police threatened to withdraw permission for Bali’s three largest security groups to continue to operate. The argument draws upon the historical work of many scholars to reflect upon debates about developing countries’ historical institutionalism in general and Bali’s security organisations in particular. Particular ormas may lose their permission to operate but existing groups will expand or new groups will form to take their place. The institution will continue to oscillate between developing local communities and their cultures, upholding a

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of s ce nt en me qu p se lo e ve tiv de ac r a l Re ltu cu

Dutch colonialism - preman

f eo c en qu nts e gs e in opm c r l fo e in dev Na onal selfe r determina on lf- ical e t S li po

Puputan 1906, 1908 Muslim movements and poli cal par es 1900-1940

Dutch orientalism 1908-42,

Japanese occupation, 1942-45

War of independence 1945-49

Polariza on and party youth wings 1955-65

Mass killings 1965-66

End of Suharto’s New Order 1998

1998-2004 Reformasi Bali bombings 2002, 2005

Fig. 4.1 An argument about the history of Indonesia’s societal organisations— ormas

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national discourse of tolerant multiculturalism, and assisting processes of authoritarian oppression and predatory capitalism. The history of the institution has not been a march straight down through time; it has been an iterative dance, first to the left and then to the right, over and over, and this will continue. Hopefully, Indonesia will in future avoid any dramatic repeats of either the hyper-polarisation of 1955–1965 or the extreme violence of 1965–1966 and steer more towards community development rather than towards localised predatory capitalism.

Developments Leading up to and Constituting the Critical Juncture A Reactive Sequence of Cultural Developments Before the Critical Juncture From about 1830, rivalry with the British saw the Dutch set out to colonise more territory throughout what would become the Dutch East Indies, and later Indonesia. This was a cultural development in that it involved an assertion of supposedly superior European rationality and modern forms of knowledge (Nierstrasz 2012; Quijano 2007). Mercantilist colonialism focussed on monopolising trade during the 1600s and 1700s but later gave way to a more comprehensive imperialism shaped by the Enlightenment and the industrial revolution (Harari 2011: 313). During the 1800s and 1900s, modern colonialism sought not merely to control trade but also to understand the land, peoples, and their cultures in order to control production in cash-crop plantations of coffee, tea, cacao, tobacco, rubber, sugar, and opium. An important aspect of the modern imperialist drive to set up plantations was the Dutch use of what they called vrijman—free man, or mercenary—who were employed as freelance security guards for the plantation owners, as tax collectors by the local authorities, and as fee collectors in ports and markets. The Dutch word became preman in Malay. These colonial preman resembled the old village toughs, known as jago (cock) who protected villagers from outside thieves and enjoyed a “Robin Hood” reputation for putting their skills in the martial art of pencak silat to good ends. Besides being enforcers, guards, local toughs, and later protection-racket gangsters, preman also came to describe any soldier or police officer who was off duty and out of uniform (Anderson 2001: 10; Barker 2001: 20–21). The preman of the Dutch East Indies are

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comparable to the “men of honour” who acted as wardens guarding the valuable lemon orchards in Sicily, which supplied the booming market for citrus fruit to prevent scurvy on long ocean voyages (Dimico et al. 2017), but the preman followed their own path distinct from the mafia that arose in nineteenth-century Sicily and spread among emigrants to the USA. One reason the preman of Indonesia differs from the Italian and US mafia, despite similar origins in the political economy of plantations supplying valuable commodities for centres of empire, is that they drew upon a distinctively Indonesian culture around the socialisation of young men (Anderson 1972: 1–16). Between childhood in the father’s household and heading a household as a married man, young men—pemuda—would spend several years living as: santri in an Islamic teacher’s boarding school or pesantren; as apprentices in the household of a master craftsman, musician, artist, or puppeteer working in a royal court; or as devotees in the school of a martial arts teacher. Young men could move between these groups and some would settle permanently into the lifestyle. In the colonial period, small numbers of students constituted an elite version of the same pemuda culture in the boarding houses around the universities. Anderson observes that: In times of tranquillity and order, utopia was the world within – whether the search for the absolute through study, asceticism, and prayer, or the quest for power through physical and magical exercises. In times of crisis, however, utopia often assumed an external aspect in response to the social disintegration and natural catastrophes which were traditionally regarded as the visible signs of dynastic decline and danger in the cosmological order. Under these conditions, the santri and their like flowed out into society in many guises: as the zealous supporters of dynastic pretenders, as propogandists for religious brotherhoods, and even simply as magicoreligious bandits. (Anderson 1972: 9)

The pemuda culture prevailed across the archipelago, Malaysia, and Thailand but played out a little differently in Bali where many competing small royal courts attracted more young men, there were no Islamic pesantren, Hindu ashram were uncommon, and there were no plantations, but the jago and their instruction in the ways of pencak silat attracted just as many young Balinese as they did elsewhere. In the 1800s, there was nothing innately peaceful about the Balinese who were as capable of violence as any other people, and indeed the Dutch saw them as particularly fierce opponents of their rule (see Negara

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1993; Robinson 1998: 19–51; Vickers 1989). During 1846–1849, Dutch secured allies in the central mountainous region of the royal house of Bangli and they waged wars against the royal houses of Jembrana (up the valleys from Medewi on the south-west coast) and against the royal house of Buleleng (around the port of Singaraja on the north coast). In Jagaraja (near Singaraja), much of the royal family and their retainers committed ritual suicide, puputan, during a battle against the Dutch in 1849 (Pringle 2004: 98). This was a long-standing tradition of honour among the royal houses in their many battles against each other. As a strategy, it did not necessarily entail suicide. Sometimes a heroic stand against superior forces might triumph against the odds. To begin with, the puputan played into the hands of the Dutch and their justification for modern imperialism in terms of a liberal ethic to liberate the Balinese from pre-modern, opium-smoking, wife-burning, slave-trading Oriental despots and then establish modern peace and order. As with any propaganda, there was some truth to the claims by the Dutch who did end the internecine feuding and established an uncommon peace across Bali from 1908 until 1942. However, two further aristocratic puputan in 1906 and 1908 became a public relations disaster for the Dutch. This time there were photographers present. In 1906, the royal courts of Tabanan and Badung entirely refused to accept Dutch rule. Today, the regencies corresponding to these two royal houses cover most of the tourist areas from Balian and Tanah Lot in the regency of Tabanan, through Canggu and Kuta, to Jimbaran, Uluwatu, Nusa Dua, and Sanur in the regency of Badung. Over a thousand relatives and retainers were massacred when they followed the Badung royal leaders performing puputan. Dressed in funeral white and bearing their ceremonial Kris (dagger), they walked straight towards the Dutch machine guns. If the guns did not kill them, they used their Kris to ensure they died honourably on the battlefield. In 1908, the royal court of Klungkung (east along the coast from Sanur and up the slopes towards the volcanoes) also committed puputan against the Dutch. Today there are two parks commemorating the Badung puputan in central Denpasar and Renon and a monument to the Klungkung puputan. A major thoroughfare, Jalan Raya Puputan, runs between Denpasar and Sanur. The Balinese celebrate these royal puputan as moments of resistance because they were a setback for the Dutch (Jarratt 2015: 33–40; Pringle 2004: 103– 108; Vickers 1989: 34–36). The photographs of hundreds of massacred Balinese nobility hardly looked like liberation.

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The Dutch reaction to the puputan was to promote a depoliticised, deeply conservative, and static version of the ordinary people’s culture as peace-loving, artistic, and charming. As Geertz (1980) and Vickers (1989) have argued, the feuding royal courts competed against each other in terms of the volume and splendour of their cultural output, but the Dutch set about depoliticising all that culture and attributing it to the commoners rather than royal courts. The Dutch began to talk about “the island of the Gods” with charming daily ceremonies, regular large ceremonies, and widespread interest in dance, music, painting, puppet theatre, and wood carving. As the Dutch redoubled their efforts to rationalise their imperialism, they generated Orientalist dreams about an authentic Bali unsullied by Western culture. In the 1920s and 1930s, this attracted wealthy tourists who could afford to sail on cruise ships through the newly opened Suez Canal and then drive around the island in a modelT Ford visiting Dutch inspectors’ stations-cum-hotels. Many celebrities, including Charlie Chaplin and Walter Spies, greatly enjoyed their interwar stays in Bali (Jarratt 2015: 42–56). The supposedly authentic local culture photographed by Gregor Krause in 1912–1914 revived Western fantasies about the beautiful, young, and naked women in the Pacific as presented first by Joseph Banks in Hawaii and Tahiti and then Gaugin in Tahiti. Photographs of young women’s naked breasts and two Hollywood silent movies, Goona-goona: the Kriss (1932) and Legong, Dance of the Virgins (1935), did much to stimulate and disseminate Western sexual fantasies about life on a tropical island. Homosexual men were also attracted to Bali because of the island’s reputation for artistic creativity and an absence of Victorian-era inhibitions and prejudices. Clearly, both this “paradise” and its imminent “loss” were Western constructions. At the same time, these constructions of Bali did draw upon a rare combination of high civilisation and a beautiful, tropical, and rural setting fanned by gentle trade winds from the Pacific (Pringle 2004: 12). The Dutch orientalism referenced a spiritual depth from India in the local version of Hinduism mixed with animist beliefs about goddesses of fertility and demons associated with the volcanoes, the dangerous oceans to the south, and a water cycle of purification and pollution (Lewis and Lewis 2009). In this cycle, the rain falls on the pure mountains, percolates down through the paddy fields, runs down the rivers to the polluted mangroves and river mouths, and then returns in the clouds and mists of more rain. These powerfully attractive constructions of “paradise” went into storage during the turmoil of invasion, liberation, and

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cold war politics during the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s only to re-emerge with the return of tourists in the 1970s (Falzon and Elfick 1972; Jarratt 2015; Topsfield 2016) when the Balinese along with Indonesians more widely began to participate in and perform the “Balinisation” of Bali (Howe 2005; Picard 1996). Besides these cultural developments, political developments were also important. A Self-Reinforcing Sequence of Political Developments Before the Critical Juncture of 1942–1945 After the First World War, the Dutch had to contend with “native” elites across the East Indies drawing inspiration from both the wave of democratisation that swept through Europe and the endorsement of national independence by first Lenin as leader of the Russian Bolsheviks and then US President Woodrow Wilson, in his Fourteen Points for world peace. National independence meant people living in colonised lands were entitled to mobilise movements for their own self-determination as an independent nation state. Indonesia’s political parties first mobilised along the lines of the ghetto model pioneered in Vienna, Berlin, Rotterdam, Ghent, Copenhagen, and Stockholm (Guttsman 1981; Therborn 1984[1983]). The parties organised a range of inter-related peripheral groups for workers, peasants, women, veterans, education, sport, and youth. In Europe, these groups formed vast networks of mutual support among urban proletariats. In Indonesia, they started among plantation and transport workers but in the post-war period they spread to villages all over Indonesia. The parties’ peripheral organisations were particularly popular in Bali (I Gusti Ngurah Bagus 1991: 203) because each village or hamlet—banjar—had organisations for irrigation, women, children, youth, and sport and they were affiliated with either the Nationalists, the Socialists, or the Communists. The first movement of political resistance against the colonial authorities was instituted by 100 Dutch socialists and union organisers in 1914 when they formed the Indies Social Democratic Association. In 1917, that association split between reform-oriented social democrats who left and revolution-oriented communists who in 1921 renamed the association the Communist Union of the Indies, and again in 1924 as the Communist Party of Indonesia, Partai Kommunis Indonesia, PKI. A disjointed general strike and poorly executed attempt at revolution in 1926 led the Dutch to arrest 13,000 people and outlaw the party in 1927. At the end

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of the Japanese occupation and beginning of the war for independence, both the Socialist Party of Indonesia, Partai Socialis Indonesia, PSI and the PKI re-emerged. The third ideology of opposition was formed by an engineering student, Sukarno who founded an Indonesian National Association in 1927. In 1928, the association changed its name to the Indonesian National Party, Partai National Indonesia, PNI, which by 1930 had attracted 10,000 members but led to Sukarno’s arrest, conviction, and detention for the rest of the 1930s. The party was dissolved in 1931 and like the PSI and PKI, the PNI also re-emerged in 1945 as a major force in Indonesian politics (Anderson 2001: 11). The fourth source of opposition to the Dutch were Muslim organisations. In 1912, Muhammadiyah formed. It was inspired by the Islamic modernism and anti-colonial thinking of Muhammad ‘Abduh (1849– 1905) in Egypt (Pringle 2010: 117–118). Muhammadiyah is a very large organisation and has diverse groups within it but in general its modernism combines an openness to scientific learning with paying close attention to the Qur’an and the Hadiths of law and commentary. Muhammadiyah set about establishing mosques, hospitals, schools, and universities and gradually mobilised hundreds of thousands of followers. With 29 million members today, it is the second largest Muslim organisation in the world. In 1926, Nahdlatul Ulama, NU, formed in response to the rise of Islamic modernism and has become the largest Muslim organisation in the world (Pringle 2010: 114–119). It also attracted hundreds of thousands of followers in its first decades and today has 40 million members. NU calls for moderation in religious matters, steering between legalistic rationalism and scriptural literalism. NU is based upon Imams and a network of rural boarding schools or pesantren. From the start, it was both more open to traditional local practices and more oriented towards participating in politics than Muhammadiyah. The Dutch and then the Japanese each did their best to keep both these large Muslim organisations out of formal participation in politics. In the long run, both of them have strongly contributed to the institutions of civil society in Indonesia (Hefner 2000). They have no direct influence in Bali but since the early 1960s, Hinduism in Bali has emulated some of the Islamic traditions and promoted greater religiosity among the Balinese.

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A Critical Juncture During the Japanese Occupation, 1942–1945 The ease and speed with which invading Japanese forces humiliated the Dutch was a shock to the “Dutch East Indies”, and had immediate, far-reaching consequences. The Japanese freed Sukarno who agreed to endorse the invaders and encourage Indonesian nationalists to support the Japanese war effort, which they called a “Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere” (Robinson 1998: 72–75). Where the conservative Dutch had been constructing an Orientalist but supposedly timeless and apolitical religious culture among commoners, the Japanese sought to modernise Bali’s culture. They offered education to many more commoners and employed many more locals in public administration. In the schools, they drew up a curriculum that was markedly militaristic and anti-Western. Later, the Indonesian state would emulate the Japanese use of schooling to instil regime-oriented values, when it set about systematically teaching nationalism to school students. In Bali, schools expressly set out to transform subjects of the old noble houses into citizens of an Indonesian republic (Parker 2003: 226–261). It remains very common to see the redand-white national flag in many places, displaying popular enthusiasm for nationalism but no great respect for official decorum or formal flag-flying protocols. The Japanese initiative to establish societal organisations (organisasi kemasyarakatan—sometimes called organisasi massa and commonly contracted as ormas ) for local security both made sense to school students and meshed well with the jago tradition, the preman practices, and the wider pemuda culture. According to Geoffrey Robinson, what the Japanese added was a: …new style of political expression and organisation …[with] quasi-military ceremonies, …flag raisings, oath taking, speech giving, marching… For many Balinese, and especially for the young, this was their first experience with public political activity … [which] brought significant changes to the structure of village life and the mind-set of a large number of young people. (Robinson 1998: 85)

The first and largest of an extensive network of ormas was Siendandan, the Young Men’s Association, which was set up in late 1943. As part of recruiting the youth to support their Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity sphere, the Japanese established a local security association in almost every village in every district across Indonesia. Members of these ormas received

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some military training and were allowed to carry a sharpened bamboo spear, which would later become symbolic in the resistance against the Dutch during 1946–1949 (Robinson 1998: 87). The new ormas were much larger but they resembled centuries-old neighbourhood nightwatches, ronda, the members of which, pecalang , policed non-European quarters in the colonial cities and dealt out vigilante justice to thieves, burglars, or any undesirables (Barker 2001: 20–21). They also resembled the rural village jago and the gangs of preman who maintained rough order around rural plantation districts (Anderson 2001: 10). This origin of the ormas and mass politics in a Japanese modernisation of conservative Dutch imperial administration was central to post-war politics in Indonesia. In the Dutch East Indies, developments around Dutch imperialism, the Balinese resistance, and the Dutch orientalist construction of “paradise” in Bali, combined with the elite mobilisation of formal political parties among the relatively few educated local people. Japanese efforts to modernise the country and mobilise commoners’ antiWestern and nationalist political culture formed new institutions in the emerging nation state of Indonesia. By 1944–1945, as the Japanese suffered military setbacks and imposed harsher extraction of enforced labour from rice growers, dissatisfaction with the Japanese did certainly emerge but the deep impact of how the Japanese initiated mass political mobilisation remained decisive for the future. Sukarno and his reinstated Nationalist Party of Indonesia were among the first leaders to take advantage of the new opportunities. Youth groups were central to the liberation movement and Indonesian politics hereafter but before tracing the course of path dependency we can note that state functionalism is the primary alternative to the argument here. Where states are weak, suffer corruption, and in general function poorly, their legitimacy is lacking and “gangs” are presented as arising to fill the void (see for example Moore 1973: 214 on gangs in the weak Chinese state). In his history of political violence in Bali, Robinson (1998: 10–12) advances a more nuanced version of the functionalist argument, presenting the state as an apparatus or organisational configuration that affects political patterns, culture, and collective action and is embedded in economic circumstances. He argues that the character and power of the various youth ormas reflected the interacting effects of: shifting weakness in the local state apparatus; the shifting fortunes of the local economy; and the geography of agricultural poverty. The bands of guerrillas resisting the Dutch were stronger in the agriculturally more fertile West of the

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island (Buleleng, Bangli, and Badung Regencies). Later gangs were more prevalent in those areas too and especially when the economy flagged or drought and volcanic eruptions disrupted the economy. At the same time, all of the pemuda groups flourished when the local state was weak but changed form when the local state was strong. Analysis of relations between weak states and opportunistic social actors (movements, parties, and other groups or organisations), tends to present the ormas as “gangs”, civil militia, or strongmen that exploit weaknesses in the state’s monopoly over the use of legitimate violence. Robinson’s argument is persuasive in the way it emphasises competition for political spoils but the greater importance granted to the economic context and international actors at crucial moments makes it more difficult to foresee what might happen in the future. The argument below draws heavily on Robinson’s account but seeks to move beyond it with the metaphor of an iterative dance between informal and formal institutions. The argument here focusses on processes or discourses that constitute both the actors and their path. Such an approach sees the ormas as informal institutions that work in the same grey zone of semi-legitimate activities as the corrupt police and courts and this arguably makes it easier to see where they have come from, to understand why they continue to exist, and to speculate about their possible fates. The point of analysing a critical juncture and the path dependency that ensues is to reflect on just how heavily that history will constrain future opportunities.

An Iterative Dance Between Informal and Formal Institutions Discourses around pemuda culture, nationalism, and the martial art pencak silat were and remain important for the ormas while ideologies of liberalism, socialism, communism, and conservatism were and remain important for the constitution, the political parties, the representative assemblies, the armed forces, and the administration. This section looks at how these discourses and ideologies figured in the iterative dance among the ormas and formal state actors. The discussion follows historical periods that are book-ended by epoch-forming events: (i) the war of independence 1945–1949; (ii) the mass killing of communists during 1965–1966; and (iii) the end of the Suharto regime in 1997. At each of those points, the critical moment when the ormas were formed reasserted an institutional path dependency even as actors could discern both a liberal and an illiberal path for the ormas along with their allies and opponents.

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The War of Independence and Demobilisation, 1945–1950 From the very start, large numbers of politically mobilised pemuda proved to be an unruly new force in the politics of an emerging Indonesian state. In early 1945, the Japanese realised they were going to lose the war and so they released Sukarno from prison and on 29th April appointed a committee of older members of the formerly banned political parties to begin preparations for a future Indonesian government. Given supportive opinion in the US and the UK and strong moves towards imminent independence in India, these leaders expected to negotiate independence with either the departing Japanese or the returning Dutch. However, pemuda demands for full independence sooner rather than later came to a head when the USA dropped nuclear bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki on 4th and 9th August, and the Japanese surrendered unconditionally on 15th August. On 17th August, pressure from the more militant pemuda saw Sukarno and Hatta agree to a hastily drafted, two-sentence declaration of independence and a very short “lightning” constitution, which they expected to amend later (Butt and Lindsey 2018: 4–6). At the same time, Sukarno and Hatta did manage to maintain secular nationalism and resist the enthusiasm of both the older religious leaders and the Islamic pemuda seeking: to make Indonesia an Islamic state; to require Muslims to fulfil shari’a obligations; and to require that the President would be Muslim. In the formulation of a preamble, Sukarno prevailed over the Islamic pemuda when he insisted upon five guiding principles, or Pancasila (from Sanskrit—rather than anything from Arabic), which he claimed to have distilled from Indonesian culture and effectively enshrined religious pluralism as a foundation for nationalism. In the first principle of Pancasila (Belief in Almighty God), Sukarno and Hatta displaced the Muslim Allah—as proposed in the Islamists’ Jakarta Charter—in favour of the Indonesia Ketuhanan for deity (based on the root word tuha for God). This formulation could include the Hindus in Bali along with Christians and followers of Confucius and diverse forms of animism. Importantly, it also displaced Muslim theology from the idiom of national politics (Butt and Lindsey 2018: 11). However, in the constitution itself a conservative lawyer prevailed and populist forms of pemuda culture came to have long-term influence. The brief 1945 constitution was expected to be completed later but the vagueness of its formulations came to suit the populist authoritarianism of both Sukarno and later Suharto, so over the longer term a lack

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of liberal checks and balances meant pemuda opinion could be channelled in conservative directions. Tim Lindsey (2001) has argued that the background and opinions of Soepomo, the prominent lawyer who led negotiations over the 1945 constitution, laid the foundations for a preman state in Indonesia. This argument has several elements. One is that after legal studies and training in Indonesia, the noble-born Soepomo studied for a doctorate during the 1920s in the Netherlands where he imbibed the conservative Hegelian ideology of the law school at Leiden University. Second, despite the recent defeats of Nazism and Fascism in Europe and Japan, and despite Sukarno and Hatta displacing an organic Islamism in favour of a more tolerant and multireligious Pancasila in the preamble, Soepomo could keep the supposedly fragmenting processes of liberal checks and balances out of the constitution and allow the President scope to articulate a general will of the people. Third, this conservative or organic view of political processes allowed wide scope for the President to intervene against threats and protect the people from enemies of the state, the nation, and the society. This Presidential capacity to protect the people could of course be manipulated and this is why Lindsey draws upon Tilly’s (1985) well-known argument that early European states operated on the same logic as gangsters running a nationwide racket extorting excessive payments for protection from exaggerated threats to security. As these early European states accumulated international legitimacy, they promoted capitalism, accumulated more taxes, built their state apparatuses, and gradually delivered genuine protection for their citizens. In Indonesia, however, Lindsey (2001) argues that the “preman state” developed deep roots during the Suharto era. In the short term, the pemuda took up arms that were handed over or stolen from Japanese forces. They formed loose bands of guerrilla fighters, resisting the Dutch and the Indian troops under British command across Java and Bali during August–November 1945. The most dramatic battle of the war of independence took place during October and November in the east-Javanese port city of Surabaya, where there was a large naval base and many Eurasian and Dutch prisoners detained by the Japanese. From early October, as the administration disintegrated and the Japanese commander handed authority over to the local Indonesian armed forces, many arms came into the hands of local police, pemuda groups and local guerrilla groups. Surabaya was completely under Indonesian control and many Dutch prisoners were executed by large crowds (Anderson 1972: 151–166). A young journalist, Soetomo, began using the Japanese radio

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network to broadcast what he called Radio Rebellion. He became known as Bung Tomo—brother Tomo. He vowed celibacy and no cutting of his hair until national liberation had been achieved, inspiring jago everywhere to rally their martial arts followers and village pemuda to fight the Dutch. Anderson notes: The authority of these djago was intensely personal, resting in their silat (traditional art of self-defence) skills, their possession of the lore of invulnerability, their armature of amulets, charms, daggers, and the like, and the mingled fear and admiration with which the kampung dwellers regarded them. …Bung Tomo’s style, which was imitated all over Java, seemed the quintessence of revolutionary self-abnegation and courage …appropriate to a society that was in a state of kegelisahan [unrest] as it moved inexorably from one epoch to another. (Anderson 1972: 156–158)

When the British troops arrived by ship on 12th October they had little idea of exactly what was happening in Surabaya. They negotiated to evacuate Japanese troops and prisoners of war but as this proceeded through the city, British command in Jakarta sent an airdrop of pamphlets demanding the city surrender within 48 hours. This undermined the local commander’s truce. Two weeks later the British assumed the situation was in hand, but confused skirmishing between British and Indonesian patrols led to the death of General Mallaby. The British abruptly switched their sympathies from the Indonesians to the Dutch. Just when it seemed an estimated 120,000 Indonesian troops, police, pemuda, and local bands might massacre the 4000 troops of the British 49th Brigade before a full division of Indian infantry could get there, Sukarno delivered a radio broadcast in which he pleaded for restraint, arguing that the present tactical strength of Indonesian forces in Surabaya had no connection with any nationwide or longer term strategy. When the Indian troops arrived, they evacuated all of the prisoners of war. Ten days later, when the local forces still refused to surrender, they commenced heavy bombardment of the city with naval artillery. They took control over two-thirds of the city within two days but heavy fighting continued for a month. The extent of the resistance astonished the British but the Dutch took much longer to appreciate that the archipelago had changed irrevocably since the Japanese occupation. In Bali, Bung Tomo’s pro-republican broadcasts and the extensive resistance in Surabaya inspired many but not all pemuda. As the

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authority of the Japanese disintegrated and the Dutch failed to assert their pre-war authority, the local puri in Bali resumed their old internecine warfare except with added complications over pemuda republican resentment against Japanese collaborators versus older leaders’ advocacy of independence from Java within Dutch proposals for transition to a Federation. The Balinese pemuda intensified these conflicts in ways that differed from the Javanese patterns. The arrival of 2000 Dutch troops in March 1946 made little difference to the chronic guerrilla warfare. The Dutch established control in Denpasar and Singaraja but in rural areas extensive guerrilla fighting continued, both in the largely republican regencies in the west (Buleleng, Tabanan, and Badung) and the largely pro-Dutch regencies in the east (Gianyar, Bangli, Klungkung, and Karangasem) (Robinson 1988: map A). When the Dutch finally conceded in 1948 that they were never going to resurrect their old colony and the United Nations recognised the sovereignty of Indonesia in 1949, the new government of Indonesia had considerable trouble dealing with the guerrilla forces. Many resented orders to demobilise, rebadged themselves as gangs, and took it upon themselves to murder puri officials, local administrators, village heads, police, civil servants, Chinese business operators, and anyone alleged to have collaborated with the Dutch. In their place, the pemuda groups “appointed” republican officials. The deaths were never recorded officially. One contemporary observer estimated 80 deaths a month during the second half of 1950, a total of 500 during 1950, and many more deaths continuing throughout 1951, while the police made a more conservative estimate of 35 per month from mid-1950 to the end of 1951 (Robinson 1998: 190). That initial violence subsided but the pemuda culture saw the ormas move towards a more politicised iteration of their founding security orientation. The ormas reproduced themselves within the youth wings of the political parties and the Muslim associations. They mobilised before the 1955 elections and drove an increasing polarisation of politics up until 1965. From Independence to a Coup d’état, 1950–1965 Unrest continued under independence but it took new forms. The santri, martial arts devotees, former guerrillas, petty criminals, and the pemuda culture in general did not settle straight back into everyday routines of work and study. The formal institutions that did shape their actions were the President of Indonesia and the youth wings of political parties, and

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in Java the Muslim organisations. At the same time, as Robinson (1998: 181–234) argues, a weak local state apparatus, conflict within the armed forces, poverty, drought, and major volcanic eruptions also shaped politics over this period. In Bali, President Sukarno’s personal affinity with the island and its people had wide effects. His mother grew up as Brahmana nobility from Buleleng on the north coast of Bali and he spoke Balinese. He built a stylish, modern presidential palace in Bali, oversaw the construction of the first tourist hotels, and brought many prominent international visitors. He visited several times a year, and often addressed large rallies. At one rally in late 1950, he alluded to the Balinese sharing the ancient preIslamic culture of the east-Javanese Majapahit empire as an argument for no more murders of collaborators: Bali has always been this country’s pride and joy… and when Nehru visited he called it “the morning of the world”. Now it is in danger of being overcome by darkness… Now there are killing and burning in Bali. I ask you, did Arjuna [a satria hero from the wayang tradition] ever attack his enemy from behind? Never! A pure and noble warrior such as he always fights fairly and in the open… Let us work to ensure that Bali will once again be known as the morning of the world. (cited in Robinson 1998: 186)

Classical and popular allusions within effective oratory was a key aspect of Sukarno’s power and it worked well in Bali where his rallies would attract large crowds. Sukarno also took a close interest in local affairs. The most controversial example of this came in 1958, when the island was made a national province. The Governor he appointed, Anak Agung Bagus Suteja was a well-known pemuda leader, a son of the communistsympathising Raja in Jembrana (along the south-west coast towards Java) and a communist sympathiser himself though never an official member of PKI. In 1961, Sukarno also made Suteja the Regional Military Authority. Not surprisingly, leaders of the PNI and the armed forces were unhappy about Sukarno favouring Suteja and indirectly encouraging the PKI. Under the liberal constitution formed in 1950, many political parties sought seats in the national and regional assemblies. President Sukarno and Vice President Hatta allocated seats according to their estimates of the size of the groups they represented. Almost immediately, these seats in the assemblies, along with ministerial posts and positions in the

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parties allowed the occupants to distribute patronage to their followers in the form of business opportunities, trips, cars, and white-collar jobs. In Bali, these positions were particularly sought after because with no cashcrop plantations, no mining, and little tourism there were few sources of income beyond subsistence farming and local trade. Successive national cabinets announced plans to organise elections but the incumbents were in no hurry to risk losing their privileges, so elections did not take place until 1955 (Feith 1962: 122–125). The 1955 elections disrupted the balance of representatives appointed by Sukarno and Hatta, bringing a few more seats for each of the two largest parties, PNI and the Council of Muslim Associations—Masjumi, many more for the second and third largest, the NU and the communists, and far fewer for the long tail of small parties (Feith 1962: 435–436). In Bali, the Nationalists won about half the seats, the Socialists about a third, the communists about a sixth, and then a long tail of smaller groups including the Muslim parties won no or perhaps one seat. Given the international context of cold war, the rise of the socialists and communists provoked conservative anxieties among factions in the armed forces and members of the National Party. In 1959, Sukarno declared martial law because he needed support from the military to cope with Socialist Party uprisings in Sumatra and Sulawesi along with disputes with the Dutch in Irian Jaya. What Sukarno euphemistically called “guided” democracy was intended to limit party competition, but instead it heightened competition and polarisation between the parties. Without elections and voting results, mobilising crowds to attend rallies became a proxy for demonstrating entitlement to their share of legislative assembly representatives and bureaucratic appointments (Robinson 1998: 188). This made the parties’ peripheral organisations all the more important and amplified the role of the ormas . Robinson (1998: 197) argues a case for a comparative political economy of ormas strength (and state weakness) and against Geertz’s (1963b) case for an anthropology of ancient grudges between the Balinese royal courts being more important than ideological rivalry between nationalism, socialism, and communism in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Widespread poverty in Bali did drive intense competition over access to public positions of prestige, influence, and income and at the same time the pemuda culture did drive intense polarisation between the nationalists and communists in the PNI and PKI. A traditional sense of the cosmos out of balance energised pemuda enthusiasm for not only communist plans to redistribute land but also counter mobilisation to

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stop the Godless communists and uphold nationalism and Pancasila. The sense of imbalance found confirmation in not only the grinding poverty and drought but also in a series of enormous volcanic eruptions and catastrophic pyroclastic flows from Mount Agung. During 1963–1964, volcanic activity killed an estimated 1900 people, left 75,000 people homeless, and displaced large numbers of beggars into urban areas. During 1965–1966, the mass killings were undertaken, or supervised, by the armed forces across Indonesia and were particularly severe in Bali where Sukarno had appointed a left-leaning Governor and encouraged the communists. Here, it is important to acknowledge the importance of political economy but insist that the choices available to the political parties, the president, and the armed forces were also constrained by the intense mobilisation of the contending ormas following the institutional path laid down during the 1940s. The New Order from Junta to Autocracy, 1965–1998 The violent emergence of the New Order saw the ormas revert to a much more security-oriented iteration. After a coup attempt by leftist military officers in Jakarta on 30th September 1965, the nationalists rallied, sidelined President Sukarno even though he had quelled the attempted coup, and began killing members of the communist party along with their families, friends, and supporters. The mass killings happened with the tacit support of silent inaction by US leaders who knew what was going on and approved of eliminating communists by any means (Henschke 2017: 282–286; Robinson 1998; Vickers 2005: 165). Suharto probably had prior knowledge of the coup attempt and used it as a pretext to eliminate the communists (Melvin 2018). The CIA soon realised that: ‘…the anti-PKI massacres in Indonesia rank as one of the worst mass murders of the 20th century, along with the Soviet purges of the 1930’s, the Nazi mass murders during the Second World War, and the Maoist blood bath of the early 1950’s. (Central Intelligence Agency 1968: 70)

The mass killing started in Jakarta in October 1965, spread to eastern Java and Sumatra, began in Bali in December, and continued there during January and February 1966 (Robinson 2018: 2–26). A range of ormas — from youth groups of the National Party, the Muslim organisations and the comparable Hindu organisation in Bali, to students, children of senior

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armed forces personnel, and criminal gangs—not only helped the soldiers locate particular communists, followers, and sympathisers but also formed paramilitary death squads and perpetrated many of the killings themselves. Joshua Oppenheimer’s (2014; Oppenheimer et al. 2013) extraordinary films document extended interviews with some petty criminals (cinema ticket scalpers) who frankly recall exactly where and how they went about killing communists in Medan, Sumatra. Across Indonesia, at least half a million, probably around one million and perhaps up to two million, people were killed in what was an anti-communist purge rather than either civil war or ethnic genocide (Cribb 2001). In Bali, at least 80,000 people (about five per cent of the population) but perhaps as many as 750,000 people were killed (Cribb et al. 1990: 246). Since Bali had become a communist stronghold, both the intensity of the killing and the proportion of people killed was probably greater than elsewhere in Indonesia (Robinson 1998: 1). According to one military officer, in Java the soldiers had to encourage locals to kill communists but in Bali the soldiers had to restrain them (Cribb et al. 1990: 243). For at least a decade afterwards, many communists who survived the purge were incarcerated, tortured, harassed, discriminated against, and routinely humiliated (Bertrand 2004; Sawita 2014; Soewandi 2014). Fifty years later, these events remain a taboo topic for discussion in Indonesia. As recently as 2015, authorities closed down a panel of the Ubud writer’s festival that planned to discuss various writers’ views on the terrible events. Since the mass killings of 1965–1966 count among the worst horrors of political violence in the twentieth century (Central Intelligence Agency 1968: 70; Robinson 2018: 2), it is not surprising that frightened silence displaced the ormas’ raucous mobilisation and intense polarisation between parties. Lewis and Lewis (2009) have delineated “Bali’s silent crisis” as President Suharto’s New Order dictatorship attracted international aid money, benefitted from OPEC increasing the price of oil, extended Bali’s airport runway to receive large airliners, promoted investment in tourism, and rode rough-shod over any local objections to development (see also Reuter 2003). But there were important nuances within the authoritarian regime that Suharto built up and presided over for more than thirty years. It took several years before Suharto could begin to concentrate power in the hands of his immediate circle, which Hadiz (2010) has specified as his own extended family and a handful of politico-business families.

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Slater (2012) deploys historical institutionalism to analyse a gradual shift from a junta in 1965, when Suharto was merely a senior general not killed in the 30th September coup attempt, through his purging of leftsympathising military officers during 1966, his appointment as President in 1967, on to a reorganisation of political parties in the late 1960s, and then an autocracy within which Suharto maintained centralised control by playing various ambitious generals off against each other and later playing the generals off against Islamists in NU and Muhammadiyah. In Slater’s analysis of who made the decisions and how decisions were executed during the New Order, the regime started as a military junta in which Suharto alongside the central Javanese Sultan Hamengkubuwono and a Sumatran politician Adam Malik decided how the military would run the country but shifted to autocratic rule from Jakarta where Suharto alone decided how a mix of military and party government ran the country. The New Order fell because the mix of military and party rule shifted away from the military, which then declined to maintain the regime when unexpected economic crisis struck. In the 1990s Suharto had been relegating the military on the one hand and empowering the Islamists on the other, all while allowing more intense corruption and rent-seeking among his closest richest supporters. When the Asian financial crisis led to a sharp devaluation of the rupiah, many middle-class people suddenly lost much wealth and many student protesters were inspired to rally on the streets but the military declined to crack down on the protesters and allowed democratisation to begin. Within the New Order, the shift from military rule back towards some party rule began in the early 1970s. On the one hand, military leaders were appointed to quotas of seats in legislative assemblies at all levels, and appointed to a wide range of positions as regional governors, chairs of public authorities, and senior posts in the public service, implementing what the military saw as their “dual function” to protect the nation from both external and internal threats (Jenkins 1983). On the other hand, the PKI had been annihilated, NU and Muhammadiyah were amalgamated into one Muslim party, and the PNI was amalgamated with a string of smaller parties into one opposition party, Partai Demokrasi Indonesia, PDI. More importantly, a secretariat of “functional groups”— golongkan karya—established by Suharto in 1964 was expanded by the military during 1965–1969 and turned into Golkar to contest elections on behalf of the government. The secretariat of functional groups began as a military effort to incorporate unions and workers alongside

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employers as the one functional group (Elson 2001: 186–191). One of Suharto’s closest aides, Ali Murtopo, expanded the secretariat to include civil servants, farmers, and the military performing its civil function. His effort to transform Sukarno’s guided democracy into an “organic” state involved displacing Sukarno’s widely popular and left-oriented ideology of social justice and egalitarianism in favour of a right-oriented ideology of corporatism to achieve security, stability, and development (Elson 2001: 305–306). To do this, Murtopo deployed what a cowed population ironically dubbed a “zoo” of criminal thugs to “Golkar-ise” the population (Vickers 2005: 166–167). All civil servants were expected to vote for Golkar and this succeeded beyond expectations when the party won 62% of the national vote at the 1971 elections. The ormas had thus begun to dance back from the extremes of violence deployed during 1965–1966, but the steps towards a more political iteration remained menacing. The New Order’s ideology around Golkar drew upon the 1945 constitution and Soepomo’s conservative jurisprudence about a “family state” (Bourchier 1997). Talk about the national family—keluargaan— (community or “familyness”) was modelled upon traditional village life, within which it was presupposed there were no “political” ideologies or factions and everything was decided by consensus. In Bali, the largest and second largest of the current ormas, Laskar Bali formed in 1990 and Baladika Bali formed in 2000, both use a motto keluarga suka duka. This motto obviously draws on the New Order ideology about a national family while suka duka is a Sanskrit phrase that means “joys and sorrows” in Hindu theology and more popularly “through thick and thin”. The party-perhiperal ormas that flourished during the 1950s were variously banned (PSI), annihilated (PKI), or incorporated (PNI) into the New Order during the 1960s. The original Japanese iteration of the ormas as pro-regime security organisations came back to the fore. In the early 1980s, however, Sukarno’s autocratic New Order began to worry about a new form of unruly ormas. To stop what were called gali-gali—youth running wild, the national police decided to ramp up local security and stop protection rackets using ex-convicts as intimidating guards. What the head of police called siskamling (a contraction of sistem keamanan lingkungan—environment security system) saw local police regulate neighbourhood-watch groups more closely and assert responsibility for training and accrediting private security guards (Barker 2001: 21, 24–30). They expressly sought to turn these groups into security businesses and prevent them from becoming full-scale protection rackets like

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those run by the yakuza in Japan or the mafia in Sicily and the USA. In Barker’s judgement, however: …it is difficult to imagine that these organisations posed any genuine threat to President Suharto’s authority. Most of the organisations were more like unions of the disenfranchised than true mafias. (Barker 2001: 41)

As siskamling won wide acceptance, and expanded into bus stations, markets, shopping malls, busy thoroughfares, and areas of great demand for parking, local security committees erected security posts—pos siskamling, which could be a small brick building beside a busy road or intersection, a hut next to a boom gate or at a car park, or a four-posted platform with a thatched roof in the centre of a village or near a rural cross-road. Incorporation of the gali-gali meant the police could exclude large numbers of ex-convicts (who of course were good at enforcing rackets and collecting debts) as they regulated and monitored the practices of acceptable guards. Today, some of these neighbourhood security committees ban drivers with “Uber”, “Grab”, or “Go-Jek” dropping off their customers in their areas in order to garner more work for local drivers (Jacobs 2018). In Bali, the community security groups formed after the bombings were indeed more like “unions of the disenfranchised” but in the 1980s, the police monitoring of security personnel and buildings had a sinister extrajudicial aspect. At the same time as the policy of siskamling was improving law enforcement, the police ran secret intelligence operations in several cities to identify criminals. The spectre of communism was fading but the spectre of gangsterism—premanisme—could be conjured up to take its place (Bertrand 2004: 331). The police set out to “cleanse” the cities of a new “cancer” (Barker 2001: 30) but their extrajudicial methods both echoed the 1965–1966 killings and resembled those of gangsterism, even if the state apparatus still followed a bureaucratic procedure. In each city, the police would draw up a secret blacklist of ex-prisoners and young hoodlums among the gali-gali, and then issue a general call for all gangsters to come to the local police station. There they would fill out detailed forms, agree to stop all criminal activities, carry a special card, and regularly report back to the station. Those on the blacklist who did not register along with those who did register but failed to attend regularly were then hunted down, and summarily killed. Since these “wild” youth never knew whether they were blacklisted, it was safer for them

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to assume they had been and submit to the surveillance. The dead were sometimes thrown in a river or a mass grave but often enough they were dumped in a public place—outside a cinema, a school, a market, or on the footpath beside a busy street—with hands tied behind their back and marks of torture apparent. The press would report these shocking and grisly spectacles with graphic photos and commentary on yet another “tattooed corpse”, which became code for a dead gangster (Barker 2001: 31). During 1983–1985, five to ten thousand such killings were undertaken and the press came to describe them as mystery killings, penembak misterius , which was contracted to petrus. The reign of petrus was most effective because nobody knew whether they had been blacklisted and it was entirely impossible to bribe any police to take someone off such a list. The campaign was also largely approved of by both the press and many readers. Recently, a senior Indonesian politician, Wiranto,1 credited the Indonesian petrus campaign in the 1980s with having inspired President Duterte’s more recent extrajudicial campaign to kill drug dealers in the Philippines (Soetjipto 2018). Since the end of the Suharto regime in 1998, interaction between the military, the police, and political parties on the one hand and young protesters, security guards, and semi-criminal thugs on the other hand have cycled through another round of major unrest, pemuda uprising, institutional realignment, and reassertion of formal authority. At the end of Suharto’s regime, the pemuda culture would inspire a return to a politicised iteration of the ormas . Twenty Years of Democracy, 1998–2018 Democratisation during 1998–2004 came as a surprise to many observers after so many years of Suharto playing various ambitious generals off against each other and playing the Islamists off against the armed forces, while the whole of Indonesia prospered even though during the 1990s Suharto’s family and a small circle of politico-business families became extremely wealthy at the top of extensive networks of rent-seeking and

1 After an assassination attempt in 2019, Wiranto retired as the Co-ordinating Minister for Political, Legal, and Security Affairs under President Jokowi. He was a Presidential candidate in 2004, former Minister of Defence under Presidents Suharto and Habibie, and Commander of the Armed Forces during the end of the Suharto regime and the vote for independence in East Timor.

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corruption (Elson 2001: 278). The material conditions for democratisation were present though. Before the Asian financial crisis in 1997, per-capita income had quadrupled from US$ 903 in 1965 to US$ 3642 in 1995, almost reaching the “magical” figure of US$ 4000 per capita at which point it can be predicted that democracy will survive, should democratisation commence (Paspa 2011: 18; Przeworski et al. 2000: 273). During the six months after floating of the rupiah in August 1997, the value of the currency fell from 2500 to 10,000 rupiah to the US dollar and inflation soared to 80%. GDP growth went from between 5 and 10% since the early 1960s to minus thirteen per cent in 1998 (World Bank 2019). The oligarchs held their wealth abroad and so did not lose much from the devaluation but the middle class within Indonesia quite suddenly suffered great losses. In this context of regime crisis amidst sharp middle-class discontent, ormas and unorganised youth played diverse roles both for and against democratisation. In 1996, a pro-government faction within the official opposition party, PDI, organised a congress and elected a progovernment chairman but Megawati Sukarnoputri refused to accept either that congress or its leader and retained control over the party headquarters in Jakarta. In July 1996, the pro-government ormas Pemuda Pancasila attacked the PDI headquarters and fostered two days of the worst rioting seen in the capital since the 1960s. Contrary to the intentions of the government and Pemuda Pencasila, Megawati’s profile and popularity greatly increased (Vickers 2005: 208). During May 1998, large numbers of students calling for Suharto’s resignation took over university campuses and attended huge rallies in several cities including Medan, Yogyakarta, and Jakarta. The Minister for Defence and also Head of the Armed Forces, Wiranto, declined to call out the troops to disperse the students. During the 13–14th May, outbreaks of anti-Chinese violence were widely rumoured to have been caused by ormas figures associated with the Wiranto rival and former general Prabowo. These interventions also failed because the armed forces refused to use the anti-Chinese violence as an excuse to restore order more generally (Barton 2002: 233–238; Siegel 2001; Wilson 2015: 183–186). The most publicised, extensive and appalling violence came from pro-Indonesian ormas who failed to deter the independence of East Timor. They destroyed infrastructure and massacred many East Timorese as they left the soon to be independent nation (Vickers 2005: 218–220).

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At the same time as these violent episodes during the collapse of Suharto’s autocracy, the era of reformasi offered many opportunities for new ormas with the lifting of restrictions on the media, new freedoms for political parties, a separation between the military and the police, and the decentralisation of authority away from Jakarta out to the provinces. In Bali, a pro-government ormas Laskar Bali associated with Golkar and the armed forces had formed in 1990, but during the upheaval around reformasi breakaway groups formed rival ormas. In 1999, Megawati Sukarnoputri revived the former official opposition party PDI as PDI-P, the Indonesian Democratic Party of Struggle. The founding conference was organised in Bali, where her father President Sukarno had always been very popular. Anxiety about a risk that Laskar Bali might be paid to stir up trouble led the PDI-P organisers to enlist their own guards from among the pecalang —local village councils’ guards who keep order during religious ceremonies. Golkar’s share of the vote dropped precipitously from 93.5% in 1997 to 10.5% in 1999 while PDI’s vote jumped from 3.5% in 1997 to 79.5% for PDI-P in 1999 (Nordholt 2007: 16–17). In 2000– 2002, many members left Laskar Bali to join Baladika Bali (a Bali-oriented ormas formed before the 2002 Bali bombing) or Forum Peduli Denpasar, FPD (Forum Caring for Denpasar) formed after the 2002 bombing. Each were associated with PDI-P and the police rather than Golkar and the military. According to Nordholt (2007: 44–47), FPD started out as a community group organised from the bottom-up and it attracted wide support from intellectuals, artists, politicians, and entrepreneurs but it subsequently became much like other ormas mixing community development with security for hire. FDP was also aligned with the puri—palace or royal court—of Satria, which had sided with the republicans during the war of independence, while Laskar Bali was aligned with the rival puri Pamecutan, which had sided with the Dutch and was later associated with Golkar. A third ormas Pemuda Bali Bersatu first organised in 2002, merged with Laskar Bali, but then split from Laskar Bali in 2006 in favour of associations with a smaller political party, Gerindra. Golkar retained strong networks throughout the public service and at subsequent elections recovered a strong position in Bali’s legislative assembly. Today, Laskar Bali has about 40,000 members, Baladika Bali has about 30,000 members, and Pemuda Bali Bersatu has about 10,000 members. Particular leaders of these three large ormas each have backers among particular

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politicians in any of the parties. Transactional money politics among individuals have displaced old alignments between entire ormas and one or other parties and one or other of the rival puri. In recent years, Laskar Bali and Baladika Bali have become the leading ormas. In their current iteration, the Balinese ormas have asserted an ambiguous role as both community leaders ensuring security that is genuinely appreciated and political brokers delivering votes to particular politicians in return for being allowed to run their business around semicorrupt if not directly illegal activities. When riots broke out among their members in the Kerobokan prison in 2012 and again in 2015, the leaders of these two ormas were called into negotiate an end to fighting between their young member (Bachelard 2014; Topsfield and Rosa 2015). Since the prison guards were also members of these two ormas, the ormas leaders were well placed to negotiate. At the same time, the prison is drastically overcrowded and the ormas control the drugs coming into the prison, which like all prisons has become a training centre for a future in crime. Since the end of the New Order, the police have ended the old image of hippies smoking marihuana and eating hallucinogenic mushrooms in Bali and drawn upon assistance from Interpol and police in other countries to stop international drug smugglers using Bali as a half-way house, when they bring the drugs from well-known origin countries and send them out again among the crowds of tourists returning to the lucrative markets of developed countries (see Bonella 2012). In 2016, a newly appointed Regional Chief of Police, Inspector General Golose declared he would ask the Governor to cancel the operation licences of any ormas committing any forms of gangsterism or thuggery, including any violence, damaging public facilities, disrupting public order, and extortion or protection racketeering. The Governor of Bali, I Made Mangku Pastika was a former Chief of Police in Papua, chief investigator into the 2002 and 2005 Bali bombings, former Chief of Police in Bali, and chairman of the National Narcotics Agency (Dalton 2013). Golose and Pastika each have long backgrounds as police officers. Their stern attitudes towards narkoba preman—drug gangsters—are widely popular in Bali. The current governor I Wayan Koster also belongs to PDI-P and supports the crackdown on drug gangs but at the same time he has expressed support for the community work undertaken by the ormas helping the poor with jobs, temporary housing, and support for school uniforms and books along with expensive cremation, wedding, and toothfiling ceremonies. Today, the Balinese ormas have clearly stepped back

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from the heady politics of the reformasi era and resumed much of their original iteration as security organisations.

Reflections and Conclusions The security groups in Bali are ambiguous in several ways. Balinese people whose family owns land in or near the lucrative tourist areas often have little time for the community offered by these security groups and look askance at their reputation for violence. By contrast, Balinese from the rest of the island or others from elsewhere in Indonesia trying to make a living in the tourist areas are interested in the contacts, possible work, networking, and help with school costs or ceremony costs that come from joining one of the groups. The slogans about community and a big family through thick and thin are substantiated when they help marginal people who pay fees that are something like insurance to share the burden of risks to their livelihood or safety. For example, around the port of Singaraja today, a group calling itself Waria dan Gay Singaraja Wargas —Transgendered people and Gays Singaraja—comprises ninety gay and transgender people as its members. They maintain genuine security within a safe environment around the late-night sex workers and the bars and venues where they work, and at the same time offer psychological counselling, promote HIV awareness, and campaign against homophobia. In Seminyak, local pecalang from the village banjar patrol the streets and ensure a safe environment among homosexual visitors and transgender entertainers. In Sanur, the Sanur Bersatu: himpunan pemuda Sanur—Sanur United: Youth Association of Sanur—works to restrict tourists’ access to the large transport companies—Bluebird Taxis along with Uber, Grab, and Go-Jek, in favour of local drivers and their transport companies (Jacobs 2018). The fees that stallholders in the markets, drivers in bus stations, bouncers at large bars, gamblers at cockfights, or various drivers and restaurant owners pay to the groups are exorbitant to the extent that the threats secured against are exaggerated if not illusory. The more they run protection rackets, develop patron–client networks and construct local counterparts to the New Order’s oligarchical networks in Jakarta, then the more they undermine liberalisation and democratisation. By corollary, the more they develop their communities and offer genuine security, then the more they contribute to the ongoing processes of liberalisation and democratisation.

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This chapter advanced an argument about the long-term persistence of the ormas as informal institutions interacting with the formal institutions of the armed forces, political parties, and the police. Cultural developments around Indonesian traditions about youth culture, modern imperialism, the 1906–1908 puputan, and then tourist-oriented orientalism came together with political developments around national selfdetermination and political parties to constitute a critical juncture during the Second World War. The Japanese encouraged many more Indonesians to go to school and to join local neighbourhood-watch security groups in large numbers. These groups later reorganised as guerrillas in the war of independence, formed youth wings of the political parties, formed paramilitary groups executing communists during 1965–1966, re-organised as pro-government groups of thugs during the New Order, reformed as student protestors during 1998, and re-organised again as somewhat community-oriented security groups since the reformasi era of 1998–2004. Since the Second World War, the path of the ormas has been a dance to the left and then the right over and over, rather than a straightforward march through time. The path has moved between authoritarian violence and community self-help. It is this very ambiguity that is likely to see the institution survive. Even if a future Governor of Bali did close one or more of the three large ormas, existing groups will expand or new groups will emerge and the institution will continue. Rather than disregard their communitarian aspects as self-serving rhetoric and emphasise the political and economic bases of their exploitative aspects, it is important to keep both of these aspects in mind. As an institution, the ormas have a clear potential to chime in with any rise of toxic nationalism, populist authoritarianism, and illiberal manipulation of elections. At the same time, they also promote cohesion among the disenfranchised, collectivise, and share the burden of risks, offer networks of mutual assistance in the thriving tourist industry, and promote local communities’ sense of their own living culture.

References Anderson, B. R. O. G. (1972). Java in a Time of Revolution, Occupation and Resistance 1944–1946, Ithaca and London, Cornell University Press. ———. (1990 [1972]). The Idea of Power in Javanese Culture. Language and Power: Exploring Political Cultures in Indonesia. Ithaca, NY, Cornell University Press: 17–77.

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———. (2001). Introduction. Violence and the State in Suharto’s Indonesia. B. Anderson, Ed. Ithaca, NY, Cornell University: 9–19. Bachelard, M. (2014). “The Dark Side of the Sun.” The Sydney Morning Herald. 9 August, www.smh.com.au/world/the-dark-side-of-the-sun-201 40803-3d2x2.html. Bakker, L. (2016a). Militias, Security and Citizenship in Indonesia. Citizenship and Democratization in Southeast Asia, Brill: 123–154, http://booksandjour nals.brillonline.com/content/books/b9789004329669s007. ———. (2016b). “Organized Violence and the State.” Bijdragen tot de Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde/Journal of the Humanities and Social Sciences of Southeast Asia 172: 249–277. ———. (2017). Militias, Security and Citizenship in Indonesia. Citizenship and Democratization in Southeast Asia. W. Berenshot, H. S. Nordholt and L. Bakker, Eds. Leiden, Brill: 125–154. Barker, J. (1999). Figures of Criminality in Indonesia, the Philippines, and Colonial Vietnam, New York, Cornell University Press. ———. (2001). State of Fear: Controlling the Criminal Contagion in Suharto’s New Order. Violence and the State in Suharto’s Indonesia. B. Anderson, Ed. Ithaca, NY, Cornell Southeast Asia Program Publications. Studies on Southeast Asia No. 30: 20–53. ———. (2016). “From ‘Men of Prowess’ to Religious Militias.” Bijdragen tot de Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde/Journal of the Humanities and Social Sciences of Southeast Asia 172: 179–196. Barton, G. (2002). Abdurrahman Wahid: Muslim Democrat, Indonesian President: A View from the Inside, Sydney, UNSW Press. Bell, S. (2011). “Do We Really Need a New ‘Constructivist Institutionalism’ to Explain Institutional Change?” British Journal of Political Science 41(4): 883–906. Bertrand, R. (2004). “‘Behave Like Enraged Lions’: Civil Militias, the Army and the Criminalisation of Politics in Indonesia.” Global Crime 6(3–4): 325–344. Bonella, K. (2012). Snowing in Bali, Sydney, Pan Macmillan. Bourchier, D. (1997). Totalitarianism and the “National Personality”: Recent Controversy about the Philosophical Basis of the Indonesian State. Imagining Indonesia: Cultural Politics and Political Culture. J. Schiller and B. Martin-Schiller, Eds. Athens, OH, Ohio University Centre for International Studies. Southeast Asian Series: 157–185. Butt, S. & T. Lindsey. (2018). Indonesian Law, Oxford, Oxford Scholarship Online. Central Intelligence Agency. (1968). Indonesia—1965, the Coup That Backfired, https://www.cia.gov/library/readingroom/docs/esau-40.pdf. Cribb, R. (2001). “Genocide in Indonesia, 1965–1966.” Journal of Genocide 3(2): 219–239.

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Cribb, R., et al. (1990). The Mass Killings in Bali. The Indonesian Killings of 1965–1966. R. Cribb, Ed. Monash University, Centre of Southeast Asian Studies. Monash Papers on Southeast Asia No. 21: 241–260. Dalton, B. (2013). “Made Mangku Pastika: A Governor of the People.” Indonesia expat. 11 March, https://indonesiaexpat.biz/travel/history-cul ture/i-made-mangku-pastika-a-governor-of-the-people/. Dimico, A., et al. (2017). “Origins of the Sicilian Mafia: The Market for Lemons.” The Journal of Economic History 77(4): 1083–1115. Elson, R. E. (2001). Suharto, a Political Biography, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press. Falzon, A. & D. Elfick. (1972). Morning of the Earth, Sydney, Alby Falzon, http://www.albertfalzon.com/store/dvd-mote.asp. Feith, H. (1962). The Decline of Constitutional Democracy in Indonesia, Ithaca and London, Cornell University Press. Fleming, J. & C. Lewis. (2001). The Politics of Police Reform. Police Reform: Building Integrity. T. Prenzler and J. Ransley, Eds. Sydney, Federation Press: 83–96. Ford, M. & T. B. Pepinsky. (2013). “Beyond Oligarchy? Critical Exchanges on Political Power and Material Inequality in Indonesia.” Indonesia 96(Project Muse, Cornell University Press): 1–9, https://muse.jhu.edu/. ———. (1963). Peddlers and Princes: Social Change and Economic Modernization in Two Indonesian Towns, Chicago and London, University of Chicago Press. ———. (1980). Negara, the Theatre State in Nineteenth-Century Bali, Princeton, NJ, Princeton University Press. Guttsman, W. L. (1981). The German Social Democratic Party, 1875–1933: From Ghetto to Government, London, Allen & Unwin. Hadiz V. R. (2010). Localising Power in Post-Authoritarian Indonesia: A South-East Asia Perspective, Stanford, Stanford University Press. Harari, Y. N. (2011). Sapiens, a Brief History of Humankind, London, Vintage Books. Hay, C. (2008). Constructivist Institutionalism. The Oxford Handbook of Political Institutionalism. S. A. Binder, R. A. W. Rhodes and B. A. Rockman, Eds. Oxford, Oxford University Press: 57–74. Hay, C. & D. Wincott. (1998). “Structure, Agency and Historical Institutionalism.” Political Studies XLVI: 951–957. Hefner, R. W. (2000). Civil Islam, Muslims and Democratization in Indonesia, Princeton and Oxford, Princeton University Press. Henschke, R. (2017). “Indonesia Massacres: Declassified US Files Shed New Light.” British Broadcasting Corporation, http://www.bbc.com/news/ world-asia-41651047. Howe, L. (2005). The Changing World of Bali: Religion, Society, and Tourism, New York, Routledge.

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I Gusti Ngurah Bagus. (1991). Bali in the 1950s: The Role of the Pemuda Pejuang in Balinese Political Processes. State and Society in Bali, Historical, Textual, and Anthropological Approaches. H. Geertz, Ed. Leiden, KITLV Press: 199–212. Jacobs, H. (2018). “‘Why Should We Make Foreigners Rich?’: Taxi Drivers Are Taking on Uber and Grab in Bali, and Some Are Turning to Violence.” Business Insider. 23 June 2019, https://amp.businessinsider.com/uber-grabbali-attacks-taxi-drivers-2018-6?__twitter_impression=true. Jarratt, P. (2015). Bali: Heaven and Hell, Melbourne, Hardie Grant Books. Jenkins, D. (1983). “The Evolution of Indonesian Army Doctrinal Thinking: The Concept of ‘Dwifungsi’.” Southeast Asian Journal of Social Science 11(2): 15–30. Leander, A. (2002). Wars and the Un-Making of States: Taking Tilly Seriously in the Contemporary World. Copenhagen Peace Research: Conceptual Innovations and Contemporary Security Analysis. S. Guzzini and D. Jung, Eds. London and New York, Routledge: 1–17. Lewis, J. & B. Lewis. (2009). Bali’s Silent Crisis: Desire, Tragedy, and Transition, Plymouth, Lexington Books. Lindsey, T. (2001). From Soepomo to Prabowo: Law, Violence and Corruption in the PREMAN State. Violent Conflict in Indonesia. C. Coppel, Ed. London, Curzon Press. Mahoney, J. (2000). “Path Dependency in Historical Sociology.” Theory and Society 29(4): 507–548. Marx, K. (1972 [1852]). The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. The Marx-Engels Reader. R. C. Tucker, Ed. New York, W. W. Norton. McAdam, D., et al. (2001). Dynamics of Contention, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press. Melvin, J. (2018). “There’s Now Proof That Soeharto Orchestrated the 1965 Killings.” Indonesia at Melbourne. 26 June, http://indonesiaatmelbourne. unimelb.edu.au/theres-now-clear-proof-that-soeharto-orchestrated-the-1965killings/?cn=ZmxleGlibGVfcmVjcw%3D%3D&refsrc=email. Migdal, J. S. (2001). State in Society: Studying How States and Societies Transform and Constitute One Another, Cambridge, University of Cambridge. Moore, B. (1973). Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy: Lord and Peasant in the Making of the Modern World, Harmondsworth, Penguin Books. Negara, K. (1993). Done Bali, the Paradise Myth Exposed: A Documentary. Melbourne, Negara Film TV Media, www.negarafilmtvmedia.com. Nierstrasz, C. (2012). In the Shadow of the Company: The Dutch East India Company and Its Servants in the Period of Its Decline, (1740–1796), Leiden and Boston, Brill. Nordholt, H. S. (2007). Bali, an Open Fortress, 1995–2005: Regional Autonomy, Electoral Democracy and Entrenched Identities, Singapore, NUS Press.

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Oppenheimer, J. (2014). The Look of Silence. Copenhagen, Why Not Productions: 103 minutes, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eTcTgOCws0g. Oppenheimer, J., et al. (2013). The Act of Killing. London, Det Danska Filminstitut, Dogwoof Pictures, Drafthouse Films: 122 minutes, https:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=-349HTKhPno. Parker, L. (2003). From Subjects to Citizens, Balinese Villagers in the Indonesia Nation-State, Copenhagen, NIAS Press. Paspa, T. (2011). How Do Methodologies Affect Theories of Democratisation? BA Honours, Deakin University. Picard, M. (1996). Bali, Cultural Tourism and Touristic Culture, Singapore, Archipelago Press and Editions Didier Millet. Pringle, R. (2004). A Short History of Bali, Indonesia’s Hindu Realm, Sydney, Allen & Unwin. ———. (2010). Understanding Islam in Indonesia, Politics and Diversity, Honolulu, University of Hawai’i Press. Przeworski, A., et al. (2000). Democracy and Development: Political Institutions and Well-Being in the World, 1950–1990, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press. Quijano, A. (2007). “Coloniality and Modernity/Rationality.” Cultural Studies 21(2–3): 168–178. Reuter, T. A., Ed. (2003). Inequality, Crisis and Social Change in Indonesia: The Muted Worlds of Bali, London and New York, Routledge. Robinson, G. B. (1998). The Dark Side of Paradise; Political Violence in Bali, New York, Cornell University Press. ———. (2018). The Killing Season, A History of the Indonesian Massacres, 1965–66, Princeton, NJ, Princeton University Press. Rothstein, B. (1991). “State Structure and Variations in Corporatism: The Swedish Case.” Scandinavian Political Studies 14: 149–171. ———. (1992). “Explaining Swedish Corporatism: The Formative Moment.” Scandinavian Political Studies 15: 173–191. ———. (1998). Just Institutions Matter: The Moral and Political Logic of the Universal Welfare State, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press. Ryter, L. (2014). Problematizing Gangs: Youth Gangs and Otherwise in Indonesia. Global Gangs: Street Violence Across the World. J. M. Hazen and D. Rodgers, Eds. Minneapolis University of Minnesota Press: 147–170. Sawita, R. (2014). Luh Sutari, Plaiting Stories. Breaking the Silence, Survivors Speak About 1965–66 Violence in Indonesia. P. O. Sukanta, Ed. Clayton, Monash University Publishing: 236–251. Schmidt, V. A. (2008). “Discursive Institutionalism: The Explanatory Power of Ideas and Discourse.” Annual Review of Political Science 11: 303–326.

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http://www.smh.com.au/world/balis-gangs-apologise-for-deadly-violenceand-guarantee-safe-christmas-20151218-glr598.html. Tsai, K. S. (2016). Adaptive Informal Institutions. The Oxford Handbook of Historical Institutionalism. O. Fioretos, T. G. Falleti and A. Sheingate, Eds. Oxford, Oxford University Press: 270–288. Vickers, A. (1989). Bali, a Paradise Created, Ringwood, Penguin Books. ———. (1998). “Reopening Old Wounds: Bali and the Indonesian Killing—A Review Article.” The Journal of Asian Studies 57(3): 774–785. ———. (2003). Being Modern in Bali After Suharto. Inequality, Crisis, and Social Change in Indonesia, the Muted Worlds of Bali. T. A. Reuter, Ed. London and New York, Routledge Curzon: 17–29. ———. (2005). A History of Modern Indonesia, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press. Wilson, L. (2015). Martial Arts and the Body Politic in Indonesia, Leiden and Boston, Brill. Wilson, L. & L. Bakker. (2016). “Cutting Off the King’s Head: Security and Normative Order Beyond the State.” Conflict, Security & Development 16(4): 289–300. Wilson, L. & E. Nugroho. (2012). “For the Good of the People?” Inside Indonesia 109(July–September), http://www.insideindonesia.org/for-thegood-of-the-people. World Bank. (2019). “World Development Indicators.” www.data.worldb ank.org.

CHAPTER 5

“A Combination of Extortion and Civic Duty”: A Comparative Criminological Perspective on Informal Security Organisations in Bali Richard Evans

… gangs are peer groups … partly economic, partly identitary, partly protective entities; and they are replies to particular pressures of the street and domination. (Jensen 2014: 36) It is the interaction of these local worlds with the structures, agents, and ideologies of the larger world that produces observable social patterns. (Venkatesh 2000: 282)

Introduction Leo Tolstoy famously wrote: “Happy families are all alike, but every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way” (Tolstoy 1877: 1) As any social worker will attest, Tolstoy is both right and wrong. To understand an unhappy family, the family’s particular story is vital—but that

R. Evans (B) Arts and Education, Deakin University, Geelong, VIC, Australia e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2021 A. Vandenberg and N. Zuryani (eds.), Security, Democracy, and Society in Bali, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-5848-1_5

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story will also have familiar patterns, perhaps of alcohol abuse or violent behaviour (Scaturo 2005). Gangs are the unhappy families of criminology: defined and coloured by the local and particular, but also with common characteristics. My interest in the study of gangs originated by chance, nearly thirty years ago. As a young journalist I had the opportunity to visit the Philippines on a study tour. This was my first exposure to life outside the comfortable First World, and among many complacencies shattered was my view of crime and policing. Australian police have their faults—as a criminologist I spend much of my time pointing these out—but usually they are a reliable source of help to the community (Saligari and Evans 2015). Ordinary people who are victims of crime or who feel threatened look to the police for assistance, confident it will be delivered. In Manila, things were different. The first police officer I interviewed was an obese man with a khaki uniform, a gold watch and a large signet ring, who offered me the services of a prostitute. This man cruised Ermita, the city’s red-light district, in a car with bald tyres. Painted on the side of the car were the words “Manila’s Finest” and “For Official Use Only”. It would be difficult to say which statement was less true. As I got to know Filipinos better, it became obvious that my revulsion was widely shared. The police, in the Philippines, are not people to look to for help. They are feared and despised. For those who can afford them, security is provided by armed guards. In poorer neighbourhoods, security means coming to terms with the gangs. They are local men and there is a relationship, an understanding. The gangs are capable of serious violence, but they also provide the neighbourhood with a degree of protection. Manila’s slums were not the crime-infested hells my journalistic training made me anticipate: poor, certainly, and deprived and often violent, but communities all the same (Jocano 1975). Somehow, despite the city’s appalling police, Manila worked. It functioned as a city, and the gangs were part of that ability to function. This was the beginning of a lifelong interest in gangs: what gives rise to them, and how they behave. One thing I quickly noticed was how eerily similar gangs are, across different places, times and cultures. Mats Utas, a scholar who studies the gangs of Freetown, Sierra Leone, remarks on this. Reading an account of gang life in America “I was struck by the feeling of total familiarity. I felt that I knew the setting and the actors to the extent that I could almost guess what would happen on the next page” (Utas 2014: 171). The purpose of this chapter is explore this “total familiarity”,

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and to assess whether the same observation can be made about the subject of this book, the Informal Security Organisations of Bali. For the sake of neutrality, the editors of this work use the term “informal security organisations” to describe the different groups under study. I respect that decision, which is sensible and fair in the broader political and social context. However, in this chapter the term “gang” will be used to describe a wide range of groups. It is necessary to stress that for the purposes of this discussion, “gang” is not a pejorative term. No moral judgement is implied. The legal definitions of gangs and organised criminal organisations which exist in the United States and many other jurisdictions are not relevant. Here, a gang is merely a form of social organisation which arises in certain circumstances and which has many common features. The term is used, not for the purpose of negative labelling, but to assist in understanding developments in post-Suharto Bali in the light of comparative criminology.

Gangs: The Paradox of the Particular The seminal text in gang studies is Frederick Thrasher’s 1927 study of the gangs of Chicago (Thrasher 1963). Thrasher emphasises the fluid and multifaceted nature of gangs, and their ability to morph into new and sometimes respectable forms, to associate with political power, and to simultaneously commit crime and provide neighbourhood security. Many of Thrasher’s observations and insights into the social dynamics of gangs remain relevant. An unfortunate result of the pioneering role of the “Chicago School”, however, is that gang studies long remained American-centric, even to the point that it was seriously argued that gangs were a uniquely American phenomenon (Hagedorn 2005). For many years there were relatively few studies of gangs from elsewhere in world, and even fewer comparative studies (Hazen and Rodgers 2014). Aside from American exceptionalism, there is a core structural reason for the absence of a wider view. To understand a gang properly, writer after writer insists, you must know the group and the community in which it operates intimately. There are crucial local details and historical events which must be appreciated to understand how and why a particular gang exists and functions as it does. Many studies include the complex genealogies of gangs as they merge, split, change name and character (Ryter 2014). Studies also position gangs within a community’s social

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and political history. For example, Salagaev and Safin attribute the emergence of Russian gangs in the 1990s to the chaos following collapse of the USSR (Salagaev and Safin 2014); while in his exploration of the gangs of Cape Town, South Africa, Jensen argues that Apartheid, with its racialised thinking and policies of forced removals, is an essential shaping factor in gang behaviour (Jensen 2014). Gangs are linked to defined territories, micro-geographies of allegiance and influence which cause many of those who study gangs to include detailed maps. In his study of the gangs of Manila, Jocarno explains that these groups are intimately bound to local geography. A gang has a “hawak” (something like a holding, a possession), a place and a group of people which is protected. Sociologically, hawak is a combination of extortion and civic duty. The latter is embodied in the gang’s self-imposed duty to protect their hawak from all sorts of criminality, threats, and unnecessary intrusions. Sometimes the gang’s protection is voluntarily sought; often, it is imposed through subtle forms of coercion. (Jocano 1975: 117)

The importance of local factors is not disputed. But the need for detail raises a practical problem. Gaining an intimate knowledge of a community is the work of many years. It is not possible for one person to gain full understanding of the gangs of more than one or two communities. As Hazen and Rodgers observe, the focus on the local and specific is necessary to build understanding, but it creates the risk that comparatives are missed: “to what extent particular gang practices are context specific, determined by global social processes, or simply more universal in nature” (Hazen and Rodgers 2014: 2). To explore these, the generalising criminologist must rely on the detailed work of specialists, and look for patterns. That is the purpose of this chapter. Drawing on the work of Hazen and Rodgers, supplemented with other detailed investigations of gangs in different times and places, it is possible to advance a “general theory of gangs”, a model which identifies the social circumstances in which gangs are likely to emerge, and their characteristics when they do.

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A General Theory of Gangs Drawing from the discussion above, any general theory must begin by accepting the “paradox of the particular”. All gangs are uniquely related to detailed local history, geography and culture. Their uniqueness and specificity is both a matter of a semi-mythologised identity and social reality: their power and influence is tied to specific places and specific people. A second paradox relates to the problem of definition. What, precisely is and is not a gang is a topic which has been endlessly debated (Hazen and Rodgers 2014). I argue that the very attempt at scientific classification misses the point. One of the defining characteristics of gangs is that they resist definition. They demonstrate a multitude of characteristics, many seemingly contradictory. Gangs shift and change continually, and this flux is their natural and continuing state. Confusion and ambiguity—about names, activities, roles, membership and the like—are essential elements of gang existence. Some parameters are still possible. Hazen and Rodgers employ a useful minimal definition. In their view, a gang is a group displaying some institutional continuity which is routinely violent, and/or engaged in illegal activities, and has members who are mostly young (roughly under 25 years of age) (Hazen and Rodgers 2014: 6). I argue that it is necessary to add that illegal activity is never the sole reason for a gang’s existence, and often is not even the main reason. A gang’s activities may include cultural, religious, economic or sporting practices. For example, gangs in contemporary Rio are frequently associated with samba schools (Arias 2014); in Dili, with martial arts clubs (Scambary 2013a); in Honduras with charismatic protestant Christian churches (Wolseth 2011). Some other common factors: • Gangs will almost always act as a substitute family for marginalised youth, whose own family is either unsatisfactory or non-existent. Gang members derive a sense of identity and personal pride from their association. • Gangs have rules, though not necessarily written down. Whether oral or written, these rules will be short and changeable and invariably inchoate. These are a mix of rhetorical commitments to honour and group loyalty, combined with shibboleth details, which often

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concern clothing, tattoos, drug consumption and behaviour towards girlfriends, but can be about almost anything. • An important gang activity will be the provision of security and crime-prevention services. Gangs can and sometimes do evolve into legitimated or semi-legitimated organisations, integrated with local political power structures. One signifier of this is that funerals of important gang leaders are major events, with thousands of mourners including city or state dignitaries: Thrasher noted this in Chicago in the 1920s (Thrasher 1963: 207). Another is murals or other public displays celebrating a gang and its leaders, as occurs in the ghetto areas of Kingston, Jamaica (Rapley 2003).

Social Conditions Which Give Rise to Gangs Migration That gang formation has an intimate nexus with migration has been remarked on since Thrasher. “The gang in Chicago is largely, though not entirely, a phenomenon of the immigrant community of the poorer type … A few of the members of these gangs are foreign born, but most of them are the children of parents one or both of whom are foreignborn immigrants” (Thrasher 1963: 191–192). This nexus can be, and regrettably often is, maliciously exploited, so the connection needs to be discussed with care. The migrant-gang nexus has absolutely nothing to do with race or culture. Gangs emerge among migrant communities regardless of: whether the newcomers are ethnically distinct from the host community, or not; whether they speak a different language, or not; whether they practice different religions, or not. Migration is difficult, traumatic. Different writers looking at different places and peoples make the same observation, time and again. Of Mexicans in Los Angeles: “A social reality of want and limited opportunity begins when a people set foot on a new land” (Vigil 2014: 53). Gangs in France are: “first and foremost an expression of the deep social exclusion suffered by immigrant and minority communities” (Mohammed 2014: 115). It is of little importance whether migrants have or have not crossed a national border. Indeed, the most common form of migration globally is that of poor and disadvantaged people from rural areas seeking economic opportunity in urban centres, usually in the same country (Hagedorn

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2005). Zhang writes of rural Chinese seeking work in Shanghai: “They migrated to cities with high expectations, but they face a situation of poverty and limited options and often experience discrimination” (Zhang 2014: 91). The same pattern of experience is noted by Jocarno in Manila (Jocano 1975), and by Scambary in Dili (Scambary 2013a). In all cases, there is a strong pattern of migrants forming cluster communities with people from the same village or regional area. Authoritarian Collapse When an authoritarian government (whether indigenous or colonial) has been in place for many decades, its overthrow is usually accompanied by a period of instability. This is partly because authoritarian governments deliberately suppress the institutions of civil society, such as political parties and trade unions, which might provide the basis of an alternative government. The new regime, however constituted, lacks people with administrative skills and experience in government, and inevitably suffers serious internal divisions. Exacerbating this problem, the “carried over” agencies of the state, including the legal system and the police, have often been co-opted and compromised by the previous order. Ordinary people are likely to be distrustful of these institutions. Examples of such governmental breakdown and community estrangement which have coincided with the rise of gangs include postindependence East Timor (Scambary 2013a), post-Apartheid South Africa (Jensen 2014) and El Salvador after the conclusion of the Civil War (Cruz 2014). Youth Unemployment An economic crisis, particularly one that causes sustained high rates of unemployment among the young, will give rise to gangs. If educational and economic opportunity are blocked for large numbers of young people for a long time, youth gangs will emerge. Economic crisis often follows the sort of authoritarian collapse described above, but the cause of the crisis is unimportant: it might be the result of natural disaster, maladministration, war, liberal economic “shock therapy” or any combination of these. The gangs of Chicago, both in Thrasher’s time and our own

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(Thrasher 1963; Whitehill et al. 2014), are examples, as are gangs in contemporary France, China and India (Hazen and Rodgers 2014). Breakdown of Traditional Social Controls All of the factors described above challenge the stability and continuity of the belief systems and practices by which communities prevent and mediate conflict. The most important of these is the family. The breakdown in shared norms, structures of authority and relationships can be particularly acute among the children of migrants, who are frequently caught between the temptations, pressures and opportunities of their new home, and the conservative social expectations of parents (Evans 2013). Such breakdown in social control does not necessarily coincide with economic hardship. Any exposure to new communications and different ways of living can have this effect. “Every new invention which facilitates human mobility both as to rapidity and range of locomotion – every new device which increases the vividness, the quickness and the spread of ideas through communication – has in it the germs of [social] disorganisation”. That was Thrasher in 1927 (p. 114), speaking of steam trains and silent films, but the point is just as valid for the internet, television, pop music, mobile phones and air travel. Ironically, while gangs are often hostile to parents and elders, and embrace new technologies and popular culture, they function as a substitute family and usually have a streak of cultural nostalgia, a claim of kinship with a mythologised and idealised past, and an interest in the revival of local traditions. An example of a gang which fits within this general theory is the Mungiki, of Nairobi, Kenya.

A Case Study: The Mungiki of Kenya The Mungiki movement emerged in the 1980s. It began in a period of one-party rule in Kenya, and expanded its influence and activities in the political liberalisation of the 1990s. As is characteristic of most gangs, Mungiki resists the label “gang”. It claims to be a popular movement, and its origins do not lie in criminal activities. The word “mungiki” itself means “people” or “masses”, and it started as a religious and cultural movement, hoping to foster “a return to traditional customs and values” of the Kikuyu, the majority ethnic group in Kenya. The group draws

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heavily on Kikuyu religious and tribal practices. It also claims kinship and connection to the mau-mau, heroes of Kenya’s anti-colonial struggle of the 1950s (Rasmussen 2010). By reviving traditions, Mungiki puts disenfranchised youth in touch with their heritage and acts as a substitute family. Many Mungiki members are school drop-outs, alcoholics or drug addicts or young men estranged from their families. The narrative Mungiki creates (partly invented) helps reduce the marginalisation of such people, instead placing them at centre of Kenyan identity (Rasmussen 2012). In the mid-1990s, in the wake of political liberalisation, serious crime problems emerged in Nairobi. Places such as bus terminals were chaotic, infested with unemployed youth and associated crime. Mungiki set about recruiting street youth. Mungiki convinced the new recruits that it was better to offer safety than to cause chaos. Little by little, by converting the troublemakers and building them up morally through religious and traditionalist teachings, Mungiki began to provide security at the terminals and in the adjacent market places. (Rasmussen 2012: 423)

Mungiki established itself as de facto police in slum areas. “Mungiki thus presents itself as both a security force working for the betterment of the local community and as a strong and powerful unit with the ability to create order where the state fails to do so” (p. 224). The group also provided freshwater, electricity connections (sometimes illegal), organised garbage collection, built public toilets and provided many other basic services. Mungiki also came to dominate the matatu (mini-bus) industry. It charged a small fee to owners and drivers, organised routes and acted as security guards and conductors. In this way, Mungiki acts as a “twilight institution”, a shadow state which takes advantage of and fills gaps left by the state (Nordholt and van Klinken 2007: 24). The threat of violence is part of the Mungiki system. The group is involved in a range of criminal activities and is capable of and willing to inflict serious violence against those refusing to work within its rules, up to and including murder. However, extortion and violence, up to and including murder, are also techniques employed by the Kenyan police. Mungiki defends the fees charged as “taxation for services delivered”, and claims that the main difference between Mungiki’s taxation and the

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government’s is that “Mungiki actually provides a service” (Rasmussen 2012: 424). Gangs as Policing The discussion of the Mungiki raises an important question. Can an illegal, or at least unauthorised, organisation act as “police”? Using the Weberian definition of the modern state (discussed further below), the answer is no. However, this is a limited view. Policing is a function of society, not of a particular organisation. The history of policing in countries such as Britain represents the gradual taking over by the state of what had previously been the rights and responsibilities of individuals or small groups. “Bloodguilt”, the right and duty of kin groups to avenge murder, for example, was replaced by the crime of murder, prosecuted and punished by the agents of the State. Individuals surrendered their rights to personal vengeance in return for the protection of the state (Rawlings 2002). This transfer of power is more extensive in some societies than in others. Individual rights to violence are more zealously protected in the United States, for example, than in most European nations. Resistance to the state’s taking over of the policing function usually comes from power being seen as zero-sum: if one sector of society gains in power, by this view, it must be at the expense of its rivals. This is true in some contexts, but ideally the social contract allows individuals simultaneously to surrender and gain power. Talcott Parsons proposes a “monetary” model of power. A sound currency and banking system increases the overall money supply, and allows growth in the wealth of society as a whole. Similarly, state institutions can increase the overall amount of power in a community. Real banks, by advancing credit, allow people to productively use money which is not their own. The “power banks” of the state similarly give people the protection of power which is not their own. A poor and physically weak person is protected from the abuse of others by the “borrowed” power of the police and the legal system (Talcott 1963). It is important, though, to recognise that Parsons conceives of power as a: “generalised capacity to secure the performance of binding [and legitimate] obligations … where in case of recalcitrance there is a presumption of enforcement … whatever the actual agency of that enforcement ” (Ng 1980: 70) [my emphasis]. In other words, a professional police force

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is one form of a “power bank”, but not the only one. The function of policing can be, and often is, exercised by other groups, including informal and unauthorised armed groups, such as gangs. This is particularly true in marginal communities, which may lack formal property rights and are viewed with hostility by the state. Jocarno writes of the slum areas of Manila, Philippines: The decision to join a gang often stems from the belief that a gang is organised as a protective unit against an external threat, like the policemen who represent the law. To many gang members, the law is a restrictive instrument designed to protect the non-slum dwellers, and to limit the earning capacity of the slum dwellers. (Jocano 1975: 107)

For an otherwise lawless neighbourhood, in which authorised police are either absent or hostile, the formation of a gang which is moderate in its financial demands and reasonably effective in preventing street crime, arguably increases the overall sum of power in that community. For a gang to be able to meet its promises of protection, it must be seen to be capable of violence. In turn, for gang members violence is a required norm, a demonstration of toughness (p. 115). However, for the community which hosts it, that power, that potential for violence can be “borrowed”. In Jakarta, for example, placing a sticker with the name of a notorious gang, 234 SC, on the window of one’s home or vehicle was an effective protection against burglary and other property crime (Ryter 2014). It might be objected that police enforce the law while gangs break it, but this is a false distinction. Even a reasonably professional first-world police service inevitably commits a substantial amount of crime (Fleming and Lewis 2001). For example, otherwise honest and competent police will lie under oath to protect each other from being held accountable for negligence, violence or other misconduct (Evans 2015a). And where police are required to suppress popular illegal industries such as the drugs trade, extensive criminality is all but inevitable. Police corruption is a mechanism by which a façade of law enforcement can be maintained while allowing criminal enterprise to continue in a quasi-regulated fashion (Evans 2015b). Recall our loose definition of a gang: a group displaying institutional continuity, whose members are mostly young and mostly male, which is routinely violent, which engages in what are formally considered illegal activities, but which also does a range of other things including

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providing security and crime-prevention services. A police service is, in many respects, a gang. And a gang can take on many of the functions of the police, as the Mungiki do in Nairobi, and many other gangs across the world do in similarly disadvantaged communities. The Weberian State: A False Normative When discussing social and political organisation, it is easy to slip into accepting a false normative. As Midgal argues, this was a weakness in many approaches to “development” in the decades after the Second World War. … the focus was on the development of an ethic powerful enough to transform divergent (unharmonious) norms and institutions (often seen as traditional and inferior). The key in effecting (desirable) change, then, was to knit together a normative consensus that would be the centre or engine for a functioning social system … assuming teleologically that modern, Western values would inevitably triumph in the end. (Migdal 2001: 5)

Among these “modern, Western” values is Max Weber’s definition: “A state is a human community that (successfully) claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory” (Weber 1948 [1919]: 78–79). In a Weberian state the function of policing is delegated to a professional, disciplined police service, authorised to use violence within a set of rational laws. Migdal argues that an uncritical acceptance of the Weberian ideal clouds discussion and hampers understanding of the real world. The problem lies partly in language. Scholars pay lip service to the fact that Weber was certainly not referring to all states but was attempting only to create a heuristic, ideal type state. But Weber’s use of an ideal type state monopolizing legitimate force and ruling through rational law gives scholars precious few ways to talk about real-life states that do not meet this ideal. Actual states are deviations from the ideal or corrupted versions of the ideal. (p. 14)

This is a patronising and unhelpful view. As Jacob Rasmussen argues referring to large African cities, it is true that infrastructure and public administration are poor and under-resourced, but treating them as “criminalised, failed or at best challenged” misses an important real-world truth: “African cities do work, and … we gain a better understanding of cities

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by investigating how things work”. Often, where the state is weak “alternative institutions make things work by acquiring degrees of stateness” (Rasmussen 2012). Examples are legion. Studies of squatter communities in large Latin American cities have found great resilience despite official hostility, and self-organised attempts to improve quality of life, such as “clean-up committees” and neighbourhood security patrols. Such local crimeprevention efforts can morph into vigilantism and outright crime; several gangs in Cape Town emerged from a vigilante movement (Jensen 2014). The child gangs of Hyderabad emerged as a self-protection initiative among boys in poor Muslim neighbourhoods, but also involve themselves in petty crime and harassment of Hindus (Sen 2014). This is the mix of predation and protection, “a combination of extortion and civic duty”, that Jocarno identifies in Manila. Gangs, then, serve a range of social functions. They meet needs. For members, the group provides benefits such as a “family”, prestige, cultural identity and economic opportunity. For the community in which they operate, gangs serve useful functions, especially protection and security. All these needs can be met by other institutions, including civil society and state agencies, but there are circumstances in which these institutions are likely to function poorly, and “community-driven creative responses”, such as gangs, emerge. The Informal Security Organisations of Bali The complex and fascinating story of Bali and the journey its people have negotiated over the past two decades is told in many-faceted detail elsewhere in this volume. I have drawn on these accounts, on transcripts of interviews conducted by my colleagues on this project, and on scholarly literature published elsewhere. Using this material, I will test whether the informal security organisations of Bali fit the general model of gangs which has been outlined. To summarise the discussion above, gangs are likely to emerge among young people in a community in response to one or more of the following social stressors: 1. The collapse of a long-running authoritarian regime 2. Sustained youth unemployment 3. Large scale migration, especially from rural to urban areas

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4. The breakdown of traditional social controls, especially at family level. It is obvious that the first two factors are relevant to Bali. The sudden and largely unexpected collapse of the Suharto government created a power vacuum, not least because the efforts of the New Order regime to suppress alternative nodes of power and administration. As Nordholt writes, reformasi and decentralisation: “set off dynamics for which we hardly had a vocabulary. Ethnic and religious identities emerged that had lain buried under the blanket of the New Order’s modernising, secular ideology. Unfamiliar forms of political competition came to life. Mostly they remained civil, but in a few cases they became violent” (Nordholt and van Klinken 2007: ix). That new political freedom did not necessarily translate to a more open and inclusive economy. In the case of Bali, the economic crisis caused by the terrorist attacks of 2002 and later are discussed elsewhere in this volume. The point here is that one result was sustained youth unemployment and a frustrating blocking of economic opportunity for young Balinese (Lewis 2009). The third factor, migration, may seem less relevant. Organisations such as Forum Peduli Denpasar (FDP) are chauvinist in character: hostile to and oppressive of migrants from other parts of Indonesia, especially poor Muslim Javanese and Madurese seeking work in Bali (Nordholt 2007). However, there are two complicating factors here. First Bali itself is a society of migrants. Over the past twenty years, there has been a very large shift from rural to urban life, to the extent that Bali is no longer predominately an agrarian society. As early as 2005, more than half of its population was urban, and the economy was moving to an urbanised tourism economy. This rural–urban shift is a classic marker of gang formation. For newly urbanised Balinese, the village and rural traditions have become “a distant icon of ‘Balineseness’” (Nordholt 2007: 391). Second, there is another element to the nexus between gangs and migration. Usually, the migrants come from disadvantaged and marginal sectors to a metropolis. But in some case the situation is reversed: poorer members of the majority ethnic and cultural group seek opportunity in places where a minority has local dominance. The migration of Han Chinese to provinces such as Xinjiang is an example (Côté and Mitchell 2017). Such migration patterns can give rise to what are termed “Sons

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of Soil” conflicts (Mitchell 2018). These conflicts arise between migrants in search of opportunity, and those who believe themselves to be “from the land”. In such circumstances, gangs are likely to emerge, both among members of the migrant group and among the host community. There are many characteristics of Sons of Soil conflicts in the nature and activities of Balinese gangs, and especially the emphasis on religion. Balinese religious practices are “rooted in the soil”, linked to specific people with individual relationships to sacred places (Nordholt 2007). While the Abrahamic religions have their sacred places, these are few and for most of the faithful far away. They are “portable” religions in a way that traditional beliefs grounded in the land are not. All these factors have combined in Bali to weaken traditional forms of social control, including family, clan and village authority structures. The general model of gangs would predict that Balinese gangs would claim to be unique, unlike any other group, inextricably bound to the people, culture and land of Bali. Nordholt’s analysis places gang activity, in its many and different shades in the context of “ajeg” (strong, resilient) Bali. He sees ajeg as key concept, which “refers to a discourse about the position of Balinese culture in present-day Indonesia … the general feeling … that Bali was endangered by a variety of negative external influences and that Bali had to be rescued” (Nordholt 2007: 387). These outside forces are partly Indonesian, especially economic pressure from Javanese investors, cultural pressure from militant Islam and economic migration to Bali from other parts of Indonesia. Also culturally threatening is the social impact of Western tourism, with its hedonist and consumerist values. Ajeg Bali seeks to define, assert and defend a Balinese identity, especially an identity which is Hindu and ethnically distinct. The gangs of Bali are an integral part of ajeg. The very name of the group Forum Peduli Denpasar (FDP) is a claim to civic identity and care. The group has the public aim to “enhance the security and cultural unity of Denpasar” and claims the spirit of the heroic Badung Puputan of Balinese resistance against Dutch colonialism. It promised to clean up the city, and improve traffic flow, fight drugs and defend traditional society against drugs and secularism. Similarly, Laskar Bali and Baladiki Bali overtly claim to be guardians of traditional Balinese culture (Nordholt 2015: 166–167). Noteworthy in this context are the pecalang , village-level quasi-police which emerged in the 1990s. Though legal and formally recognised, the pecalang have many of the attributes of a gang, including their close

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connection to a local community, which they defend against “suspicious strangers” and not always within the bounds of the written law. Nordholt remarks of the pecalang uniform, which mixes traditional clothing and symbols of authority, such as the ceremonial kris, with modern printed T-shirts and mobile phones: “Thus attired they are supposed to represent traditional authority, which must be seen in contrast to the corrupt practices of an external and often absent police force” (Nordholt 2007: 402). Gang theory would also predict fluidity, confusion and ambiguity, of which there is no scarcity in the Balinese security sphere. The very fact that there is uncertainty about what to call groups such as Laskar Bali and FDP suggests that they are gangs. The FDP has its roots in a Suhartoera criminal gang, Armada Racun, and it continues to commit and profit from criminal activity. At the same time it has connections to recognised political parties and makes plausible claims to provide security and other services to the community (Bakker 2016). Gangs resist definition. Though fluid in identity and structure, gangs also display continuities. As Ryter notes, not just in Bali but across Indonesia semi-formal and stable gangs are a feature of life, existing since before independence. Historically, the Dutch colonial administration co-opted gangs as part of the strategy of indirect rule. During the struggle for independence, some gangs became part of the nationalist struggle, using their criminal skills (such as extortion) to help provide funds (Ryter 2014). These groups, some known collectively as Laskar Rakyat (or People’s Army) were, as journalist Bruce Grant wrote in 1964, often “hard to distinguish from … armed bandits and marauders” (Grant 1964: 69–70). Part of the success of the New Order in bringing stability to Indonesia lay in co-opting and taming some gangs, and suppressing others. Major gangs such as Pancasila Youth were formally recognised as youth groups. These gangs often had family connections to army officers or police, connections which enabled them to commit violence with relative impunity, but the key to their success was maintaining at least a pretence of being nationalist or patriotic associations (Ryter 2014). Many of these same groups have morphed and “rebranded” in the post-Suharto era. These continuities are noted by Lewis and Lewis in their analysis of the crisis which confronted Bali after the 2002 terror attacks. A theme which emerges from their text is that gangs such as the FDP exercise policing functions, but are not very effective, are often brutal, and frequently commit crime themselves. The official police are also criticised for being

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ineffective, unskilled, often brutal and frequently involved in crime (Lewis 2009). Though it is not directly stated in the book, clearly the functions and mode of operation of gangs and the police overlap, and sometimes personnel do as well. McDonald and Wilson describe the situation: “… the traditional security apparatus overlaps with state institutions, militia and other civilian actors in a confused and crowded security sector that has increasingly become dominated by local communities” (McDonald and Wilson 2017: 242). If one adopts the Weberian ideal, that a state must maintain a successful monopoly on the legitimate use of violence, then this is a problem, a sign of a dangerously weakened polity. However adopting Midgal’s more pragmatic view, the gangs of Bali seem less malign. Bakker makes the point that while the civic rhetoric adopted by gangs is high flown—“Offering protection to the needy, ensuring peace and order, respecting the wishes of the local population and ousting bad influences”—there has to be some substance to it. While such statements could be seen as mere lip service to the national state and as ‘cover-ups’ of what amounts to the appropriation of state authority, it is very hard for such organizations to get anywhere without the support of the population. (Bakker 2016: 127)

This means that gangs must, indeed, provide services especially in the area of security within specific territories. Bakker notes that “the daily practices of citizens’ rights and duties in Indonesia have a history of personal relations at odds with the anonymity and accountability essential to Western ideals of state–citizen relations” (Bakker 2016: 128). As discussed earlier, “Western ideals” are not necessarily superior. There are other ways of meeting the social need for policing.

Conclusion Kenya and Bali have some obvious similarities. Both gained independence after the Second World War through armed struggle against European colonial regimes, both have endured periods of oppressive one-party rule, along with periods of violent political instability. The populations of both societies are increasingly urban. However, in terms of geography, ethnicity, political and economic structures existing prior to colonisation, the nature and length of colonial rule, languages, climate, religion,

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culture—in most respects, the differences between the two societies could scarcely be greater. Yet the similarities between the gangs of Nairobi and those of Bali are striking. They have emerged in stressed communities, appeal to (sometimes faux) tradition, organise and incorporate alienated young men, provide identity and a source of pride, provide community services including security and crime-prevention—and also commit crime, and have a capacity for violence up to and including murder. Levi Strauss writes that apparently absurd social customs are sometimes found among disparate groups with no knowledge of each other: So, if the same absurdity was found to reappear over and over again, and another kind of absurdity was found to reappear, then this was something which was not absolutely absurd; otherwise it would not reappear. (LéviStrauss 1995)

Gangs, with all their paradoxical features, fit this schema. They are a form of local political, cultural and economic organisation that emerges where the Weberian state is not strong. They “reappear over and over again” in response to problems to which they offer partial solutions. Scambary writes of the gangs of Dili, East Timor, “vacuums in governance, service provision and policing … have produced a range of informal parallel authority and security structures”. In this light, gangs can be seen as “unique forms of community resilience” in a “challenging environment” (Scambary 2013b: 1935–1936).

References Arias, ED 2014, ‘Gang Politics in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil’, in JM Hazen & D Rodgers (eds), Global Gangs: Street Violence Across the World, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, pp. 237–254. Bakker, L 2016, Militias, Security and Citizenship in Indonesia, Brill, http:// booksandjournals.brillonline.com/content/books/b9789004329669s007. Côté, I & Mitchell, MI 2017, ‘Deciphering ‘Sons of the Soil’ Conflicts: A Critical Survey of the Literature’, Ethnopolitics, vol. 16, no. 4, pp. 333–351. Cruz, JM 2014, ‘Maras and the Politics of Violence in El Salvador’, in JM Hazen & D Rodgers (eds), Global Gangs: Street Violence Across the World, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis.

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Evans, RW 2015a, ‘“The Footage Is Decisive”: Applying the Thinking of Marshall McLuhan to CCTV and Police Misconduct’, Surveillance & Society, vol. 13, no. 2, pp. 218–232. ———. 2015b, ‘“The Police Are Rottenly Corrupt”: Policing, Scandal, and the Regulation of Illegal Betting in Depression-Era Sydney’, Australian & New Zealand Journal of Criminology. ———. 2013, ‘Applying the Theory of Resource Curse to Disadvantaged Migrant Communities and Criminal Offending: Vietnamese Australians and the Heroin Trade as a Case Study’, Citizenship and Globalisation Research Papers, vol. 5, no. 1, pp. 1–28. Fleming, J & Lewis, C 2001, ‘The Politics of Police Reform’, in T Prenzler & J Ransley (eds), Police Reform: Building Integrity, Federation Press, Sydney, pp. 83–96. Grant, B 1964, Indonesia, First edn., Melbourne University Press. Hagedorn, JM 2005, ‘The Global Impact of Gangs’, Journal of Contemporary Criminal Justice, vol. 21, no. 2, pp. 153–169. Hazen, JM & Rodgers, D 2014, Global Gangs: Street Violence Across the World, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis. Jensen, S 2014, ‘Intimate Connections: Gangs and the Political Economy of Urbanization in South Africa’, in JM Hazen & D Rodgers (eds), Global Gangs: Street Violence Across the World, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, pp. 147–170. Jocano, FL 1975, Slum as a Way of Life: A Study of Coping Behavior in an Urban Environment, University of the Philippines Press, Quezon City. Lévi-Strauss, C 1995, Myth and Meaning, Schocken Books, New York. Lewis, J, 2009, Bali’s Silent Crisis: Desire, Tragedy, and Transition, Lexington Books, Lanham, MD. McDonald, M & Wilson, L 2017, ‘Trouble in Paradise: Contesting Security in Bali’, Security Dialogue, vol. 48, no. 3, pp. 241–258. Migdal, JS 2001, State in Society: Studying How States and Societies Transform and Constitute One Another, Cambridge Studies in Comparative Politics, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge and New York. Mitchell, MI 2018, ‘Migration, Sons of the Soil Conflict, and International Relations’, International Area Studies Review, vol. 21, no. 1, pp. 51–67. Mohammed, M 2014, ‘From Black Jackets to Zulus: Social Imagination, Myth, and Reality Concerning French Gangs’, in JM Hazen & D Rodgers (eds), Global Gangs: Street Violence Across the World, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis. Ng, SH 1980, The Social Psychology of Power, Academic Press, London. Nordholt, HS 2007, ‘Bali: An Open Fortress’, in HS Nordholt & G van Klinken (eds), Renegotiating Boundaries: Local Politics in Post-Suharto Indonesia, KITLV Press, Leiden, pp. 387–416.

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———. 2015, ‘From Contest State to Patronage Democracy: The Longue Durée of Clientelism in Indonesia’, in G Bankoff, P Boomgaard & D Henley (eds), Environment, Trade and Society in Southeast Asia: A Longue Durée Perspective, pp. 166–180. Nordholt, HS & van Klinken, G (eds) 2007, Renegotiating Boundaries: Local Politics in Post-Suharto Indonesia, KITLV Press, Leiden. Rapley, J 2003, ‘Jamaica: Negotiating Law and Order with the Dons’, NACLA Report on the Americas, vol. 37, no. 2, p. 25. Rasmussen, J 2010, ‘Mungiki as Youth Movement’, Young, vol. 18, no. 3, pp. 301–319. ———. 2012, ‘Inside the System, Outside the Law: Operating the Matatu Sector in Nairobi’, Urban Forum, vol. 23, no. 4, pp. 415–432. Rawlings, P 2002, Policing: A Short History, Uffculme Cullompton, Willan. Ryter, L 2014, ‘Problematizing Gangs: Youth Gangs and Otherwise in Indonesia’, in JM Hazen & D Rodgers (eds), Global Gangs: Street Violence Across the World, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, pp. 147–170. Salagaev, AL & Safin, RR 2014, ‘Capitalizing on Change: Gangs, Ideology, and the Transition to a Liberal Economy in the Russian Federation’, in JM Hazen & D Rodgers (eds), Global Gangs: Street Violence Across the World, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, pp. 65–83. Saligari, J & Evans, RW 2015, ‘Beacon of Hope? Lessons Learned from Efforts to Reduce Civilian Deaths from Police Shootings in an Australian State’, Journal of Urban Health, no. First online. Scambary, J 2013a, ‘Conflict and Resilience in an Urban Squatter Settlement in Dili, East Timor’, Urban Studies, vol. 50, no. 10, pp. 1935–1950. ———. 2013b, ‘Conflict and Resilience in an Urban Squatter Settlement in Dili, East Timor’, Urban Studies, no. 10, p. 1935. Scaturo, DJ 2005, ‘Family Therapy: Dilemmas of Codependency and Family Homeostasis’, in Clinical Dilemmas in Psychotherapy: A Transtheoretical Approach to Psychotherapy Integration, American Psychological Association, Washington, DC, pp. 99–110. Sen, A 2014, ‘“For Your Safety”: Child Vigilante Squads and Neo-Gangsterism in Urban India’, in JM Hazen & D Rodgers (eds), Global Gangs: Street Violence Across the World, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis. Talcott, P 1963, ‘On the Concept of Political Power’, Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, vol. 107, no. 3, p. 232. Thrasher, FM 1963, The Gang: A Study of 1,313 Gangs in Chicago, University of Chicago Press, Chicago. Tolstoy, L 2018 (1877), Anna Karenina, Lerner Publishing Group, ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/deakin/detail.action? docID=5441791.

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Utas, M 2014, ‘“Playing the Game”: Gang-Militia Logics in War-Torn Sierra Leone’, in JM Hazen & D Rodgers (eds), Global Gangs: Street Violence Across the World, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, pp. 171–192. Venkatesh, SA 2000, American Project, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA. Vigil, JD 2014, ‘Cholo!: The Migratory Origins of Chicano Gangs in Los Angeles’, in JM Hazen & D Rodgers (eds), Global Gangs: Street Violence Across the World, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis. Weber, M 1948 [1919], ‘Politics as a Vocation’, in HH Gerth & CW Mills (eds), From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, Routledge & Kegan Paul, London, pp. 77–128. Whitehill, JM, Webster, DW, Frattaroli, S & Parker, EM 2014, ‘Interrupting Violence: How the CeaseFire Program Prevents Imminent Gun Violence Through Conflict Mediation’, Journal of Urban Health: Bulletin of the New York Academy of Medicine, vol. 91, no. 1, pp. 84–95. Wolseth, J 2011, Jesus and the Gang, University of Arizona Press. Zhang, L 2014, ‘Of Marginality and “Little Emperors”: The Changing Reality of Chinese Youth Gangs’, in JM Hazen & D Rodgers (eds), Global Gangs: Street Violence Across the World, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis.

CHAPTER 6

Paradise Fabricated: Networking of Local Strongmen in Bali Nazrina Zuryani

Introduction The Indonesian presidential election in April 2019 marks a sense of optimism for democratic transitions taking place in the hands of a good leader and will make Indonesia a fully democratic country. After the Suharto era, many scholars think that elites are the major players in politicaleconomic upheavals in many places in Indonesia where adat traditional customs, and economic development intermingle with democratic transitions. Within these transitions, there are many layers of society that have been part of the Indonesia mosaic we see now. A smooth shift from an element of military oligarchy occurred, as Hadiz (2010) clearly noted, as part of a centralised political economy during the Suharto era leading to the current patterns, producing predatory local strongmen within, what Slater calls, networked bosses. This chapter analyses the contemporary local strongmen of Bali as part of Indonesian elites who hold their own characteristics with both successful and unsuccessful stories that created the image of what Vickers (2012) calls “paradise created”, which is now fabricated to enforce Balinese sovereignty.

N. Zuryani (B) Faculty of Social and Political Science, Udayana University, Denpasar, Indonesia © The Author(s) 2021 A. Vandenberg and N. Zuryani (eds.), Security, Democracy, and Society in Bali, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-5848-1_6

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Each region in Bali has unique local organisations with their own problems and evolutions. Among them, there is one regent elected from the ranks of what we call preman, or thugs, and supported by Baladika, one of the mass organisations that Wilson (2015) regards as preman, thugs, or even gangsters in the sense of political protection rackets in the post-New Order regime. Rather than regarding the community security organisations (CSOs) as being oriented towards accumulating social capital or assuring social welfare, this chapter sees the CSO as a kind of mass organisation created by elites, local strongmen utilising despotic power which Slater (2012) notes among the networked bosses. To take a recent example, in Badung Regency the Benoa Bay reclamation is opposed by most Balinese. The proposed resort development is creating tensions, and the local elite, strongmen have paused it for a while (further discussion below under “En-route to Fabricated Bali” section). The Jakarta-based elites are opposed by a network that aims at promoting Balinese sovereignty. At the same time, they must manage oligarchical investor interests in the megaproject around Benoa Bay reclamation. Investor financing from Jakarta is still being organised, and it is supported by Presidential regulations. The reclamation protests from many local Hindu environmentalists are a genuine expression of democracy, and other elites are opposing the idea of reclamation too. There were many types of elites that emerged after the Suharto era and they intermingled in many entrepreneurial activities, in political parties, and more importantly within the adat and local by-laws promoted by their own networks. This chapter aims to issue a warning about contemporary conditions allowing the genesis of local strongmen in Bali. It discusses a typology of local strongmen and reflects on how the networking of local strongmen could promote a sense of “paradise fabricated”. The stranglehold of elites in Bali, especially in urban areas and the territory of the former royal courts cannot be denied. This grip has an impact in all directions. These elites are not only the upper classes, they also derive from the middle classes (Dwipayana 2001) and the lower classes, and they are dispersed in a mosaic of Balinese traditions based upon caste, race, and colour. Caste, as stated by Dwipayana (2001), is a general sociological structure that governs a differentiation of traditions, but caste in Bali is different from the caste systems in India. Compared to India, a dynasty is more prominent in terms of the lineage (brahmin [priest], satria [knight], wesya [merchant], and sudra [commoner]). As Agung

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(1972: 183) confirms, the structure of social stratification around the “thrice born” brahmin, satria, and wesya means it is only Balinese people themselves who know if they belong to the sudra. Otherwise, besides caste, another term is “color” or warna that explains a gradation of clan diversity. Pande, Gusti, or Ngurah belong to the wesya caste which is derived originally from the “darker” skin sudra and this is reflected in their power relations with the “paler” skin brahmin and satria. Where Hadiz presents predatory local strongmen filling a vacuum left by the collapse of centralised power, Slater (2012) offers a more analytical approach to understanding the emergence of despotic power utilised by locally networked bosses and underway before the collapse of Suharto’s regime. The infrastructure of power that originated under autocratic agency and centralised strongmen confirms what Hadiz sees as fluid contestation of social relations, but clan markers introduce further complications which shape local networks. Particular titles mark the spiritual elite as guardians of tradition who act as priest or sulinggih (for the Brahmin who lead religious ceremonies called Ratu Pedanda), or act as satria (who lead religious activities called Sri Empu), or act as the wesya or sudra (when appointed as religious leaders called Begawan) while they must forget their traditional position or social colour as the holder of political power. These elites act as sanctified priests in the traditional ideology that invites the village community to obey to the village leaders and village assembly, and now governs almost all Balinese people under the rules of Parisadha Hindu Dharma formed in 1959.

Local Strongmen in the Context of Bali Bali has a unique variety of communal traditions ranging from the lowest level up to the elites. These communal traditions shape the birth of party cadres, the new rich, and local civil power to guard the tradition. The civil militia, or laskar (troops) originate in the community organisations known as pecalang (traditional custom security). The elite in this discussion comprises those who become strongmen with the blessing of the customs of the Balinese village territories, especially in urban areas. Hadiz (2010: 98) describes the failure of local parliaments to achieve “good governance” standards in Bali, North Sumatra, East Java, and East Kalimantan and attributes this failure to the original importance of local elites, but it should be noted that this has nothing to do with poor education levels in Bali. The prime importance of the Balinese case is related to

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the nationally protected position of the Hindu minority with the layered security arrangements they deliberately created. Layered security refers to the nuance of economic interests overlaying the interests of maintaining the security of traditional and regional assets constituted by Bali’s sociopolitical conditions. A secure “island of gods” not only escapes conflict but also creates a social “harmony” between nature, god, and human beings called Tri Hita Karana (the three causes of well-being). This invites the Balinese to know more about dharma (good actions) as well as adharma (bad actions) because eventually every single individual will be subjected to “karmaphala” (or result of previous good and bad actions). Like elsewhere in Indonesia, the era of decentralisation in Bali is characterised by the strengthening of regional identity, including the emergence of a new group of generic warriors, meaning that local strongmen whom Schiller (2009: 149) called “little kings” who are an integral part of civil society organisations. In Banten, in western Java, they are known as “jawara”, a Bantenese local strongman who can broker relations between business, the military, the criminal underworld, and the political parties. More specifically, Wilson (2015: 46) talks about the early New Order regime “institutionalising jago” the traditional village thug within “working units” that reinvented the culture around the martial art of pencak silat and the traditional satria in much closer alliance with the national military and the regime’s political party Golkar. Despite tensions among rival jawara gangs, the new working units led to lucrative construction contracts and the jawara worked to reinforce the rule of Golkar (the biggest and powerful political party in Suharto rezime). When civil society is organised like this, it reaches into the habitus of the local party cadre who, according to Schiller, colludes with the executive and legislators to corrupt and drive the spending of local government budgets. The role of civil society organisations of this type is to adopt the mask of regional traditions and cultures even if it also exacerbates national political issues. For example, in the blasphemy case of former Jakarta Governor Basuki Tjahaja Purnama (better known as Ahok) in Jakarta, elites used pressure from the FPI (Islamic Defenders Forum) to win the subsequent elections for governor and vice-governor of Jakarta. The civil society organisations formed by religious people stating that their religion is the best and the most truthful guidance has caused many problematic and controversial issues in several areas. Sadly, it has been used to win political positions in any possible way. In Ahok’s case, his civil society opponents ended up putting him in jail. Massive action from

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the FPI attracted national attention and threatened to throw the country into chaos on the basis of an assertion that they represent the majority of Indonesians. The force of this new group of local strongmen has been seen through tremendous change in political conditions at the national level due to the bad habits of local tradition often embedded, and sometimes strongly embedded, in its political identity. As several researchers point out, local political elites can utilise and master local decentralisation and democracy. They place themselves with their cronies and families, in strategic positions to ensure that resource allocations are in the direction, interests, and grip of their own people. In Bali, they quickly grasp the economic opportunities in the tourism industry. Together with rich people from Jakarta and Surabaya, foreigners or in collaboration with indigenous people, they build hotels, restaurants, pubs, and shopping centres in addition to being active in both legal and illegal trades. They also reach all levels of society to train security officers and prepare the path for their investment through regional head elections and through the appointment of political party officials. In Bali, the Gerindra party is led by one of the local strongmen of the Pemuda Bali Bersatu (Bali Youth United). This local strongman was once part of the elite in the much larger organisation Laskar Bali (Soldiers of Bali). After serving time in prison, he moved to the United States of America, worked as a celebrity bodyguard, and returned to Bali to form his own community organisation under the name of Pemuda Bali Bersatu (see the discussion below). The Betawi Rembuk Forum in Jakarta has as its head a local strongman, Habib Muhammad Rizieq Shihab, a bearded and turbaned cleric who took refuge in Saudi Arabia in 2018 after a speech with hatred was reported to the police as a breach of the law of Electronic Information and Transactions or ITE. His hateful speech, uttered as the head of the Forum Pembela Islam (Islamic Defence Forum), dealt with the issue of Chinese ethnic dominance. There is a phenomenon similar to FPI found in Bali. Here the tourism industry has spawned strongmen whose power rests on the manipulation of local tradition. Here too, besides the local thugs, there are organised militia groups. Such groups are not organised along clan lines and generally operate independently from the Balinese customary order. Membership of these groups is not determined by caste, prayer, or social colour or status. According to the “melting pot” slogan of politicians and party cadres, decentralisation in Bali is both fluid and quite mature as a mixture. The

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traditional community consists of social solidarity-building organisations which bring their members together in both good and bad times. Decentralisation has functioned in such a way that local thugs can become representatives of the people, officials, and government leaders. The significance of the decentralisation of the post-Suharto reform era corresponds with the emergence of local political elites. As noted above, the local political landscape in Bali is not only determined by political parties which nominate their candidates for regional leaders, but is also shaped by forces from the outside that assert themselves within the political parties. Political power is controlled by powerful mass organisations or “little kings” (Schiller 2009). The latter have become fronts for the mass organisations (Zuryani et al. 2018). Following Zuryani et al’s (2018) argument, Azhar et al. (2020) argue that populism in Bali could well become nasty. Especially, one also sees the same complications around the deepening of local democracy through civil society since the postSuharto reform era in Indonesia. The complications are linked with the deficit if one takes into account the provocative slogans, statements, and actions of one of the four senators of Bali, who has a strong following among the younger autochthonous generation. He has, for example, set up a ‘Hindu’ movement called “Gerakan Sukla Satyagraha”, which manipulates Gandhi’s proclamation about pure “Hindu” food and creates tension with “migrants from the strait to the West” (nyama tamiu dauh tukad). This clearly shows the deficit and vulnerability of democracy in post-1998 Indonesia, when the country began the process of democratic transition. Although Indonesia conducts elections and procedural democracy, including direct election of the regional head (Pilkada), the election of legislatures (Pileg ), and presidential elections (Pilpres ), many stakeholders in the executive often break the rules of democracy as they engage in communal corruption. Given this situation, how can Bali, and Indonesia as a whole, safely shift away from a military-backed oligarchical regime which undermines civil society on the subject of law enforcement under an appropriate state government apparatus? A key aspect of this problem is the long-standing importance of the island’s culture for its tourist industry.

Balinese Culture, Tourism, and “Paradise” The idea of Bali as a paradise is related to the Dutch control of its colony. European expatriates started the idea of Bali as a place of cultural and natural richness and lived their lives based on this idea. The first

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generations of colonial civil servants (people born in the Indonesian archipelago with less commitment to the Netherlands and more attachment to the East Indies) found Bali the perfect place to express their love for their first home (Vickers 2012: 76). Then broad-minded travellers came from all over the world and contributed to forming a common set of ideas about Bali. This includes the images of bare-breasted women, young dancing girls, and bad witches representing the essence of Balinese culture. As the Dutch were in full control of Bali, they made this paradise into a tourist destination where those ideas blossomed. Bali kept moving, as elaborated by Vickers (2012: 76), from “savage” Bali, to what the Dutch and other visitors from Europe saw as “female” Bali associated with bare-breasted smiling women, and then “cultured” Bali where everyone is an artist. These successive images of Bali and its rich arts and culture were studied by anthropologists and became a counterpoint to the more stereotypical images of Bali deployed in the tourist promotion materials. As more visitors came to Bali, their views reproduced the images of Bali that are seen today, elaborating them in books, films, and photographs. The Bing Cosby, Bob Hope, and Dorothy Lamour film The Road to Bali (1952) helped to spread and maintain these fantastic and exotic ideas of an originally pure Bali. Popular opinion about Bali ensured that these images survived from the European Golden Age of the 1930s into the post-war period. The transition from war to tourism took place through art. One of the first print-makers and painters to romanticise Bali was W. O. J. Nieuwenkamp, who visited Bali in 1904 and came back as an artist traveling with Dutch military forces. He visited many places in Bali where he had a chance to work with Balinese artists. Nieuwenkamp’s approach in collaboration with Balinese artists showed a positive side of Dutch colonialism. His prints represented an interest in a wider perspective and set the style for the new type of tourist advertisements beginning to circulate. In the early decades of the twentieth century, tourism was remarkably peaceful. It took six leisurely weeks to get to Bali from America (Vickers 2012: 88–89). Routes to Batavia came from the United States, Europe, and Australia. This was tourism for the upper class. In the 1920s several companies entered the market and the routes changed. When Miguel and Rose Covarrubias came to Bali in 1930, they traveled from New York via Europe and the Suez Canal, the Pacific, the China Sea, Surabaya (north coast of Java), and then Buleleng (north coast of Bali/Laut Bali). Then Gregory Bateson and Margaret Mead came to Bali from London and Paris via the Suez Canal, stopping in Singapore and joining a KPM tour

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of Makassar and the outer islands before heading to south Bali. This type of leisure travel helped the visitors to learn more about Asia and the Pacific and influenced their expectations about what they would see in Bali. When Bali became a popular tourist destination after World War II, the images of bare-breasted smiling Balinese women soon flourished in the paintings for sale. Even the first president of Indonesia, Sukarno, collected and hung such images in the presidential palace at Tampak Siring in central Bali. In the 1930s in the kingdom of Ubud in south Bali, the pianist and artist Walter Spies tried to introduce a new genre of Pitamaha painting in order to enrich the local expertise of painters. Pitamaha helped many painters and sculptors such as Ida Bagus Made and Ida Bagus Tilem. Other foreigners accepted by the locals included Antonio Blanco in Ubud, Le Mayeur in Sanur, and Rudolf Bonnet who collectively gave the image of Bali as a creative paradise. The inter-war period was a stepping stone between the initial Dutch orientalism and later tourist culture when locals interacted with foreigners and contributed to creating a new image of Bali as paradise. At this stage, Balinese local strongmen were those elites (including foreigners) who worked with adat or traditional kings, priests, artists as those who accepted local ambiance to fulfil the uniqueness of Bali. Soon after the era of globalisation, the above-mentioned networking was changed by the influx of information technology and devices (mobile networking, smartphones, tablets, social media, etc.). This change is also instrumental to the fabrication of Bali, free of socio-political upheaval, and controlled by the Balinese. The clear picture of this opposition is in the pro and contra of Benoa Bay reclamation or Reklamasi Tanjung Benoa.

En-Route to Fabricated Bali Serious concerns around the proposals for Benoa Bay reclamation are not without reasons. Many changes took place during the half-century since 1970. Bali and the Balinese have turned into major producers and suppliers of goods and services for the tourism industry. The first source of conflict over the reclamation project was that no adat leaders were initially consulted and investors did not understand that it would be necessary to bring in a large number of migrant workers from Java, from the eastern Indonesia islands, and probably also from overseas. These migrant workers would be regarded as life-threatening for Balinese cultural sovereignty. The earliest historians such as Covarrubias, several Dutch experts, the anthropologists such as Gregory Bateson and

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Margaret Mead and many other foreign experts, they all failed to see the major role played by the local adat in modern Bali. Consequently, the potential ugliness of the tourism industry was not predicted by the experts. As late as 1975, experts on Bali still thought tourism would be marginal and have little effect upon the Balinese way of life (Udayana and Francillon 1975: 724). Today the replica of Bali in its modern, commercial form is incomparable with the versions of Bali illustrated by those experts. This mismatch is disturbing and it is inspiring efforts to “save” Bali. The second reason for concern about the Benoa Bay reclamation project is the role played by various elites. To take one example, the ruling family of Ubud instilled a family-oriented management in their local tourist economy when it got involved in many business and economic changes in the Ubud area. From the Puri Lukisan Museum and several hotels to the Starbucks cafés, much falls under their influence. In Denpasar, the Pemecutan kingdom contributed urban human resources that helped Bali evolve in the direction of good government that is aimed at uniting Indonesia and ensures that Bali retains its image as a place with harmony. Here the task is to answer the question of how local people can relate to the hierarchical and heavily tourism-oriented organisation of Balinese customs which became very complicated due to the efforts to fabricate reality according to their interests. This problem can be seen throughout the contemporary landscape of cultural parades in many parts of Bali along with dancing, sculpture, yoga meditation, the Elephant Park, and Buddha sculptures. These are all to some extent commercial expressions drawing upon external influences. Contemporary Bali is particularly receptive for Indian ideas about the Buddhism nabe (spiritual guru) and New Age diets, fashions, and medicines that show up everywhere in Bali today. There is no blueprint on how to fabricate Bali and the ecological impact caused by over-development, excessive growth in tourist numbers and island population, misuse of water resources, and global warming will be felt for a very long time. No one can predict what will happen if Mount Agung one day erupts or other natural calamities strike Indonesia who sits on the ring of fire. Little effort is being made to educate more people about the importance of reducing plastic use, recycling waste, reusing products, and minimising the impact of development. The elites who run Bali and its fabrication are too short-sighted. The ISI (Institut Seni Indonesia/Art Institute of Indonesia) keeps creating new forms of dance, theatre performance. A whole creative

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industry related to arts exists. Various dances created by the lecturers in the performing art division of the institute often take up an old story as a theme and give it a modern nuance, but too often that is for the sake of tourism and tends to minimise the sacred part of the performance. This follows the demand of the global market which keeps breaking down polarisation between sacred and profane. A well-known example is the Kecak Dance, which uses fire almost as an instrument and so this dance is often simply called the “fire dance”. This can also be seen in the Balinese conduct of ceremonies by using offerings like sarad pregembal and jatah or sate tungguh, which are tall, very large, and popular with tourists. It is more common nowadays that rich Balinese sudra use the highest level of offerings, thus market forces have begun to transform the ritual. The formerly strict stratification of village traditions in order to mengider/pengider-ider (to keep the balance) and suastika (based on the compass) are the bases of Balinese life. These traditions, which start from the positioning of residential buildings, including wrapping the food with banana leaves and building houses with polpolan (clay) walls, are no longer the pakem (standard guideline) of community. Nowadays, a big family compound can only be found in the village and when the rituals in the village are conducted they are shaped by the stratification of the home village. Nuclear families have become common in urban areas among newly married couples but they are still bound by the patriarchal purusa system. This system includes obligations such as pulang kampung (paying a visit to the hometown) for clan rituals, and soroh, dadia, celebrating religious ceremonies. In other words, the whole Balinese contemporary culture has been shaped, one way or another, by modern market demands, such as urbanisation, commercialisation, and short term profit-seeking. This phenomena has also shaped study programmes at state universities in Bali, including Udayana University, which have expanded tourism studies as a postgraduate programme and focused the study of the Balinese language only on Kajian Budaya (Culture Studies). Bit by bit, the memory of traditional culture, genuine performance in the arts, and locally oriented literature for local consumption is slowly fading away as it is replaced by modern and too often vulgar culture from outside Bali. Another prominent aspect of this cultural degradation is a campaign, Ajeg Bali, run by the daily newspaper, Bali Post. Ajeg means steady or upright, both physically and morally, but this meaning fossilised when the leader of Bali Post ran as a candidate for governor and campaigned around

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various ways to preserve Bali’s culture (Allen and Palermo 2005; Schulte Nordholt 2007). The idea of Ajeg Bali reduced the complexity of Balinese people and polarised them against other Indonesians. This appeared clearly in the creation of a new form of bakso (meatball) using pork as a counterpoint to the regular bakso from Java using beef or chicken. The sellers of the bakso Ajeg Bali wore their Balinese udeng (head cloth) as a provocation to many bakso sellers from Java who as devout Muslims avoid pork. Ajeg Bali is no longer prominent in the Bali Post but the local chauvinism of its anti-Muslim themes lives on and contradicts the intrinsically Balinese tradition of tolerance and openness. Schulte Nordholt (2007) summed up this contradiction well when he characterised contemporary Bali as an open fortress. The Ajeg campaign was a rather alien idea imposed by ambitious Balinese elites seeking political office at the expense of maintaining a genuinely vibrant, living Balinese culture. The third reason why the Balinese reject the Benoa Bay reclamation project is that it is ethically defective from the beginning. Developers and investors driving the megaproject made no effort to draw any synergy between their proposals and the Balinese Hindu concept of Tri Hita Karana (three causes of well-being). They should have taken the sacredness of the area into account when drawing up their project. The issuance of the Presidential Regulations 51/2014 and 122, 2012 by President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono overturned a previous Presidential Regulation 45/2011 concerning the zoning of Benoa Bay as a water and mangrove conservation area. The use of a technical term “buffer zone” (Kompasiana 2016) to describe the area in Benoa Bay to be reclaimed, triggered the religious environmentalists protest. The most recent Presidential Regulation is certainly based on the National City planning guidelines in previous Presidential Regulations 9/2005 and 52/1995 concerning the strategic and zoning plan of the coastal area and small islands, which have allowed various reclamation projects in Jakarta and Bali coastal areas to proceed without considering their ecological impacts. There will, however, be an ecological impact when more seawater will flow past Sanur beach due to the constructions sitting on 838 hectares of new land planned in the megaproject (Moerti 2013, merdeka.com). The boss of the Artha Graha Group promotes the project as a “cultural theme park”. Approving the reclamation will also impact the stratification of villages around Benoa Bay because it promotes the modern management of huge resorts competing for working capital in financial markets. There will be a further loss for the local people around

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the Benoa Bay if there is no clear taxation of the created islands in the lagoon and coastal area. Overall, this project shows that Bali is for sale. Given these reasons for concern regarding the Benoa Bay reclamation project, it can be argued that the movement of developers, investors, and financiers is often against the interests and values of the local people. Although it has been unclear as to which local strongmen are involved in approving the reclamation project of Benoa Bay, it is important to undertake a deep review of the structural typology of the strength of those local strongmen who protect those investors and the support of the political parties who play their games at the local level in order to succeed at the national level. The games of the elites and these local strongmen are difficult to describe in terms of Balinese structural stratification. They have the members and power of a clan and at the same time they are also a modern movement. Most of Bali politicians are protected by family power and have massive back-up from a CSO (Community Security Organisations) in the beginning of their movement into the national political world. One of the DPD senators from Bali uses his position as a king descended from Wilwatikta Majapahit (a ruler in the largest kingdom in Southeast Asia based in East Java from 1293 to circa 1500). This king, with his claim of ancient lineage has received continuous daily attention from the Bali Post, from his earliest political manoeuvres to his newly election in October 2019 as legislator of Dewan Perwakilan Daerah (DPD/Regional Representative Council). The existence of local strongmen is influenced by the mass organisations in Bali. Formally they have a CSO/community security organisation registered with the Ministry of Home Affairs as an ormas (mass organisation) which is replete with many activities in their branch area. For example, in Buleleng regency in north Bali, there is a mass organisation that calls itself Buleleng Dogen (Just Buleleng). Initially, the organisation helped its members and their families financially and later it aimed also to maintain their security. Drawing on the local Buleleng dialect, they called themselves Bulldog and drew up branding for their leader’s vehicle along with T-shirts, hats, and so forth. There is a quite similar mass organisation in Sanur (a beach-side village east of Denpasar) named Sanur Bersatu (Sanur United), which was formed with the approval of the local nobility and owner of a major hotel group. This organisation aimed to stop outside mass organisations with no affiliations in Sanur penetrating the security market. From the beginning, Sanur Bersatu’s member recruitment process was regarded as crucial in maintaining the

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security of Sanur, and by extension Bali more generally. The problem is that from this community security organisation dangerous forms of local strongmen are born. There was once a young man who loved to meet his friends. As a teenager, he and his friends formed their own martial art group. One day he was challenged by an opponent. Our young man was in very good shape and bigger than most young men in Bali. His strength and fitness were well-known. His friends called him the Elephant (Gajah). Unfortunately, his threat to kill his opponent was serious and it had consequences. When he finished his prison sentence in Bali, he moved to the United States of America. He found work as a bodyguard for a celebrity, did well and his case even appeared in the media. When he decided to return home to Bali, he managed to leverage both his father’s reputation as a strongman of the past and his own success in America and overcame the setback of his time in prison when he was a young man. He completed a master’s degree at one of the local universities. One of the political parties recruited him as a cadre. He was elected to the local legislature (DPRD/Regional People’s Representative Assembly) and took up the position as a local lawmaker within Gerindra (Partai Gerakan Indonesia Raya), a political party formed by Prabowo Subianto who run for President in 2009, 2014, and 2019. Prabowo is a former Lieutenant General and was a special forces commander during the final years of the Suharto regime. He was also married to President Suharto’s youngest daughter, and very well connected in Jakarta. This “Elephant” Gerindra cadre and DPRD lawmaker, with his reputation in the pencak silat martial art scene, his father’s past as a strongman, and strong connections in Bali’s CSOs is both a useful contact for investors hoping to develop new business in Bali and a leader who the CSO members look up to. Relationships between political cadres and the CSOs are interesting to study. Sukma (2013) has researched social organisations associated with political parties in Sukawati (a sub-district east of Denpasar, downriver from Ubud). He argues that the existence of social organisations in Bali is often influenced by political parties which use CSOs to threaten people who oppose them. Sukma found that the involvement of the CSO Suka Duka Baladika Bali (Pure Balinese) with one of the political party figures arose from assistance provided by the members of the political party to Baladika. However, in public, the party figure was only seen as a general supporter of CSOs who invited Baladika members to attend branch party

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activities. They did attend, adorned with Baladika regalia, wearing expensive sunglasses, uniforms, and hats. They arrived in no small number in big cars with military ornaments or very big wheels and attended. Their solidarity was paramount. The political party provided encouragement, support, assistance, and welfare aid in the Sukawati area during the General Election of 2009. Sukma (2013) interpreted this as a disturbance of the community. From our interview with a Baladika advisor in 2016, there is no doubt that the election of the regional head reflected the strength of the mass organisations and their cadres. CSOs have clear interests in determining the election of regional leaders as representatives of the people. This brief study overviews how the involvement of Community Security Organisations (CSOs) within political parties in Bali has a hidden function, which is to attract masses of members to party activities. The involvement of CSOs in political parties may trigger potential conflicts among members of different CSOs in relation to their various interests, as well as the CSOs’ conflict with other CSOs operating under different party banners. More research is needed around the political parties and mass organisations in Bali in relation to their power because the CSOs are not just youth wings of the political parties, and various leaders in either of the two largest CSOs have personal working relationships with leaders, candidates, and public officials from several political parties. The activities of community security organisations (CSOs) in Bali penetrating local communities have also been studied in Nugraha et. al (2016) research about the “dynamics of community organisations in Denpasar city”. In his research, Nugraha discussed the background of the birth of community security organisations, their dynamics, and their contributions to securing the city of Denpasar and supplying legislators. Baladika Bali currently has three members in three political parties as members of the Bali Provincial Legislative Council (Dewan Perwakilan Rakyat Daerah Bali) Regional People’s Representative Council, Bali Province) and eight members in four parties for the Regency/Municipal Legislative Council (Dewan Perwakilan Rakyat Daerah Kabupaten/Kota) representing communities in the local parliament/the lower regional house representatives. In their research, Purnama et al. (2014) discussed the procedure in the selection of korlap (field coordinator) in the neighbourhood of Peguyangan Kaja Village, Denpasar. They drew five conclusions. First, the Board of the Regional Head of Baladika actively conducts both social activities (social service, house renovation for community members,

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blood donation) and mental and spiritual coaching for its members. Second, Baladika Bali has been officially registered in Kesbanglinmas (Department of Community Welfare, Development, and Protection) Bali Province with inventory number 220/208/KBPM/ORG. Third, Baladika Bali Community Organisation (Korlap/Field coordinator of Peguyangan Kaja Village) has been able to realise aspirations of its members in useful activities such as mutual cooperation and environmental protection for villages according to the five principles of Indonesia, Pancasila. Five, internal constraints faced by Baladika Bali are mostly matters of shortage or misuse of funding. They obtain their funds through a bazaar. At the same time, there are also external constraints in the form of public negative stereotype on the existence of mass organisations. It is also unavoidable, according to Purnama et al. that even the mass organisations regarded as thugs (preman) perform social activities but cannot break negative stereotypes about them. This study emphasised that not only origins but also rules and procedures influenced the election of the field coordinator (Purnama et al. 2014: 23). The fragmented ormas (mass organisation) at the local level create many diverse forms of what we call CSO. Another example is Anker, an abbreviation of Anak Kerobokan (The Children of Kerobokan), which is a CSO based in the tourist area of Canggu and Kerobokan. The group wants to save Bali. They originally come from many places, Buleleng, Sanur, as well as Canggu and Kerobokan. These groups have not all evolved in the smooth fashion Slater (2012) sketches in his analysis of how despotic power was transformed during the Suharto regime. The groups were connected through their despotic power which gave them access to and control over a target community. Their pictures were printed on billboards in 2014–2016 and some people called them “the narcissistic premans ”. Putting up those billboards cost a lot of money and the fees to the local government were based on the size of the billboard itself. Considering the numerous billboards on the roadsides, you could expect a spike in local government income. However, for the Denpasar and Buleleng regencies during 2014–2016, when the huge billboards went up and the mass organisations displayed smaller billboards everywhere, income for this budget line was well below target incomes. Several budget lines for revenue from hotels, restaurants, and pubs were around half their targets but income from billboards was only a quarter of the target income (Widyaswara 2016). It is reasonable to assume that Denpasar City exercised little control over the billboards and that the CSOs paid no fees to

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Sources of Revenue

Rupiah/ US$

Local incom e

IDR

1.1 local tax

IDR

USD USD Hotel IDR USD Restaurants IDR USD Pubs/ Entertainment IDR USD Billboards* IDR USD Parking IDR USD Et cetera IDR USD

Target 2017

Actual income

Actual/Target %

3, 358, 070, 000

41. 7

571,762

238,423

5,774,090,000

2,231,590,000

409,960

158,443

1,370,000,000

582,370,000

97,270

41,348

760,000,000

414,533,000

53,960

29,425

126,000,000

78,520,000

8,946

5,575

21,340,000

4,864,310

1,515

345

3,500,000

989,000

249

70

3,453,240,000

1,148,180,000

245,180

81,521

38.78 42.51 54.58 62.32 22.79 28.27 36.37

1.2 Local retribution

34.44

1.3 Fund management

108.89

1.4 Other income

37.66

*During 2012-16, billboard levies were 16.48 million rupiah ($1,173 USD) in deficit due to lack of regulation

Fig. 6.1 Income of Denpasar city in 2017 ($1 USD = 14,031 rupiah IDR) (Source Widyaswara [2016])

put them up. When the ormas start as CSOs and then turn to politics, they increase economic burdens on the community and undermine local democracy (Fig. 6.1).

Networking in Paradise The Bali Regional Chief of Police, Inspector General Petrus Golose has recently begun to criticise thuggery, gangsterism, and illicit drugs. On 10 November 2018, the Chief of Police attended the inauguration of a statue at the Bajra Sandi museum in Puputan Park, Renon opposite the

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Governor’s office in Denpasar. The statue lauds opposition to gangsterism and illicit drugs (see Fig. 6.2). This public relations event was covered by various newspapers and the newspapers’ websites attracted much social media commentary. Golose said the police have to eradicate the cowards and thugs who he thinks are in a vulnerable position. He asserted that all thugs are cowards who frighten people with their appearance and ideology of fear. His statements were a reaction to the riots in Kerobokan prison in 2015 and the killing of several active ormas members in the prison and Teuku Umar road in Gianyar (south and east of Ubud). His statements

Fig. 6.2 A statue against gangsterism and illicit drugs (Source Nazrina Zuryani)

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were also a response to the refusal of three riot leaders from Baladika and Laskar Bali to serve further time in Kerobokan prison, and instead relocate to Lapas Nusa Kambangan prison. Besides the prison riots in 2015, several street brawls between members of the largest CSOs in Denpasar city, Buleleng and Gianyar regencies created quite a lot of fear and unease among citizens. Before relocating the three prison riot leaders, Inspector General Golose had investigated twelve CSO members’ use of smartphones. Divianta (2016) explains that the riots in Kerobokan prison were triggered by the imminent arrival of prisoners recently convicted of crimes associated with gangsterism but not recognised as members of their organisations. The newspaper Tempo reported that Police Headquarters believed the prison riots had been coordinated via smartphones because one CSO, Baladika, had established links between its members inside and outside the prison. These links were the grounds for Golose arguing that the string of incidents inside and outside the prison should be regarded as cowardly actions designed to intimidate people. The irresponsible actions by networks of thugs fighting each other invoked the national law 11/2008 concerning electronic information and transactions. One of the shortcomings in this law was an omission of the word pakai—“use”. In the case of Ahok, based on the controversy around his comments on verse 51 of the Koran, there was controversy about the edited video of his speech uploaded to a YouTube channel by Buni Yani. The editing of the video was arguably a violation of this law because it strengthened perceptions of blasphemy and therefore represent a misuse of the information network. Similarly, it is arguable that CSO members inside and outside of Kerobokan prison misused the internet when they coordinated their actions and so can conceivably be charged with a crime under the electronic information act. Referring to the riots caused by the CSOs, a senator who represented Bali in Jakarta lobbied the Governor of Bali Province with a request not to disperse the three largest CSOs. A news outlet, Detik (2019) reported that Senator Gede Pasek Suardika’s request emphasised the presence of government in public infrastructure and programmes. However, the new Governor, I Wayan Koster, elected in 2018, issued warning letters to the three biggest CSOs, Baladika, Laskar Bali, and Pemuda Bali Bersatu. On 15 January 2019, he warned those CSOs against undertaking.

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… murder, prosecution, damage, threat, extortion, thuggery, drugs abuse, execution of other actions which are the duties and authorities of law enforcement officers, and other activities that can disturb the peace and harmony or damaging other public and social facilities. (Detik 2019)

Such activities obviously contravene the terms of their registration and therefore constitute grounds for deregistering them. Tempo (2015) has already provided a chronolgy of this on-going tension between CSOs in Bali. There are arguments for and against the ongoing existence of these CSOs. On the one hand, they are violent and instil widespread fear. Some of them pursue an anti-Muslim, Bali-for-the-Balinese local chauvinism. The three larger CSOs contribute to fabricating a shallow image of Bali around crass and poorly conceived development projects and all of them pursue prospects for making money ahead of promoting a genuine, living local culture. On the other hand, all of them are grounded in local communities and traditional village governance, all of them promote both development and the unity of Indonesia at large and all of them contribute to the financial and spiritual well-being of not only their members but also their members’ local communities. These arguments for the CSOs is why a DPD senator from Bali and a governor of Bali could publicly defend them (Mustofa 2019). At the same time, the arguments against them are the reason why a more recent Governor could criticise them and why they are vulnerable to the moves being made by the current chief of police and the present governor. The recent efforts to dampen thuggery in the big three CSOs might fade if the reclamation of Benoa Bay makes significant headway. Sanur Bersatu, whose activities are more disciplined and low profile under the supervision of Sanur nobility and large hoteliers, claims that behind the scenes they will stop the reclamation. According to one member of the Sanur noble family, reclamation means the termination of Sanur tourism period. If the circulation of seawater is blocked, then the marine ecosystem along the Sanur beachfront will be ruined. The mangrove forest around Benoa Bay and parts of Nusa Dua supports the holy and sacred areas but they will be eroded and will soon die without the usual water flows, puddles, and tides cycles. Reclamation is rejected by the Balinese because it is filling the shallow water with soil and concrete rather than any form of revitalisation. The resurrection of CSOs in Bali can potentially sustain both Balinese society and the ecosystem if they work with the Balinese ideas of Tri

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Hita Karana. If harmony is their ultimate purpose, then they will avoid the political turbulence that will result from a massive further increase in tourism development oriented to western influences. Bali should promote the concept of cultural tourism rather than mass tourism.

Conclusion Whether we call the organisations that elites form ormas, CSOs, or groups of traditional processes, this chapter has stressed that these organisations are dominated by local strongmen and their efforts to fabricate Bali as a paradise for ever-larger numbers of tourists. With Bali’s unique mosaic of cultures on a small island oriented towards tourism, the Balinese people cannot avoid fighting for their sovereignty if they want to make sure Bali itself is not for sale. Problems around reclamation are not exclusive to Bali but the analysis above shows these problems are much more than a matter of a “buffer zone”. The problems around reclamation are closely related to problems with the local elites becoming strongmen and exercising their power. The Benoa Bay reclamation is underway but making slow progress. The new governor is realistic about the large CSOs but naive about the reclamation project. The debate about this issue remains open but the grey area is prominent and it seems likely that the superior power of wealthy investors and their supporters among local politicians and CSOs will prevail over the Balinese community and will welcome more tourists. Saving Bali and maintaining the image of paradise created in the 1920s and 1930s are not easy tasks. It is also quite challenging to ensure the Balinese maintain their own traditions when the local strongmen are unconsciously acting like networking bosses. This network of bosses was in full swing when Baladika’s and Laskar Bali’s members fought each other in Kerobokan prison. The elite leaders of the CSOs maintain their networks in order to avoid police surveillance. Police Headquarters are now taking action to exploit their vulnerability to legal and public scrutiny. How this confrontation between the large CSOs and the police will play out in the near future is uncertain. The CSOs may well bide their time and wait for better occasions when they can again exercise their powers. If the newly elected local government is to make Bali safe ecologically, economically, and socially and fulfil great expectations, then the new President must revise the Presidential Regulations about strategic areas

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and zoning plans for coastal area and small islands, which have, in the past, allowed reclamations in Jakarta and Bali. These regulations need to be reviewed to make them suitable for the future. However, it seems that the development project is currently active. Will the newly elected government be brave enough to stop the reclamation project? Will it risk angering local voters? Are we ready to see Bali as a failed paradise? These questions are in everyone’s thoughts. The local elites must listen to the voice of the people rather the interests of capital.

References Agung, A. A. G. P. 1972. “Lahirnya Idee-Idee Pembaharuan dalam Organisasi Sosial di Bali”. Basis Majalah Ilmiah XXI(6) (March): 183–189. Allen, P. & C. Palermo. 2005. “Ajeg Bali: Multiple Meanings, Diverse Agendas”. Indonesia and the Malay World 33(97): 239–255. Azhar, A. M., N. Zuryani, and T. Erviantono. 2020. “Populisme Otensitas Bali”. In A. Faishal and P. Wahyu (eds.), Refleksi Politik Indonesia 1999–2019, Jakarta: Pustaka LP3ES, 132–140. Detik. 2019. “Senator Minta Gubernur Bali Jangan Sampai Bubarkan Ormas” from https://news.detik.com/berita/d-4392597/senator-minta-gub ernur-bali-jangan-sampai-bubarkan-ormas. Divianta, Dewi. 2016. “Begini Awal Mula Kerusuhan Di Lapas Kerobokan”. Retrieved on 23 February 2019 from https://www.liputan6.com/regional/ read/2490030/begini-awal-mula-kerusuhan-di-lapas-kerobokan. Dwipayana, A. A. G. N. 2001. Kelas dan Kasta: Pergulatan Kelas Menengah Bali. Yogyakarta: Lapera Pustaka Utama. Hadiz, Vedi R. 2010. “Localising Power in Post-Authoritarian Indonesia”. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Kompasiana. 2016. “Oh Ternyata ada SBY di Balik Reklamasi Teluk Benoa Bali”. Diunduh tanggal 16 Januari 2019 from https://www.kompasiana.com. Moerti, Wisnoe. 2013. “4 Proyek Raksasa yang Ingin Diwujudkan Tomy Winata”. merdeka.com, 16 November 2013 diunduh tanggal 16 Januari 2019 dari https://m.merdeka.com. Mustofa, Ali. 2019. “Kapolda Sebut Preman di Bali Pengecut, Netizen Minta Tujuk Langsung”. Retrieved from https://radarbali.jawapos.com/read/ 2018/11/12/103177/kapolda-sebut-preman-di-bali-pengecut-netizenminta-tunjuk-langsung. Nordholt, Henk Schulte. 2007. Bali, Benteng Terbuka 1995–2005: Otonomi daerah, demokrasi elektoral, dan identitas-identitas defensif . Denpasar: Pustaka Larasan.

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Nugraha, A., I. P. G. Suwitha, and I. B. G. Putra. 2016. “Dinamika Organisasi Kemasyarakatan di Kota Denpasar”. Jurnal Humanis, Fakultas Ilmu Budaya Unud 16(1): 10–17. Retrieved on 23 February 2019 from http://ojs.unud. ac.id/index.php/sastra/article/download/26441/16786/0. Purnama, Tjokorda I. A., I. G. K. A. Sunu, and D. B. Sanjaya. 2014. “Fungsi, Hak, dan Kewajiban Organisasi Kemasyarakatan Dalam Pemberdayaan Masyarakat Pada Reformasi” (Studi Kasus Pada Ormas Baladika Bali di Desa Pakraman Peguyangan). Jurnal Jurusan Pendidikan PKn 2(1). Retrieved on 23 February 2019 from http://ejournal.undiksha.ac.id/index. php/JJPP/article/view/2503. Radar Bali. 2018. “Kapolda Sebut Preman di Bali Pengecut, Netizen Minta Tunjuk Langsung” from https://radarbali.jawapos.com/read/2018/11/ 12/103177/kapolda-sebut-preman-di-bali-pengecut-netizen-minta-tunjuklangsung. Schiller, J. 2009. Electing District Heads in Indonesia, Democratic Deepening or Elite Entrenchment? In M. Erb and P. Sulistiyanto (eds.), Deepening Democracy in Indonesia? Direct Elections for Local Leaders (Pilkada), Singapore: ISEAS, 147–173. Slater, Dan. 2012. Altering Authoritarianism Institutional Complexity and Autocratic Agency in Indonesia. Cambridge. Cambridge University Press. Sukma, I Wayan Putra Widia. 2013. “Eksistensi Organisasi Kemasyarakatan (Ormas) Dalam Partai Politik di Kecamatan Sukawati”. Jurnal Jurusan Pendidikan PKn 1(1). Retrieved on 23 February 2019 from http://ejournal. undiksha.acid/index.php/JJPP/article/view/372. Tempo.com. 2015. “Rusuh Denpasar Baladika Vs Laskar Bali, Ini Kronologinya”. 18 December. Retrieved 23 February 2019 from https://nasional.tempo.co/ read/728981/rusuh-denpasar-Baladika-vs-laskar-bali-ini-kronologinya/full& view=ok. Udayana, U. and G. Francillon. 1975. “Tourism in Bali—Its Economic and Socio-Cultural Impact: Three Points of View.” International Social Science Journal 27(4): 721–752. Vickers, Adrian. 2012. Bali: “A Paradise Created”. Jakarta: PT Java Books Indonesia. Widyaswara, I Wayan Erwin. 2016. “Rp 15,3 Miliar dari Reklame Hilang, DPRD Denpasar Usulkan Revisi Aturan.” Tribun Bali, 26 July. https://bali.tribunnews.com/2016/07/26/rp-153-miliar-dari-reklamehilang-dprd-denpasar-usulkan-revisi-aturan. Wilson, Ian Douglas. 2015. The Politics of Protection Rackets in Post New Order Indonesia, New York, Routledge. Zuryani, N., M. A. Azhar, and T. Erviantono, 2018. “Udayana University: Proposal for the Establishment of a ‘Political Parties and Local Government Studies Centre.” Udayana Journal of Social Sciences and Humanities 2(1): 44–49.

CHAPTER 7

The Transitional Democracy Trap: Democracy, Complexity, and Local Oligarchy in Bali Ali Azhar Muhammad Translated by Abigail Robinson

In reality, the collapse of the Soeharto regime and a transitional phase of democratization in Indonesia has not led to political “replacement”. New political power did not come into the mainstream. Economic liberalization and democratization did create new centres of power that were more widespread and involved increasingly diverse networks. Democracy is a free space where new structures have yet to be developed, and the political arena has become a space for contestation with various political forces competing. The survival of all political actors (especially political parties) in a democratic political order is not easily determined by the claims they present reformist-democratic political elements. Actors’ political resilience is entirely determined by their ability to respond to continually changing political conditions and environments. Some observers refer to

A. A. Muhammad (B) Faculty of Social and Political Science, Udayana University, Denpasar, Indonesia © The Author(s) 2021 A. Vandenberg and N. Zuryani (eds.), Security, Democracy, and Society in Bali, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-5848-1_7

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this trend as localized oligarchy because power networks have managed to circumvent fair competition mechanisms. The establishment of this new nomenclature provides an opportunity for existing patronage around political-economic ties to adapt to the new political atmosphere and build alliances that are housed within political parties (Hadiz 2003). The key focus of this chapter is the existence of political infrastructure in the form of ormas (civil society organizations) within political contestation in Bali. The operational rationale of the ormas is to maintain Bali as it is until a different interpretation of their objectives arises. Therefore, the ormas in Bali have become a means of pursuing politicaleconomic interests, involving thugs, political parties, and public officials. The long transitional phase of democratization has allowed the rise of ormas in Bali and resulted from a combination of increasing identity politics, ethnic-based violence, and the presence of local bosses. The latter of these factors, the presence of local bosses, strongly influenced the rise of ormas. This is demonstrated by ormas being formed and maintained by political elites, and some corporations that have been used as instruments of political power. During elections, the “democratic festival”, ormas were mobilized by political camps and have been deliberately maintained for particular political interests.

Background No one imagined that the Ajeg Bali movement, often regarded as “cultural resilience”, would become part of the emergence of local oligarchs taking advantage of the very long process of democratic transition. That means Ajeg Bali has implications for the emergence of a local oligarchy that grows and develops during an extended democratic transition period. Starting with a seminar conducted by the Bali Post daily newspaper on August 16, 2003, this term began to circulate. Heading towards a strategic form of Ajeg Bali, the seminar began by inviting various community groups starting with representatives of the tourism sector, economists, and experts from various fields such as agriculture, education, performing arts, and architecture. The seminar was motivated by joint concerns related to physical development activities and the rapid development of uncontrolled tourism areas that caused massive environmental damage (see Santikarma 2002; Nordholt 2006; Atmadja 2006). The feelings of the various community groups and experts were motivated by critical sentiment towards government policies for development that

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treat Bali as a mass-tourism destination. Bali’s massive natural exploitation has caused the Balinese to gradually feel alienated in their own land (Atmadja 2006). The influences of tourism began to emerge with hippies in the mid-1970s. Other influences such as cultural commercialization and desacralization saw the Balinese lose increasing amounts of their land. Nordholt (1995 in Azhar, 2018) characterizes Bali as an open fortress that accepts outside influences while struggling to protect itself from outside influences that cause the fading of Balinese culture. So great is the Balinese expectation of this term, that it has transformed into a cultural product interpreted on three levels (Atmadja 2006). First, at the individual level, Ajeg Bali is interpreted as the ability of people to enjoy cultural confidence, a creative nature and to not limit themselves to mere physical matters. The second level is the cultural environment. Ajeg Bali is interpreted as the creation of a cultural living space that is inclusive, multicultural, and selective towards outside influences. Third, at the level of cultural processes, it is interpreted as the interaction of Balinese people with the scope of Balinese culture in order to produce new cultural products or markers through a process based on cultural values and local wisdom, all of which has a deep awareness of space and time (Atmadja 2006; Wijaya 2004). As an agenda, Ajeg Bali is setting the political culture of Bali. The first priority on that agenda is to instil cultural confidence. Driven by the massive development of capitalist tourism, misinterpretation is inevitable. Ajeg Bali is so praised and respected as the saviour of the future that it has inevitably seen various new groups all claim to fight for the spirit of Ajeg Bali. The rapid pace of the development of capitalist tourism and the emergence of a new oligarchic class have formed and maintained the ormas to protect their interests in the local political setting. The spirit of Ajeg to protect Bali from outside invasion has entered the realm of politics.

The Dependence of Transitional Democracy Upon the Local Oligarchy in Bali As mentioned above, the nature of transitional democracy in Bali has come to depend upon the emergence of true oligarchies, starting with the misinterpretation of Ajeg within particular sectors of Balinese society itself. One aspect of this is violent conflict between Balinese, triggered by struggles over economic resources. In practice, violent conflicts and

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struggles over economic resources have been driven by local bosses who take shelter in the several ormas groups that have flourished after the New Order era, according to Hadiz (2010). This illustrates the main characteristics of the democratic transition, which is perhaps petering out due in part to the emergence of organized thugs in parties and paramilitary forces. The latter have in many cases replaced the roles and functions of official security forces such as the police and the military. Siegel (2000) identified the transitional period with the emergence of heroes, local strongmen, thugs, and criminal groups. The local state has “used” the services and power of these local heroes to preserve their interests. The “local heroes” are therefore seen to act in accordance with the orders of the authorities. Like other regions in Indonesia, the emergence of local bosses under the umbrella of the ormas is closely related to the very long process of democratic transition. As the reform era played out, non-state power grew like mushrooms in the rainy season. More and more emerged and they were increasingly out of control, to the point where they were no longer beneficial for the development of democracy. This non-state power, as we have seen, consists in the emergence of figures with ormas backgrounds and it constitutes a new form of power on the political map at the local level. The local oligarchy has become a real political force in Balinese society. The local oligarchs have developed and strengthened as a result of decentralization, electoral politics, and regional autonomy. They were born not only from societal power as they had been in the past. Now they are fostered by state power structures developing at the regional level. They are also part of the process of capital accumulation that runs in accordance with the standards of the current national, local, and international economy. A political reality that nobody ever imagined might arise has resulted in a flawed democracy or what is more accurately referred to as “political oligarchy”. According to Airlangga (2017), the contemporary situation can be termed “slipping” democracy, which is a democracy led by a group of political elites with considerable material wealth In the New Order era, this group constituted a centralized oligarchy. Fedullah (2015) after the reformation, it transformed into a decentralized oligarchy that sees democracy as an adequate space to maintain their existence, both informally and materially.

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According to Ibrahim (2017), local democracy in Indonesia has not yet entered into the phase of consolidating democracy given that many new problems show no signs of resolution. If that is the case, then the face of Indonesian democracy will remain in the shadow of fragile oligarchs. In line with this view, Suwarso (2013) argues that during the reform era many oddities occurred in the development of democracy. Caught in a paradox, Indonesian politics tends to concentrate political power leaving it liable to being seized by leaders or oligarchs who want sources of legitimacy by various means. Conceptually, the term oligarchy has long been known in political studies. The term emerged in ancient Greek times and is prominent in the present era. The concept of oligarchy in the modern era is closely associated with three Indonesian political experts: Vedi R. Hadiz, Richard Robison, and Jeffrey Winters. The work of Hadiz and Robison (2004) Reorganizing Power: The Politics of Oligarchy in the Age of Markets, and Winters (2011) Oligarchy, emphasizes the superiority of material resources as origins of both political and economic power. These works are theoretically different from the conceptualization of oligarchy that emerged from the tradition of elite power theory and elite theory more generally in political science and sociology. Hadiz and Robison (2004) drew upon the theme of oligarchy to explain the political economy of post-Soeharto Indonesia. The oligarchy theory is used to describe the forces that form the core of power in Indonesia, which dominates the economic structure and political structure of post-New Order Indonesia. Winters (2011) emphasizes the motive of pursuing personal wealth when identifying oligarchs. Oligarchs are those who use property to defend their wealth. It is always an individual, not an institution or agency. Where oligarchy is usually regarded as the politics of maintaining wealth conducted by those who are rich, for Winters oligarchy does not always refer to political actions taken by oligarchs. In other words, an oligarch does not always have to have a political motive. Another study that also draws on the theme of oligarchy was conducted by Raphaeli (2003: 28). Talking about Saudi Arabia, Raphaeli focussed on the control of economic and financial resources by the Saudi monarchy. In Saudi Arabia’s monarchical political structure, the position of the palace is indeed highly centralized and powerful. This concentration of power does not only occur politically; it follows from the control of capital by the Prince and the King’s relatives.

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In the literature above, oligarchy can be viewed from two sides. First, from the political side, oligarchies are a concentration of power among a handful of elites who carry out public affairs with their mechanisms. This can be seen in Michels’s Iron Law of Oligarchy or in studies of authoritarian regimes such as Saudi Arabia or Indonesia in the New Order era. Second, in terms of political economy, oligarchy is a power relationship that focuses on economic resources in a handful of interested parties, fostering mutually beneficial relations between industrialists and political elites. Turning to what happened in Bali, social and political changes from the Suharto era through the Reformation era did not bring significant social and political changes. As explained above, the structure of the political economy was actually taken over by economic groups of newcomers who arose after the New Order fell. They became predators or brokers in the current era of democratic transition. In this context, the arguments developed by Winters, Robinson, and Hadiz are directly appropriate for observing local political settings in Bali. This means that the oligarchic framework is a justifiable assumption to explain the appearance of several ormas forces controlling political and economic resources in Bali. The situation becomes more complex when these local oligarchs later seek to cleanse themselves of the legacy and shadow of the old power and turn into new rulers mastering the political economy that they previously obtained when they collaborated with the state (Siegel 2000).

Local Oligarchy Masked as Ormas Local oligarchs took up the aim of guarding Bali’s culture as a way to mask the emergence of their power. This was admitted by several founders of two ormas in Bali (Laskar Bali and Bali Baladika). Both of the two largest ormas have always echoed Ajeg Bali. The word Ajeg refers to the discourse about the position of Balinese culture in Indonesia, nowadays especially since the reform and decentralization which changed the political map in Indonesia. The word Ajeg was introduced by the Bali Post during the 55th anniversary of the Local Newspaper. In a Special Issue, the newspaper published a headline related to the term Ajeg Bali, beginning with the many concerns of various community groups including, as noted earlier, representatives of the tourism sector, economists, and experts from

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various fields such as agriculture, education, performing arts, and architecture. They were all concerned about the physical development activities and the rapid uncontrolled development of tourism areas causing massive environmental damage. The forum held at the Bali Post seminar touched on the fear of the loss of Balinese religious and traditional values as a result of the influx of Western cultural influences that fostered criminality, drug use, and materialistic hedonistic attitudes that would harm the people and culture of Bali. Just as important was the feeling of external threat posed by the influx of thousands of migrant workers from elsewhere in Indonesia, creating a feeling of discomfort for Balinese who worried about becoming a minority and an audience in their own region. Ajeg Bali was expected to counteract the influx of people and foreign capital, along with the simultaneous commodification of Balinese culture. There was a group of Balinese intellectuals who wanted to save Bali, by insisting on the need for spiritual revitalization and strengthening cultural self-confidence, while emphasizing the importance of local knowledge and the central role of traditional institutions. Futhermore Ajeg Bali has become a keyword in the search for a new master plan that respects the delicate balance between God, Man, and the Environment (Tri Hita Karana). A philosophy which has been the foundation of Balinese development since 1969 can be implemented in every development activity in Bali. In its deployment, the philosophy was successfully institutionalized in the establishment of the Tri Hita Karana Center in Denpasar City. The deployment of this philosophy cannot be maintained because of differences over interpretation of what strengthening Bali actually means. Among other things, differences in objectives and struggles over political economy interests are disoriented due to differences in views and goals. For groups who are near power, the spirit of guarding Bali is interpreted as being male and militaristic in nature. This meaning found new momentum when the New Order regime collapsed. A previous image of Bali as “a pretty little girl”, gentle and helpless, gave way to an image of muscular and well-built men. They use the motto “Nindihin Bali” (Defend Bali), declaring themselves ready to protect Bali from threats to its culture which is “Adiluhung ” (of highest quality) (Atmadja 2006). As noted, the local oligarchy in Bali grew intertwined with the development of the ormas. Behind the emergence of ormas in Bali, there were great hopes for the realization of the Ajeg Bali but Ajeg Bali turned into

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an effort to hide power relations. This new spirit of Bali became an intellectual exercise in creating new cultural symbols to redefine the Balinese identity in the interests of powerful people. At the cultural level, the emergence of ormas in Bali cannot be separated from the group of people who want to see Bali in the future with a culture that remains sustainable. It is undeniable that their emergence has had a big influence on the political realities of culture in Bali. Even more so when the mass media plays a big role in the political campaign that is now known as the Ajeg Bali and originated from power relations behind the founding of Bali TV. The cultural politics of Ajeg Bali formed people, networks, human agencies, which were joined in various mass organizations, which could be traditional groups, political parties, youth groups, and others. The network of power around the groups became the watchdog, the guardian of culture. A new form of security organization emerged around the customary guards or pecalang, who not only served as guards for ritual ceremonies but could also serve as a political party security unit, guarding music concerts, and performing sweeps to find internal Indonesian migrants lacking local residence permits. When the Hindu Day of Silence—Nyepi—comes around, they check on anyone not upholding the local customs. The new groups were encouraged by the fall of President Soeharto’s power which gave birth to an atmosphere of freedom to convey political aspirations. The Bali bomb explosions in Kuta and Denpasar on October 12, 2002 and again in Jimbaran on October 1, 2005 saw the initial masculine and militaristic momentum of the various discourses on the stability and security of Bali post-Soeharto became more urgent. Long before the bomb explosions, however, several mass-member civil society organizations had begun to emerge in Bali, beginning with discourse around the pakraman or traditional adat villages. According to Warren (1993), the pakraman village developed during the New Order’s policy of deliberately resurrecting a Dutch bifurcation between law and custom, dinas and adat, formal administration and religious traditions, which was used as a strategy to control the community under a duality of leaders who competed with each other. Although there had been debate about which form of village in Bali was suitable for the conditions of the Balinese people, both the official village and the customary adat village and village hamlets, banjar, were maintained legally and sociologically. Thus, Bali maintained what Ketut Sudantra (2007) called a “diversity of village government “or village dualism.

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The position of traditional villages which are now called Pakraman villages is very important to determine the map of political power in Bali. The Pakraman village governs several hamlet councils or banjar which is the true base of the traditional community in Bali. With this important position, Pakraman villages often become arenas of struggle among political interests and of course the interests of the state to “empower” them (as it was thought during the New Order). In this situation, according to Suryawan (2013), the village head craved a local “adat / pakraman village party” (BaliPublika, edition 14–27 January 2013). The rise of the pakraman village has seen a shift away from the image of women, presented as gentle and powerless, towards muscular and well-built men. The Pakraman village has, according to Suryawan (2013), finally become a space of power, violence, and tension among Balinese people. These arguments about protecting the authenticity of Bali from invasion from outside contributed to causing the growth and development of various mass-member organizations in Bali including those that specialize in violence. According to Dwipayana (2003), the interesting thing about the formation of a traditional village in Bali is that two types of power operate: the naked and the hidden. In its bare form, the power struggle, conflict, and violence occur within the territories of traditional villages and hamlets. These conflicts involve both domestic environmental actors and supra-local political entities. The hidden field of power involves struggle over nationality and development. These discourses about the emergence of the traditional village prompted the establishment of a dominant political economy and a hegemonic formation around what values are retained and what values are discarded. The operation of these naked and hidden powers takes place using various punitive, coercive, and remunerative instruments. Punitive instruments include the use of court rulings and legislation in building social compliance. Here legality serves to normalize power relations both within the traditional villages and between traditional villages and the state and bureaucratic systems. The operation of power through punitive instruments is confirmed by coercive means that utilize the state repressive apparatus such as the police and army and community guards such as pecalang or ormas. Starting from the workings of the state apparatus, there is a long history of violence in Bali. Here this analysis focuses more narrowly on building traditional villages through a battle between

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two power relations. This is sufficient to explain the reasons behind the emergence of ormas in Bali. The second way to trace the emergence of the ormas is in the significant reality of a masked oligarchy operating within the ormas in the political landscape, which is compounded by the weak capacity of political parties as a political institution. During the reform era, local political settings became increasingly complex but the political parties remained very weak with little capacity to mobilize voters, develop policies, or school leaders. The reality is that local politics in Bali does not rely on the strength of political parties to nominate leadership candidates in the regions in Bali. Instead, it relies on power outside political parties in the ormas or gangsters and local strongmen. In other words, the formation of the ormas in Bali is closely related to struggles over political power. Anyone who wants the power of the people can form and establish an ormas in order to regulate, control and even dominate the Balinese. The ormas leaders have been successful at gaining a range of political positions. The most interesting thing behind the emergence of elite ormas in Bali is that it challenges the view that power can be divided. Their view is that power must be corralled and accumulated in a single instance that is controlled by the elite. This view also challenges the view that power is first obtained and then distributed to other groups or authorities, which is the thinking of classical pluralism and its assumption that power is equally distributed. Views about centralized power support the emergence of powerful people behind the ormas in Bali. Strong ormas can emerge and appear on the stage of power today because as they climb the ladder of power they accumulate and concentrate more power. This is all consistent with the classical elite theory of Pareto, Mosca, Michels, and Weber. Power is actually concentrated in the hands of a few individuals and small groups (Mills 1956). In the case of Indonesia, studies of the elite and control of power often discuss changes in the elite arena in the reformation era. The New Order elite competed in Jakarta as the seat of government but now elites compete at the regional level through new spaces provided by decentralization (Hadiz 2003).

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Modes and Mechanisms of Power As explained earlier, the long transition to democracy provides enormous opportunities for creating new socio-political conditions both at the national and local levels. In Bali, this is demonstrated in the new phenomenon of many ormas emerging as a force in the socio-political structure of society. Ormas are widely used by individuals to form oligarchic power. Following Winters (2011) argument, oligarchs are actors who control a large concentration of material resources that can be used to maintain and enhance their personal wealth and exclusive position. This phenomenon was strengthened by the character of the Balinese people, which is thick with the nuances of figureheads and very strong ties to the indigenous community. This character plays an important role in the emerging authority of the ormas who are directly involved in the local oligarchy. With their control of material resources, the ormas in Bali were formed as part of efforts to gain political power. In an interview, one informant made a fundamental statement about the Balinese. According to him, the Balinese are difficult to regulate. The creation of ormas is one way to regulate them and they are now a tool for political elites to regulate or control the Balinese. Another informant talked about the convenience for local strongmen in forming the ormas. The informant said that the Balinese people like to get together and pursue the same hobby. It can be drinking, gambling, and cockfighting and from that hobby a community forms. That is, Balinese people like to gather, come together as a community, to do things together and share the same understandings or thoughts. Economic reasons can break up the community formed by the habit of gathering, but a new community will gradually form again. Statements like this are common, especially since the emergence of the ormas in Bali is deliberately created for the benefit of local strongmen. It begins with gathering and forming the character of youth, through thick and thin or joy and sorrow—suka duka, which features in the emergence of many Omas in Bali. Sharing both joy and sorrow is pursued as a mission of ormas but it is slowly directed towards acts of violence and control of economic enterprises and land. Another common comment was that public officials use the ormas as a tool. According to one informant, many officials in Bali maintain the ormas because their land or business ventures are sources of power (Interviews, July 2018). When local strongmen approached political parties

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and came to occupy senior positions in political parties, some of them were given the opportunity to become representatives of the people. As one informant put it, the closeness of local groups of powerful oligarchs with political parties is a matter of symbiotic mutualism around common political interests. In the era of the new order Ormas strong but only as extras, in the era of reform Ormas appear as the main force in political parties. The opposite happened in the reform era. Ormas members instead became the main actors in political parties. They appeared in the foreground, spoke up, became representatives of the people, and even become mayors and regional heads. This Indonesian pattern is not much different from the political realities in Bali. In the election campaigns around legislative assemblies and regional heads, many local strongmen were the products of the ormas entering the political world through political parties. Uniquely, according to an informant, none of the local strongmen in Bali joined parties that had only emerged after the postreform era. They gravitated towards Soeharto’s election vehicle Golkar and the only permitted “opposition” party PDI-P now competing in new circumstances.

The Mapping of Region, Royalty, and Contestation It is not difficult to find a local strongman in Bali. Through the maintenance of ormas networks their existence can be tracked in three interacting ways. First, you can map the area of a network. These are based on current and well-known administrative districts such as Badung (southern coastal tourist areas around Denpasar), Denpasar, Tabanan (east of Denpasar), Buleleng (along the north coast), and Jembarana (east coast), which are the heartland of the emerging local oligarchs who fostered the large ormas in Bali. Second, you can look at the legacy of feudal power persisting since the reform era. The Puri—royal courts—are still considered important as symbols of moral strength, acting as moral guardians of the people who are experiencing the euphoria of freedom after losing the shackles of authoritarian leadership in the New Order era. Areas known for their density of aristocratic nuances include Puri Pamacutan (western Denpasar), Puri Gianyar (east of Denpasar), Puri Ubud, Puri Klungkung (along the southeastern coast), and Puri Karangasem (east coast). The revival of the Puri coincided with the emergence of the ormas as a new political force and each of them has been affiliated with particular ormas in

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the province of Bali. Mahadewi (2017) argues that Puri figures dominate in the emerging local oligarchy class, because in contemporary politics only Puri figures who are both rich and royal will have a capacity to network beyond their traditional territories. Even the ongoing modernization of society does not overwhelm their ability to adapt and maintain if not build networks in their royal circles. These networks were presented as a matter of strengthening family ties, but actually they are matter of strengthening practical political goals. These old and new political geographies shaped contestation. In Denpasar and parts of Badung (where most of the tourism is), a mixture of people originating from within and outside the Puri has coloured the oligarchical contest. A dominant oligarchy centres primarily on two Puri and rivalry between them is integral to the struggle for power and influence (Ardhana 1993). It is evident from their rivalry that Puri Pemecutan and Puri Satria have each won influence and each fostered oligarchs competing against each other since the end of the New Order. Similarly, in Gianyar Regency, political contestation between Puri Gianyar and Puri Ubud has arisen since the era of the Soekarno government. Dwiputra (2013) states that these two palaces rely upon “political-brokerage” to strengthen their oligarchic power. The extent of their social, economic, and political capital has seen them survive after their classical pre-colonial period and successively transform during the Dutch colonial period, independence from the returning Dutch, Sukarno’s government, the New Order, and the post-New Order era. A third way to trace the magnitude of the influence of the ormas oligarchy in Bali is to look at the history of rivalry between Puri in Bali. This rivalry greatly shaped the emergence of local oligarchs in their respective districts. The very long transition to democracy facilitated the political revival of the Puri in areas that retained strong feudal leadership such as Puri Pemecutan, Puri Satria, Puri Klungkung, Puri Ubud, and Puri Karangasem. There was intense contestation and competition among powerful groups of strongmen and traditional feudal groups of Puri descent. On the whole, the Puri are still important social entities that have special capabilities to gain support and legitimacy from the community, both materially and morally. In the reform era, Puri groups all over Indonesia have taken up opportunities to create local oligarchies and Bali is no exception. In Bali, oligarchic power among the Puri has happened around local elections. This is shown in the research by Nordholt and Klinken (2007)

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on Javanese civil militias who often deploy identity politics during election campaigns in Banten (in West Java). Another study by Wilson and Nugroho (2012) on the role of Forum Komunikasi Pembangunan (Development Communication Forum) and Forum Betawi Rempung (the Betawi Brotherhood Forum) in the local elections in the Capital Region of Jakarta shows that these militias each exist and operate in much the same way as their counterparts do in Bali. Tourism is the primary strength of the Balinese economy and it is also a source of strength for the aristocratic oligarchy. Interviews revealed that the growth of tourism in Bali is a distinct advantage for aristocratic oligarchs based in the Puri. Tourism is very profitable because this oligarchy can utilize the sale of land owned by the Puri. They can use the capital to finance profitable enterprises that reinforce their position as an elite group of rulers in Bali. Since the 1970s, the Balinese economy has been based on tourism. Elites in the Puri were well placed to become oligarchs on the basis of large land holdings in prime locations. Some Puri developed various tourist businesses. The ability to develop business networks and serve the people with employment saw this group feel reborn after their strength and power had waned during the economic crisis of the 1930s, Japanese occupation and World War II, the struggle for independence and the problems of political economy in the 1950s and 1960s. In Bali the Puri groups are quite important because they exercise strengths that are not available to other forces or groups. Suwita (2015) classifies three strengths of the Puri group: moral strength, great ability, and financial strength. Fathermore Suwita said, the image of the castle are formed through finer things and traditional values such as helping repair temples, helping traditional villages, and other religious ceremonies. The ability (building social networks) to get along with and the ability to serve the people (social capital). There are times when people come to the castle and the castle never refuses community requests. The request was not only in the form of material, but also advice and information, historical explanations and the general public to receive a moral obligation. For that reason, if there is a ceremony at the castle, people come to father without being told. Assistance in the form of advice on customs, religion, history is a force that is included in the category of “knowledge is power”. Similarly, Dominique (2014) found that the Puri groups continue to attract attention from the community, during for example the 2014 legislative elections. Dominique studied Anak Agung Ngurah

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Gede Widiada who belongs to the Puri Peguyangan in Denpasar. His strategy was to provide Upacara Memukur (cremation services purifying the spirits of the deceased) and Mesangih (tooth filing to rid young people of animalistic aggression) for all Peguyangan villagers. The ceremonies were held in Puri Peguyangan for seven days. He provided social assistance as a complementary activity and certainly succeeded in attracting the community’s attention. For the community around Puri Peguyangan, Anak Agung Ngurah Gede Widiada’s engagement in politics will benefit them because only Puri figures can deploy the three forces of morality, capability, and finances. However, the resurgence of the Puri oligarchy in Denpasar does not represent the entirety of emerging local oligarchs in Bali. According to one informant, in Jembrana, Klungkung, and Gianyar the Puri oligarchs were outcompeted by newly emerging groups after the post-Suharto reform era. As mentioned earlier, the sustainability of Bali’s development is a major factor in the emergence of local oligarchs in Bali. As they emerged each of them translated this in their own way. Consequently, the abuse of Bali remains sustainable in that cultural networks are used for the acquisition of interests. Misuse also occurs in, for example, the use of cultural symbols at the political level. Either way, politics in Bali always includes elements of the local culture, which has a very decisive role for any political contenders. Other researchers have observed the same developments. According to Segel (2017), local oligarchs use the culture of tajen to improve their trust within society. Tajen is literally “absurdity” but means cockfighting. Any political actor who has a close relationship with the Sekaa Tajen— cockfighting tournament—certainly has the opportunity to mobilize the masses and win votes to gain political office in the Legislative Election. This approach to culture is practiced by one of the local oligarchs from Tabanan (west of Denpasar). Ketut Suryadi is a political elite with socioeconomic power and capital. He provides security around the ceremony and the fighting cocks with the aim of building relationships with the organisers and building their sense of trust in him. Beyond the cockfighting, the strong men or local oligarchs mobilize voters in diverse ways, providing financial assistance, creating emotional connections, and so on. This is achieved through culture for the tajen fans and people from the lower middle class. Similarly, Gemet (2017) argues that the very long transition period has allowed local oligarchs to succeed in extending their positions utilizing

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the local business network and local cultural values around each cockfight betting event, gradually accumulating more power. In this manner, incumbents I Putu Artha and Made Kembang Hartawan contesting the positions of Regent and Deputy Regent of Jembrana succeeded in maintaining their position at the direct election in 2015 because they could utilize local cultural values to maintain their power in the local realm. At present the Regent of Jembrana is the only local oligarch. Through their political-economic networks and their use of social capital, the Regent and his Deputy won the 2010 and were re-elected in 2015 (Gemet 2017). They developed relationships with various community groups such as the Sekaa Makepung (buffalo racing) network, ensuring a good reputation when they funded the cost of maintaining the Makepung circuit and increased the prize money every year. The Sekaa Makepung is a gambling network that is particularly well connected in the Jembrana Regency. Other oligarchs have also been utilizing the rapid mobilization of local culture in Bali, as shown by local strong men such as Cok Ratmadi commonly called Cok Rat. Utilizing the networks organized around Cekian Bali (an association for the popular card game ceki), the local strongman succeeded in mobilizing supporters who delivered him political power, namely the seat of the legislative member (DPD) of Bali. Among the local strongmen in Bali, gatherings around the card game ceki are considered very important for the acquisition of power interests. Cekian has a large if not fanatical following in Bali. On the road to power, the local strongmen seeking to join the local oligarchy will help to organize some ceki tournaments ahead of an upcoming election. Most people consider it a form of gambling, but like Bridge it is based on taking tricks and adherents find the skill of players most entertaining, so it is not considered to be entirely a matter of gambling. Regardless of whether it is gambling, ceki has a large following because of the entertainment value enjoyed by all parties. It is not surprising that ceki is massively popular in many places throughout Bali (Angga, 2015). Given that the ceki is so big and has many fans with deep roots in Bali, it is used by party sympathizers and politicians to achieve their political goals. People working for politicians try to intermingle with ceki fans, seek out the best place in the crowd, become players, or organize a tournament in order to portray themselves and their politician as being on the same side as the ceki fans. Sympathizers or politicians who are part of a ceki tournament join people from different professional backgrounds, family backgrounds,

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lineages, and customs. Ceki can gather all these different people together so it is seen as a pretty good campaign ground for politicians. Sympathizers, or politicians themselves, who join a ceki tournament will certainly need campaign capital, both in the form of financial capital and other sources of power such as traditional roles in a Puri and important positions in traditional communities. This power will lead to a closer relationship with the community because when the authorities can blend with the people, the community will see that the authorities want to protect what they are doing. This promotes relationships and networking that will continue to develop on several levels as each individual is expected to spread the network around them. The strength of the network formed through ceki tournaments follows the same patterns everywhere because the interests of the politicians and traditional leaders and the rules of the game are identical everywhere. To provide protection for, or to be a protector of, these ceki tournaments greatly influence the strength of the network formed in the community around the ceki tournaments. According to Nurhasim (2003), the local political elite includes anyone who occupies political positions in the executive and legislative branches and elected in democratic political processes at the local level. Local elites, in this case traditional leaders together with indigenous people, can be said to rule out making formal regulations about ceki because there is an assumption that this game is situational and not played every day. It is primarily the local political elite who are involved in the ceki tournaments because there is an opportunity to win the sympathy and voice of the community. Being directly involved and being a starter or first player offers the best opportunity to be noticed and that is what all political elites are seeking (Nordholt 2006: xxii). To achieve central involvement in the tournament, the political elite needs to negotiate with various parties and key power holders in the traditional villages, hamlets, and guards or pecalang.

Conclusions This chapter is basically a critical reflection on the phenomenon of local democracy in Indonesia. It concludes that local democracy in Indonesia has not yet entered the consolidated phase of democratic transition. The many new problems that have arisen in the current phase mean Indonesian democracy remains under the shadow of fragility.

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Under such a shadow, the democracy that has developed is often referred to as oligarchical. The development of oligarchs in Bali cannot be separated from two factors: first, the growth of tourism as the driving force of capitalism in Bali; and second, the sense of alienation of the Balinese. The latter gave birth to the spirit of Ajeg Bali, which fostered the emergence of local oligarchies that developed under the influence of the ormas. Oligarchic elites benefit from tourist capitalism in Bali. They have used it to finance development assistance in their villages of origin, with the construction of banjar (hamlet) facilitities, temples, and other community facilities. They have also been involved in mentoring local village thugs. For oligarchs, tourist capitalism provides benefits in the long- and short-term. In the short term, it helps maintain social status and strengthens social standing. In the long term, it helps to maintain the networks and strengthens the social base that are needed to climb the peaks of power. These two benefits of tourist capitalism have accumulated in Buleleng. This area has a local societal organization, ormas, known as Buldog or Buleleng Dogen. This organization was formed by local oligarchs who are from Buleleng but live in Denpasar. They are true local oligarchies who enjoy the opportunities of capitalist tourism and have succeed in making a profit. The oligarchs in Bali emerged from, and were fostered by, the massive development of capitalist tourism. Control over capital benefitted the oligarchs, who used their money to promote thugs who in turn formed ormas to preserve the oligarchs’ interests. This is in line with the view of some Balinese who think the oligarchs formed the ormas drawing together people already well-known for their thuggish backgrounds and could be readily recruited unless they had already volunteered to join the new ormas. In this convergence of the interests of oligarchs and the ormas, mutualistic symbiosis developed as both the oligarchs and their ormas leaders succeeded in winning political positions. In turn, such success gave them strategic positions as political elites. All of this demonstrates a development in which many local political officials in Bali collude with thugs who are mostly affiliated with one of the ormas. This is indisputable. In addition to the ideology around tourism, some Balinese also ideologize Ajeg Bali. Ajeg Bali began to be misinterpreted from the true meaning of saving Bali from the ravages of invading outside influences

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(taksu), as it turned into a matter of forming security units; first pecalang and then ormas. Ajeg Bali emerged as an effort driven by hidden power relations. The spirit of Bali is mentioned, but its manifestation is always an intellectual exercise in creating new cultural symbols to redefine the Balinese diversity of identity for the sake of powerful interests. It is arguable that the spirit of Ajeg Bali, constrained by a very long democratic transition, has shifted from meaning a mere transformation of Balinese culture to mean giving birth to new local oligarchic groups. These conditions for oligarchy are increasingly out of control as tourism has become a driver of the capitalist economy. One effect of this is the increasingly uncontrolled distribution of power. The economy is concentrated in the hands of a small number of elites who are delaying any further transition to democracy.

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Hadiz, Vedi R. (2003). “Power and Politics in North Sumatra: The Uncompleted Reformasi”. In Local Power and Politics in Indonesia: Decentralisation and Democratisation, ed. Edward Aspinall and Greg Fealy. Singapore: ISEAS-Yusof Ishak Institute, 119–131. Hadiz, Vedi. R. (2010). Kekuatan Lokalisasi di Indonesia Pasca-Otoriter: Perspektif Asia Tenggara. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Hadiz., Vedi., R, & Richrd Robison. (2004). Reorganizing Power in Indonesia: the Politics of Oligarchy in an Age of Market. London: RoutledgeCurzon. Ibrahim. (2017). “Local Election and the Future of Indonesian Democracy”. PEOPLE: International Journal of Social Sciences 3 (1). https://grdspubli shing.org/index.php/people/article/view/304. Mahadewi, I. A. Mas. (2017). Dominasi Peran Puri dalam Kontestasi Politik di Bali: studi Kasus Puri Agung Denpasar (Skripsi 2017). Maluku Utara, Jawa Timur dan Kalimantan Tengah. Jakarta, Pusat Penelitian Politik- LIPI. Mastini, Komang. (2014). Faktor Tingginya Partisipasi Politik Masyarakat Desa Sidetapa Pada Pemilu Legislatif Tahun. Mills, C. Wright. (1956). The Power Elite. New York: Oxford University Press. Ning, Raqhuel Dominique. (2014). Strategi Politik Incumbent Mempertahankan Suara Pasca Pindah Partai Pada Pemilu Legislatif Kota Denpasar Tahun. (Skripsi: 2016). (Incumbent Political Strategy to Defend Votes Post-Move Party in Legislative Elections 2014, Denpasar City. Essay: 2016). Nordholt, Henk Schulte. (2006). Bali Benteng Terbuka 1995–2005. Pustaka Larasan, Denpasar Bali. Nordholt, Henk Schulte & Gerry van Klinken (Eds.). (2007). Politik Lokal di Indonesia, Obor, Jakarta. Nurhasim, Moch. (2003). Konflik Antar Elit Politik dalam Pemilihan Kepala Daerah: Kasus. Putra, I. Nyoman Dharma (Ed.). (2004). Bali menuju Jagaditha: Aneka Perspektif. Pustaka Bali Post, Denpasar. Raphaeli, Nimrod. (2003). Saudi Arabia: A Brief Guide to Its Politics and Problems, Dalam Middle East Review of International Affairs, September. Santikarma, D. (2002). Budaya Siaga dan Siaga Budaya, Kompas Minggu, 6 November. Segel, I. Kadek Eggy. (2017). “Mobilisasi Massa Melalui tajen dalam pemilian Umum Legislatif Tahun 2014 di Kabupaten Tabanan”. E-jurnal Politika 1 (1). https://ojs.unud.ac.id/index.php/politika/article/view/32853. Siegel, James T. (2000). Penjahat Gaya Orde Baru, Eksplorasi Politik dan Kriminalitas. Yogyakarta: LKiS. Sudantra, I. Ketut. (2007). “Pelaksanaan Fungsi Hakim Perdamaian Desa dalam Kondisi Dualisme Pemerintahan Desa di Bali”. Program Pasca Sarjana Universitas Udayana, Denpasar.

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Suryawan, I. Ngurah. (2013). Desa Pakraman dan Habitus (kekerasan) Manusia Bali. Opini: Bali Publika, 14–27 Januari. Suwarso, Reni. (2013). Some Thoughts of Indonesian Politics since Reformasi 1998: Electoral Systems and Political Parties”. In Belajar dari Politik Lokal. Jakarta: UI-Press. Suwita, I. Putu G. (2015). “Castle Elite in the Contemporary Political Lanscape of Bali”. Dalam Jurnal kajian Bali 5 (1). Warren, C. (1993). Adat and Dinas: Balinese Communities in the Indonesia State. New York: Oxford University Press. Wijaya, Nyoman. (2004). “Melawan Ajeg Bali: Antara Eksklusivitas dan Komersialisalisasi”. Jurnal Ilmu Sejarah Tantular. Jurusan Sejarah, Denpasar. Wilson, Lee & Nugroho Eryanto. (2012). “For the Good of the People?” Inside Indonesia, 19 August https://www.insideindonesia.org/for-the-good-of-thepeople. Winters, Jeffrey A. (2011). Oligarchy. London: Cambridge University Press.

CHAPTER 8

The Internal Governance of Civil Militia Tedi Erviantono Translated by Augustina Wayansari

Introduction Civil militias or ormas in Bali are representations of non-formal forces that are common and can be found in countries around the world. This is a consequence of a state that does not accommodate all community forces into its formal structure. Wilson and Bakker’s study (2016: 292) emphasized the way in which militia groups in several different countries are run, using their ‘securitization’ to construct threats as the basis for the legitimacy of political groups. Kurniawan (2017) notes that general elections as a mechanism for the circulation of formal political structures only provides for a limited number of seats. Powers that actually have a more material and cultural basis are sometimes left out of the process. Eventually they become non-formal powers, one of which is the civilia militia organizations. The classical approach to political systems, renders non-formal power a counterweight to the power of formal structures, either as supporting parties or pressure groups (Haryanto 1982). Only in a different way, in the name of harmony and social stabilization,

T. Erviantono (B) Faculty of Social and Political Science, Udayana University, Denpasar, Indonesia © The Author(s) 2021 A. Vandenberg and N. Zuryani (eds.), Security, Democracy, and Society in Bali, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-5848-1_8

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can people who do not buy into formal political structures be accommodated through other forms of relations that negotiate interests with state political actors. In these circumstances, the non-formal powers manifested within and wielded by the militia organizations have helped enrich democracies with their ability to adapt while taking advantage of political changes taking place at the local level. These militia organizations’ ability to adapt is the focus of this paper. More specifically, it focuses on their ability to adapt by utilizing bodily reality to compete with various power relations of internal and external knowledge. This paper uses an interpretive perspective, drawing upon Michel Foucault’s concept of governmentality. Governmentality sees bodily capacity as a battleground, within which obedience is embedded. Such obedience is created by technologies of self-discipline as a way to control power. Power is a productive force that can lead to regulation or discipline and, ultimately, obedience. Compliance, or obedience, is accepted without resistance, which according to Gramsci is referred to as hegemony. Power is a false consciousness that can be manipulative, specifically in the form of knowledge production and its immersion in community collectivities. The body can regulate itself without direct orders‚ violence‚ or domination from others. Group hegemony features technologies of control that work without the need for violence or domination‚ only the manipulation of consensus that is perpetrated by obedient individuals.

Dual Status Individuals associated with the militia organizations (ormas) in Bali can be said to have ‘dual status’, acting as both citizens and as members of mass militia organizations. These statuses are substitutive but at times they can also be counterproductive. There are various responses from ‘leaders’ that aim to affect the governing of militia organizations. In this context, ‘elites’ are understood as those who occupy positions of dominance within groups as a result of the values they have created, formed, and produced. They occupy the uppermost strata of the group, and hold a commanding position over the decision-making that binds all of a group’s members (Haryanto 2017a: 88–90). Technologies of self-discipline are used by these elites as a manipulation strategy to control the behaviour of all members. They do not control through violence or domination, but rather the voluntary self-regulation of members through organizational

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symbolic ties. Symbols are perpetuated through various spatial technologies and forms, ranging from tattoos to the commodification of sound through the commercial recording industry. In this context, both leaders and members can, in the grand scheme of ‘well-being’, also succeed in running the State’s biopower as compliant and obedient individuals. As noted, these statuses are mutually substitutive. Issues arise, however, when in certain phases they are counterproductive; the reality of the behaviours of group members and elites clash with the State’s criminal law. In reality, the state’s biopower is weakening. However, technologies of the self continue to constitute obedient bodies. The essence of this makes for an interesting read when it presents itself. Everything put on display by these militia organizations can be seen as a representation of power that emerges from the elite and members of the body through the production of new knowledge around the discipline and the training of the body. This model of discipline and physical training is an important aspect of the understanding of the reality of public relations in modern times (Wilson 2015: 1). The writer had a chance to see this in practice during a meeting with members of a militia organization as they conducted a training session at a gym southwest of Denpasar City. Their muscular bodies were inked with jet-black tattoos, and their singlets hugged the outlines of their muscles. Some of them had wrapped small white towels around their heads. On this occasion, there were three people present, trading banter in Balinese. They greeted their seniors as ‘Tu Ajik’ (father), and used ‘Gus’ when greeting those younger than themselves. As they work their barbells, they commented that exercises like these were a part of their everyday morning routine. Indeed, it had become a daily lifestyle, especially upon clockingoff after working overtime as security guards on ‘night watch’ in the entertainment district of Seminyak. Their activities at the gym helped to restore their stamina even though they had to pay a monthly membership fee at the fitness centre of up to Rp. 30,000. That said, the cost is relatively cheap for a gym of this size in the middle of the city. One of them, a member of a Badung militia organization, said that every member of his organization makes an effort to look after their bodies so as to always appear fit. What’s more, the head of field coordinators of the militia organization (who is also the owner of a security services company in Tabanan) provides variously sized barbells to his employees, who are members of various militia organizations, so that they can do the exercises during their down time. The meaning of ‘fit’ among them

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varies, with body shape, fitness, and appearance of all important measures of fitness. Their bodies were expected to conform with desired ‘ideal representations’, and to align with the standards of the group ‘as they would demand it’. As such, in this way, one’s body is disciplined more by others than by oneself (Johnston and Longhurst 2010: 30–31). The meaning of ‘fit’ shared by most of the militia organizations is perceived as muscular arms, full tattoo images decorating the chest, and arms that display a masculine, dashing side, as if raring to fight one’s opponents. That being said, the identification of one’s opponents can be extremely relative. On another occasion, the author invited a member of a militia’s central management to participate as a speaker at a discussion forum. During the question and answer session in early 2012, one student enquired as to why the bodies of members of the mass organization were strong and covered in tattoos. The manager, who at that time was considered within his organization to have a fairly high educational background, gave his answer: he explained that they can not truly rely on anything except their bodies, puffing his chest out as he spoke. He emphasized that the difference between members of militia organizations and academics or students was indeed their strength. Militia members can only rely on the strength of their muscles, while academics have the ability to analyse things. The organizations’ leaders must think about solutions when their organizations become vulnerable to internal or external conflict (Discussion Forum, Sociology, Udayana University 2013; Interview, 2018). This answer from 2012 was repeated later in response to numerous questions from Balinese locals as they witnessed the rise of the militia organizations’ billboards, which were scattered throughout the city. In the background of the photo, the field coordinator (korlap) wore a shirt bearing the logo of the militia organization, and tight-fitting so as to display muscular arms covered in tattoos. Underneath there would be a photo of junior members, lined up and bare-chested. Their lower halves were covered with a traditional kamben cloth and all showed off their sturdy arms. Symbols of militia organizations are still displayed on a large-scale like this, featuring bodies that are deliberately commodified as images of prowess and masculinity. According to Picard’s study, which saw Bali as an island developing a culture of ‘touristification’, the bodies of militia organizations were like a battle arena and a constructed image (Picard 1997: 181; Vickers 1989: 28). The reality of the Balinese body is that it is an interface representing complex spiritual, social, and

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natural forces, depending on the aspect being written upon (Lewis and Lewis 2009: 86). The body is the place of various power configurations working with disciplinary mechanisms and the presence of biopower in itself (Wilson 2015: 13). The exoticism of the body, masculinity, and the value system that initially displays ethnic authenticity, namely ajeg Bali, sheds light on the differentiation of identity between ‘us and them’. Ajeg Bali is not a matter of cultural retention (art, tradition, Balinese Hindu values), rather it is a matter of economic retention in the locations where they live (Suryawan 2012: xviii). Ajeg Bali in this context includes a sense of ‘male’ and ‘militaristic’ content (Suryawan 2012: 71). These meanings become markers as well as organizational glue, all clearly illustrated in the reality of a body marked with tattoos. Symbols of the organizations include members’ tattoos, the burly body that featured in the outdoor billboards, the voice commodified in the commercial recording industry, and the confrontational wearing of t-shirts, which often ignited conflicts between members of the militia organizations causing injury and sometimes claiming lives. It was notable that during 2013–2017 there were several public brawls between members of the militia organizations, some of which were triggered by symbols and the displayed identity. In reality the brawls and clashes between the organizations reported in the media (Table 8.1) stemmed from trivial issues around reprimands, yelling out, prestige and pride among members of the militia organizations, solidarity among them, and their identification with symbols displayed on billboards and worn on members’ clothing. The symbol became important because it was the identifier for the militia group concerned.

Fear and Mimicry Mcdonald and Wilson (2017: 8) argue that militia groups often use authority in the name of customary law (adat) as a discourse to balance concerns about threats to cultural and spiritual sustainability. However, the customary police (pecalang) are totally different to the militia organizations whose territory is outside the bounds of customary authority. Bali is well known for the thick duality of its formal and customary government (Nordholt 2010: 33; Covarubias 2014: 65), namely traditional (adat) villages and official (dinas) villages. The official village is an extension of the central government in the context of a modern state,

Brawling in Denpasar between two members of security organizations. No reprimands from other members of mass organizations. No charges. Two victims, one from a security organization, were treated at the Sanglah hospital. Evidence secured: chain bracelets, dried coconut containing bloodstains, wooden beams, eyeglass frames, hammers with blood spots and four motorcycles Brawling began over the destruction of billboards promoting the album of a Balinese singer, in vicinity of offices of a mass organizations in Kayuputih Village, Buleleng. The members were involved in a dispute through SMS which led to brawling

27th January 2017

5th May 2016

Type of violence Jalan Nuansa Indah Denpasar, at 16:30 WITA

2 people were seriously injured

No victims

Bali regional police with security evidence of violence and peaceful facilitation between the two mass organizations which clashed, with prayers and symbolic settlement in the temple in February 2017

Police facilitate negotiation of a peace agreement

Kayuputih Village, Banjar District, Buleleng Regency. At 16:00 WITA

Location and time

Victim

Form of management

A chronology of violence between militia in Bali 2012–2017

Date

Table 8.1

182 T. ERVIANTONO

The brawling in Gianyar began when members of mass organizations intentionally crashed a motorcycle into a car driven by one of the leaders of another mass organization, who were mourning the death of the parents of their leader. They did not accept apologies, conflict ensued leading to the death of one member of the mass organization who was wearing a T-shirt emblazoned with the organization’s symbols Riots in prisons/Penitentiary Class IIA Kerobokan, Bali. This was triggered by the riots a few months earlier (17 December 2015) between members of a large militia group

3rd June 2016

21st April 2016

Type of violence

Date Jalan Raya Batuan, Sukawati District, Gianyar Regency. 14:30 WITA

One person dead

No victims

Three perpetrators are taken to the Gianyar District Court. During the hearing the prosecutor alerted police prevent further brawling. The judge sentenced the 4 defendants to 2 years and six months imprisonment on charges of premeditated murder

Head of the prison transfers trouble-makers to another prison

(continued)

Kerobokan Prison, Badung, 19:00 WITA

Location and time

Victim

Form of management

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Type of violence

Brawling between members of two militia groups in Denpasar. Fighting took place at several points starting in prison, the Teuku Umar Street area, and around Jayagiri Denpasar. The fighting began over information about clashes between two prison inmates from two different mass organizations in prison. This news spread among members. A peace agreement was signed by both parties in front of the Chairman of the Main Assembly of Pakraman Village (MUDP), the commander of the Udayana Regional Military Command IX, the Provincial Government of Bali and the Bali regional police

17th December 2015

(continued)

Date

Table 8.1 Victim

Four people dead The sentencing of the three defendants with varying sentences in the verdict hearing at the Denpasar District Court. The decision of each defendant was sentenced to 3 years in prison and 1 year and 3 months in prison One defendant was found guilty of beatings by using violence against people resulting in serious injuries and death, as regulated and threatened in Article 170 paragraph (2) 2–3 of the Criminal Code

Form of management

Kerobokan Prison, Badung 16:00 WITA

Location and time

184 T. ERVIANTONO

Brawling in the Denpasar, Tohpati area. Started over offense due to shouting by members of mass organizations driving past on a motorcycle Brawling between individual members of militia organizations in the Denpasar area due to one person firing firecrackers. Seven motorbikes were burned and two cars damaged

28th January 2013 Highway in front of Dharma Yadnya Hospital, Tohpati, Denpasar. At 21:00 WITA

Jalan Raya Dalung-Kuwanji, North Kuta District, Badung Regency. At 23:00 WITA

Two people injured

The conflict ended with a peace agreement and prayers by all members of the two mass organizations in Pura Besar. Facilitated by the state apparatus: the police and Denpasar City Government

Location and time

No casualties

Victim

A peace agreement was concluded between the leaders of mass organizations facilitated by the police

Form of management

Sources Listed by date Kertasari, Kis. 2017. ‘Dua Ormas Terbesar di Bali Bentrok, Dua Orang Dilarikan ke RS’. SindoNews.com, 22 January. https://daerah.sindonews.com/ read/1173165/174/dua-ormas-terbesar-di-bali-bentrok-dua-orang-dilarikan-ke-rs-1485088752 Bali Berkarya. 2017. ‘Beh Jeg!b Lagi Antar Anggota Ormas Berantem, 2 Korban Luika Dirawat di Sanglah’. Bali Berkarya.com, 22 January. https://bal iberkarya.com/index.php/read/2017/01/22/201701220014/Beh-Jeg-Lagi-Antar-Anggota-Ormas-Berantem-2-Korban-Luka-di-Rawat-di-Sanglah.html Kabarnusa. 2017. ‘Bentrok Anggota Ormas di Denpasar, Dua Terluka Parah’. Kabarnusa.com, 22 January. https://www.kabarnusa.com/2017/01/ben trok-anggota-ormas-di-denpasar-dua.html Wicaksono, Luga. 2016. ‘Bentrok 2 Ormas di Buleleng Dipicu Perusakan Baliho Penyanyi Bali’. Tribun Bali, 7 May. http://bali.tribunnews.com/ 2016/05/07/bentrok-2-ormas-di-buleleng-dipicu-perusakan-baliho-penyanyi-bali Raiza Andini. 2016. ‘Dipicu Masalah Pribadi Anggota, Dua Ormas di Bali Bentrok’. Oke News, 6 May. https://news.okezone.com/read/2016/05/ 06/340/1382034/dipicu-masalah-pribadi-anggota-dua-ormas-di-bali-bentrok Manggol, Aloisus H. 2016. ‘Dewa Gede Artawan Tewas Bersimbah Darah di Batuan Bali, Laskar Bali Bantah Bentrok Ormas’. Tribun Bali, 3 June. http://bali.tribunnews.com/2016/06/03/dewa-gede-artawan-tewas-bersimbah-darah-di-batuan-bali-laskar-bali-bantah-bentrok-ormas

23rd December 2012

Type of violence

Date

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24 December. https://news.okezone.com/read/2012/12/23/340/736227/gara-gara-mercon-2-ormas-di-bali-nyaris-bentrok

2012/12/25/340/736795/bentrok-anggota-ormas-di-bali-2-terlukaRohmat. 2012a. ‘Gara-Gara Mercon, 2 Ormas di Bali Nyaris Bentrok’. Oke News,

trok-depan-rumah-sakitRohmat. 2012b. ‘Bentrok Anggota Ormas di Bali, 2 Terluka’. Oke News, 25 December. https://news.okezone.com/read/

Besar di Denpasar Bentrok Depan Rumah Sakit’. Tribun Bali, 29 January. http://bali.tribunnews.com/2013/01/29/2-ormas-besar-di-denpasar-ben

December. https://www.beritasatu.com/nasional/332957-bentrok-ormas-di-denpasar-empat-tewas-puluhan-luka.htmlIskandar, Yoni. 2013. ‘2 Ormas

baladika-vs-laskar-bali-ini-kronologinyaMardika, I. Nyoman. 2015. ‘Bentrok Ormas di Denpasar, Empat Tewas Puluhan Luka’. Berita Satu, 17

‘Rusuh Denpasar Baladika Vs Laskar Bali, Ini Kronologinya’. Tempo.co, 18 December. https://nasional.tempo.co/read/728981/rusuh-denpasar-

Tribun Bali, 21 April. http://bali.tribunnews.com/2016/04/22/lapas-kerobokan-kembali-memanas-bentrok-dipicu-balas-dendamSetiawan, Bram. 2015.

pelimpahan-11-tersangka-bentrokan-ormasCandra, Putu. 2016. ‘Lapas Kerobokan Rusuh, Diduga Dipicu Pelimpahan 11 Tersangka Bentrokan Ormas’.

Tersangka Bentrokan Ormas’. Oke News, 21 April. https://news.okezone.com/read/2016/04/21/340/1369420/lapas-kerobokan-rusuh-diduga-dipicu-

iwa/pria-tewas-dikeroyok-di-sukawati-ternyata-pentolan-laskar-bali.htmlSukiswanti, Puji. 2016. ‘Lapas Kerobokan Rusuh, Diduga Dipicu Pelimpahan 11

Jaya, Gede Nadi. 2016. ‘Pria tewas dikeroyok di Sukawati ternyata pentolan Laskar Bali’. Merdeka.com, 3 June. https://www.merdeka.com/perist

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while the adat village is based on the relationship between religious and cultural communality. The traditional villages play a central role in the cosmological aspects of its citizens, from birth to death (Covarubias 2014: 42; Gertz 2017: 82). The existence of adat actually has no relation at all to strengthening the identity culture of the militia groups. Local militia groups are fora in which the members are mostly of similar Balinese background (‘semeton’) from various traditional villages. They are tied together by group interests that are not based on adat. Adat for them is a narrative of great power about being Balinese. This is a psychological bond for the militias providing a collective concern about the future (Lake and Rothchild 1996: 43; Haryanto 2017b) even if that is fragmented through their respective material interests. Local militia members feel secure and guaranteed of their wellbeing when they are within their group. Their self-identification with the groups tends to strengthen them. If there is a distortion of information then collective concerns are paramount and at times can point towards a destructive collective fearfulness. This situation is sometimes deliberately maintained by the leaders in order to secure a variety of interests (Alfirdaus 2017; Manggol 2016; Jaya 2016a). This condition explains how members of militia ormas can resist and react quickly. When they feel their interests are not being accommodated, as Lake and Rothchild (1996) put it, they tend to go their own way. Leaders or older members were not merely leaving, they left their organizations thinking about a need to change their interests or rebuild them through forming new institutions (rational choice institutionalism). They build new militia organizations to facilitate the actualization of their new interests. When an old institution is no longer able to respond to its environmental demands, it experiences a shock. Existing actors try to encourage changes so that their interests can be accommodated (Kurniawan 2009: 17). Such case was stated by one leader of a militia organizations in Bali. Previously he was a member of the largest militia organization. He played a role as an intermediary between militia organizations and business people in Jakarta. At one time there was a clash between militia organizations and a local arm of the security apparatus, the TNI—Indonesian National Armed Forces, so that the organization was in danger. Most leaders went to prison causing chaos within the organization. At that time he was in Jakarta and was told to go home because the members

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wanted him to sit as their leader. However when he returned, he was imprisoned instead. There was no defence from his militia organization and he was disappointed, as were other friends who shared the same feelings. After leaving prison, he and his comrades along with loyal members stated that they had left the old militia organization and formed a new one. However at the beginning of the formation of the new militia organization he did not want to be positioned as a leader. He finally agreed to assume the position after being pushed into it and he put forward the condition that his new organization must follow new rules of the game, not the old system followed by the previous militia organizations (Interview, 2018; Candra 2016; Mardika 2015). Changes occur when an old institution is deemed to have failed to meet the requirements for reaching the initial goal when it was formed. Changes in the organizational environment have an effect on the structure of opportunity for the actors (Kurniawan 2009: 20), including the emergence of new militia organizations in Bali. When actors’ self-interests are not accommodated and worse, if they become victims of old militia organizations that do not provide optimal legal defence, then through the strength of social capital, the old leaders tend to gather members binding them together with solidarity of social capital and symbolic capital. Here, collective fearfulness becomes a situation that is deliberately preserved as a joint weapon for the formation of new militia organizations. Social capital consists in a network among the old militia organization members who are considered to be loyal followers. For symbolic capital, the process of newness or rebirth of new militia organizations is characterized by symbolization, which actually have the power to cross time and space. Here, the formation of new mass organizations, which might initially be explained through rational choice institutionalism, tended to shift understanding to sociological institutionalism. In this understanding, the formation of institutions is not only based on formal rules, procedures or norms, but also based on a system of symbols, cognitive references, and moral frameworks that provide actors’ basic frame of action (Kurniawan 2009: 21). Resistance and the ability to reproduce new militia organizations involve a series of markers that are symptomatic of the phenomenon of mimicry (Kurniawan 2009). This is exemplified by the mushrooming of new militia organizations between 2000 and 2017, including the emergence of Baladika Bali, Balinese Youth Unite, Children of Kerobokan, Sanur United, Padangsambian Bersatu (although they refused to be called

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a militia organization), Buleleng Dogen, and so on. Mimicry is used to describe the process of imitation and does not display dependency among those who break away from their old groups. Imitators actually enjoy and play with the ambivalence that occurs in the imitating process. Mimicry is both an imitation and subversion that is seen as a strategy to confront the domination of pre-existing militia organizations. This form of mimicry is disguised and ambivalent, perpetuates yet also negates previous domination (Bhabha 1994: 85). On the one hand new militia organizations want to establish an identity in common with old organizations, but they also maintain their differences. For this reason, Tantra (2015: 51) calls mimicry a basis for hybrid identity. Hybrid identity that is built from mimicry implies two things. First, it is complex form of strategy to reorganize, organize, discipline, and match others in order to visualize their strength. Second, it is a strategy of resistance to the dominance of the old militia organizations, so that what is carried out can be called mockery, mimicking but also making fun of them (Bhabha 1994: 86). For example, new militia organizations feel they do not need to require the use of an identity tattoo among members, or deploy symbols of their organization, or logos that mix symbols of old organizations and other militia organizations. The series of strategies displayed present the new organizations as either parallel with, or superior to, the previous or other organizations. There is a room for new forces to operate in a more contemporary context and that seems to be able to answer all issues that arise from the dissatisfaction of the leaders or members of the old militia organizations. Really their mobility is very high in adapting to changes in the patronbuilt political economy, but their membership is always built on the foundation of strong symbolic solidarity values. The sign of the exercise of power was initially shaped by the visualization of symbolic solidarity. This emerged in an interview with a leader of a new mass organization who stated that at the beginning of the formation of a new militia organization, he was not living in Bali, but was in the United States. When he finally won members’ trust in him as the operational leader, then the symbols and new management formed and the problem of organizational control was easy. Militia organizations have symbols which are directly handled by elites or daily leaders, because they did not want just any random or meaningless symbol, but seek a symbol that has a unifying effect and is based in a philosophy (Interview, 2018). Symbols are an important force in how organizations are formed. When the conciliation stage at the elite or member level is less than optimal, the symbol becomes

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the unifier that comes to mind. In this stage, the elites are in a limited space of interaction and the symbols can become a binder of virtual solidarity for members and leaders. The symbol of the organization locates compromises reached in bargaining within the collective fearfulness of those who have experienced collective concerns about the future. Some militia organizations such as Laskar Bali, Baladika, Balinese Youth, and so on use Balinese Hindu symbols. There are indeed a variety of Balinese efforts to preserve their religious symbols and one component of these efforts is the preservation of symbols in the implementation of security, particularly security around the temples and holy places. The preservation of symbols is directed at the existence or ‘keajegan’ of Balinese Hinduism in all corners of the earth or the universe, on sakala (real) efforts and niskala (unreal) efforts (Subagiasta 2015: 104). The creation of militia organizations’ symbols requires careful consideration. Symbols cannot be claimed unilaterally to derive from the universal symbols of Hinduism. At one interview with a member of a militia organization, he referred to the importance of using the Moksa symbol. Moksa means human perfection and ultimate achievement. This symbol was agreed upon by the members and their leaders. In constructing the symbol, the leaders had to make adjustments to the image consistent with the meaning of glory. This organization deployed an image of Dewa Rudra symbolizing strength and courage, implying the militia organizations could protect everyone. The circle is used to symbolize a determination to jointly maintain the organization as well as the spirit of uniting Bali. The golden color is a sign of majesty and red is the color perceived as courage to uphold the truth. After being mutually agreed upon, it was emphasized by the leaders of the ormas that their symbols had been chosen because they are sacred. Symbols of the organization would be displayed in various media such as T-shirts, stickers, billboards, and other media. In this context, self-discipline emerges as the means to secure the compliance of every individual, both leaders and members. Among them there has been a kind of shared norm that there should be no addition of ornaments to the symbol because it is considered sacred and respected in Balinese Hinduism. If it is violated then presumably one can expect “blame from God” or Betang Salahang, so deployment of the sacred symbols should not be arbitrary (Interview, 2018). The symbols of the militia organizations became a good means of building solidarity between leaders and their members.

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The number of members of each militia organization is very large. For example Laskar Bali had about 40 thousands members at the end of 2018. Its leaders claimed that their ormas was the largest in Bali. Most members came from Denpasar, Gianyar, Karangasem, and other districts. They have a large number of members, but their leaders did not think of themselves as exclusive. They are ‘one big family’. Membership is open to residents outside Bali, such as Java and Lombok. On the details of their occupations, the leaders could only say that most members work as hotel security personnel, debt collectors, security services for companies, and personal guard services (body guard) (Interview, 2018). Likewise, the Bali Youth United (Ormas Pemuda Bali Bersatu) organization claimed its membership reached 10,000 people with an estimated 1000–1500 people at each branch office. The nature of its membership is open, with members coming from various religious backgrounds and most residing in Bali. The majority of members come from Tabanan and other areas around Denpasar (Interview, 2018). Leaders of the organization consider themselves to be part of ‘one family with the same hobby’. The main occupations include doctors, legislators, bank employees, and hotel staff, though most of them are security personnel. The last occupation makes up the biggest number of members, whose level of education is usually no more than high school, so working as a security force is their only option. Although the leaders explained that the number of active members often changed, the militia organizations in Bali fostered a bond of solidarity within an imagined community. It is certainly impossible for all members to interact directly and intensely. By analogy with the Anderson’s (2008: 125) notion of the nation as an imagined community, the solidarity of the leaders and members actually speaks to the historical experience of members coming and going until they form a new organization. The ormas were initially bound by solidarity in language, religion, social organization, and cultural expression, which were nothing but their strongholds that were united (read: integrated) in the emblems of the militia organizations’ interests, as well as national interests (Geertz 2017: 233). This includes manifestation of the welfare development programmes run both by central and regional governments and by militia organization such as house renovation, distribution of basic foods for the poor, and so on. The symbolism of the militia organizations deploys markers of membership identity within the accessories of their members’ body art. The body art is manifested in tattoos or the voice of organization leaders

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commodified in commercial music albums. Tattooed identification is often associated with something that is completely criminal and negative, but has now experienced a shift in association. Especially in Bali, tattoos for some people have become an actualization of great art and is even given respectable space on their bodies. As part of this shift, tattoos are not just a representation of a particular art or self, but are rather a matter of identification with groups, including militia organizations. Regarding tattoos, it was acknowledged by one leader that it was once a compulsory for members of the old militia organizations to have one on their bodies. It is now no longer compulsory. Especially for certain occupations that are considered respectable, including public servants, tattoos are still considered a taboo even if they are in Bali (Interview, 2018). One leader of a militia organization acknowledged that because of his position within the public bureaucratic apparatus did not have any tattoos despite being a leader and figurative symbol of the organization. But shortly after resigning from his job and running for election to a position in the legislature, he did not delay getting a tattoo. Getting tattoes become a necessity for him because he felt uncomfortable about being different to fellow leaders and members with tattoos. Not having a tattoo while assuming an important role in the government bureaucracy did not mean the leader had to keep quiet. He actually made a breakthrough shifting the myths of militia organizations, which were previously known to be scary, into a humanist, gentle organization that is far from the image of violence. This was done by releasing a music album titled Bali Shanty. The album that he produced was a sweet pop genre with an invitation to peace and romance. He and his band used the acronym for the stage name ‘Rocky N’. The name was an imitation of the role played by his idol, the muscular international action movie star, Sylvester Stallone. This leader is often seen on billboards of one militia organization states that the proceeds of the album are used to help the poor in Bali, including through a house renovation programme that he developed with the government and the organizations he leads (k22 Nusa Bali 2015). Interestingly, many members of the public bought the album. Albums on DVD are priced at Rp. 100,000 each and 2000 were sold in Bali with another 10,000 sold in the rest of Indonesia. The biggest buyers were government bureaucrats and as a militia leader he also required his members to memorize the lyrics of the songs he sang (Metro Bali 2015). The success of the first album prompted him to release another

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three albums. At the release of the third album, his idol, Silvester Stallone was present and praised his talent. Stallone even invited him to join him playing a part in a movie. Sylvester Stallone in the eyes of this leader is someone who has a good body, is a great director and writer, and is someone who directly affects him. In the media, the leader stated that he always followed the example of Sylvester Stallone in his life (Jaya 2016b). From tattoos to popularizing the leader through selling CDs, the use of symbols of the militia organizations means that really there is a lot of room in which to actualize their existence. All this indicates that the purpose of the militia organizations’ leaders is to produce knowledge in a variety of platforms and bring pride to the large number of ormas members so that one day their potential can also be ‘used, changed, and enhanced’ (Foucault 1997: 136). This management mechanism is a disciplinary force. Everything is directed specifically towards the production of obedient people (Wilson 2015: 1).

Theatrical Bio Power: Manifestation of Power Dissymmetry Governmentality believes that the domain of government actually exists in the various discourses it creates. Foucault revealed that the aim of government is not the actions of governing, but rather to improve the welfare of the people, to ensure that the citizens are healthy and live a long time. The instrument used by the government to achieve these goals has been immanent in society (Foucault 1997: 114; Philpott 2003: 211). The rationality of the state is not understood negatively but actively and comprehensively. Power incarnates as the use and creation of technology to regulate behaviour. In this arrangement there are a series of programmatic strategies, calculations, techniques, tools, documents, and procedures in authority that manifest in many people. Governmentality emphasizes the productivity of power in the form of discipline and ethics as markers of its sovereignty boundaries. The government has shaped Indonesian people, including the Balinese as moral people. They are humans who have a sense of responsibility to realize the welfare of society as well as the state (Philpott 2003: 225). This moral formation is not carried out through the construction of power, nor achieved by coarse orders, but is secured through gentle commands that are fulfilled by busyness, neatness of aesthetic outward appearance, and homogeneity of behaviour. The ideal Balinese in their status as Indonesian citizens is

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written by many observers as a form of order that is reflected in their community. This leads to habits to maintain environmental cleanliness, good health behaviours among citizens, a zeal for study, and obedience to the leadership. The purpose of this moral formation is to make Indonesian citizens live orderly and disciplined lives, serving the interests of the country and the nation by being good citizens. Balinese culture coexists with a strong patriotic commitment to the Indonesian people. This is in line with the findings from all interviews with leaders and members of the militia organizations, which rationalize their existence as actualizers of the welfare programmes of members and citizens in general. The welfare program is an integral part of the Regional Government’s development programmes, such as house renovation, assistance to the poor, and other populist programmes. Bali as part of Indonesia is directed at efforts to realize the welfare of the tourism sector that supports national economic development. The language used to achieve this common goal is the language of stability and order (Philpott 2003: 225). The state manifests an interest in the nature of individual thinking immanently. The discipline that forms them entails biopower where militia organizations in Bali have the ability to control and oversee their presence among other people or organizations. The welfare programmes are a narrative of the country’s success because they have succeeded in instilling an awareness of discipline among leaders and members of ormas. Borrowing the terms Vickers (2003: 23), awareness of discipline among leaders and members of militia organizations is a matter of shaping their feelings as ‘members of the extended family of the state’ who must participate in the success of development programs, the ultimate goal for which is the welfare of society. One leader said that his militia organization routinely organises social work programmes to help the poor of Bali during the celebration of the anniversary of the organization. Social work is realized through house renovation activities, the provision of food, and other programmes that are actually the provincial government’s development programme under the control of Bali Mandara. This is not surprising because this leader of the militia organization also held an important position in the bureaucracy and a strategic position in the government of Bali. Similar social programmes are organized by the Bali Youth United organization. Most of the militia organizations in Bali followed similar forms of selfdiscipline, but they received no government financial assistance which had to be invoiced for their financial accountability reports. The welfare

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programmes required discipline in every leader and member of the militia organizations to raise funds independently for the running of these activities. To collect funding, each member pays a mandatory contribution of Rp. 25,000. However, the amount payable is relative to income, especially for the leaders or members who are considered to have high incomes. In other organizations, there is a system of payments to attend social gatherings of around Rp. 10,000–20,000 per member. This organization raises funds from companies or sponsors, with the supervisory board submitting a proposal for each of its activities. The principle of self-help within the militia organizations to finance welfare programmes is always maintained when the members of the militia organizations have guaranteed employment. For example, at the branch level, there are employees who work in businesses owned by the militia organizations concerned. The various ways of raising funds are all based on an understanding that they are part of a member’s minimal or inherent tasks, such as helping the empowerment of the poor, performing house renovations, free health checks, blood donations, cheap markets, and other programmes for the people. Even on this understanding, the involvement of the militia organizations undertaking normal duties, especially house renovation, was considered a strategy to attract the sympathy of the masses so that they wanted to become members of the particular organization. The implementation of these activities is usually conducted in a forum of ‘suka duka’, joy and sorrow, through thick and thin. Joy and sorrow in a community binds its members together in a family spirit. This concept of kinship through ups and downs encourages organization members’ habit of visiting each other, especially if there are colleagues who are sick. For them, maintaining family values is very important. Through this value many people will also become more interested in participating in the relevant militia organizations (Interview, 2017). The logic of policing is also manifested in the militia organizations issuing membership cards (Karta Tanda Anggota, KTA). The KTA is a controlling technology for each individual and leader. It allows monitoring between members horizontally, as well as vertically between the leaders and their members. There is a mechanism for granting KTA. A leader from one of the organizations stated that a KTA was issued to members after a probation period of three months. The membership procedures must adhere to the articles of association (anggaran dasar, AD) and the association’s by laws (ART). These documents explain the membership rules, including the election of organizers and committees of

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an ormas. There is no pressure to become a member. Everything is based on goodwill and an expectation that members can maintain the organization’s good reputation (Interview, 2018). If there are members who break the rules, according to the initial agreement, then the management will issue a warning letter, and a second warning for a second breach. After three warnings, his KTA will immediately be revoked. For grave violations, such as theft or murder, a member is immediately declared discharged and his KTA is revoked. However, the definition of ‘violation’ is determined by the leaders and there are no written rules. Usually it is decided at a joint meeting because the organization has an advisory board and a supervisory board (Interview, 2018). When the writer examined the KTA of a member of one organization, the signatures on the card were the most senior local leader and the head of the branch. The KTA identifier is more a matter of community and a de facto kinship system, through thick and thin as described earlier. Through this family system, the head of the branch is the lowest ranking leader of the militia organizations, who is considered best able to monitor members effectively and gather reports from fellow members. These layers of organizational control make state control over the militia organizations more effective. Geertz’s (2017) conception of the pre-modern theatre state has strong relevance for reading the discipline of militia organizations in Bali. Symbols of organization, tattoos, commodification of the leader’s voice, billboards, and membership cards are all part of the form of social order. Control over this order is nothing but securing the position and the interests of the leaders who present the biopower. A display of self-discipline is important during celebrations of everything from birthdays to social services. The self-discipline is displayed in order to strengthen the biopower of not only the state but also the leader of each militia organization. The state no longer standardizes its governance with an emphasis on violence, but regulates citizens in such a way that the individual members of militia organizations remain faithful as compliant citizens. All of this fits naturally with what Gertz wrote about classical Bali’s theatre state. Efforts to display self-discipline among members and leaders produces symbolic knowledge of their roles, all of which is constructed to maintain tourism assets in the logic of space. Bali seems to be divided into small powers with a security fortress protecting the island. Contests about symbols are a matter of competition over space. The contest and the control are very multi-layered. Much like villagers’ participation in customary events of ‘ngayah’ (gotong-royong—mutual

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cooperation) in the village temple, self-discipline entails an exclusion of absence. Leaders and members accept the risk of being ostracized or even expelled from their village if they do not fulfil their normal duties or are absent from too many village events. Control in the form of supervision is effective at the organizational level. Supervision involves a panopticon. The concept is proposed by Foucault and borrowed from Bentham. Through this mechanism, supervisors continuously monitor members without members knowing whether they are being supervised at any particular time. Individuals in ormas are constantly monitored without ever knowing who is monitoring. They become objects of information but can never be the subject of communication. In the panoptic mechanism, individual members are always aware that they are constantly monitored, so the individual watches himself. Every individual has the opportunity to position himself as a leader as long as he gained the trust of other members based on the experience of participating in the current or the old militia organizations. The compliance of individual militia organizations is judged according to the behaviour of ormas members and citizens. This behaviour is always under panoptic supervision. Even if there are conflicts between ormas which result in criminal actions, it is the actualization of self-discipline that matters, and especially when that manifests in welfare programmes. Borrowing Bentham, individuals in this context are always conscious that maybe they are being monitored even though they do not know when they are being watched. Thus, the panopticon mechanism displays an asymmetry of power without the need to show excessive power. The panopticon becomes a machine that guarantees a power dissymmetry. It is the machine that automates and at the same time individualizes power not through the person in power (king), but through the spread of individuals who are always monitored (Foucault 1997: 109). This arrangement produces a power relation mechanism that controls individuals, without having to undertake physical coercion. The presence of power in all places makes every individual aware that he is constantly monitored and conquered in various instances of monitoring. Individuals take responsibility for themselves, embodying various power relations within themselves. Thus, individual militia members become conquerors of themselves. When there is a clash between unscrupulous members of different organizations, this is categorized as a violation of criminal law from the point of view of their status as a citizen. Individual members become compliant individuals before the law. But

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non-compliance can be ignited when members form bonds of solidarity in correctional institutions. More generally, this is a reaction to the symbolic harassment of the organization. For example, there were several clashes between members of militia organizations in the Kerobokan prison in 2015 and 2016 but none since then. The organizational panopticon has multiple effects spreading how it produces knowledge. It can amplify its strength continuously among the lowest members, without needing any deployment of violence against them. The ability of the militia to govern their members’ identity as a conduit for welfare programmes including derivatives from provincial government programmes, is the success story of their internal panopticon. The state could draw upon Balinese members of the militia organizations as obedient individuals despite them deviating from prison regulations and the normal law. Even if in the field there is a clash between particular individuals, this can be understood as a form of ordinary criminal violation, not organized crime committed by structured militia organizations. However, early in 2019 the police called for the dissolution of militia organizations in Bali. From around 2000 and the emergence of the contemporary militia organizations in Bali until 2018, the State regarded the members of the militia organizations as individuals with self-discipline. Discipline is a functional mechanism that develops the implementation of power more clearly and effectively. It was the police proposing to disband the militia, but this proposal was not entirely representative of the state apparatus as a whole. According to Foucault, the police and various public functionaries are co-extensive officers. The apparatus of the body politic ensures that the disciplinary function carried out by the police can be taken over by the state. The police always use their prerogative to influence the judiciary so that the mechanisms of governance adjust to the disciplinary requirements of society (Foucault 1997: 117). For this reason, the translation of the discourse on the debate about disbanding the militia organizations in Bali cannot be understood as a matter of agreement throughout the state apparatus. It is possible that there were other non-police apparatus that actually benefited from the compliant bodies of these militia organizations, regardless of the motivations for their use. The ever-present panopticon that produces effective biopower has been in Bali a long time. Covarrubias (2014) noted that obedience was a habit of the Balinese, especially in their communal life. To this day the enforcement of spiritual sanctions with fatal consequences imposes a burden far

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more onerous than physical punishment. For the most serious contraventions this is matter of imposing penalties such as a bar against participating in all village activities, permanent exclusion, or life-long expulsion from the village (Covarrubias 2014: 69). The Balinese actually prefer to resolve differences between themselves in a peaceful manner. If possible, they will reach agreement among themselves (Covarrubias 2014: 72). This is what leaders of the militia organizations do after public brawls or prison riots between members of contending militia organizations. In one interview, the informants pointed out that there was no problem among the leaders of the ormas who all get along fine. Problems usually occur at the level of subordinates. They become indignant about conflicts between unscrupulous militia members. In another interview, one leader asserted that contrary to the stigma about the militia in Bali in general they resist brawls and violence, which are perpetrated by only a few members. Brawls are a risk for members in the lower levels but not among the leaders. This is because the leaders, including the management, are often brought together in forums for the militia. Avoiding brawls among lower members is regarded by the leaders as the responsibility of the field coordinators, korlap, who are administrators at the lowest level. If the korlap recruits members carelessly, then sometimes it leads to a lot of bad behaviour. When there is friction, it will automatically lead to conflict, even though there is never any friction among the chairmen and the leaders. On this experience, the leaders often urge the field coordinators to not recruit members just to gain more followers and be more careful when recruiting members. The leaders also request thorough interviews and in-depth research about new members (Interview, 2017). This is reasonably close to what Geertz understands about Balinese society when he writes about a theatre state (Geertz 2017: 212). Ceremonies work not only in the realm of religiosity, but also in the realm of politics and the implementation of control. Control is not monopolized and exercised by superiors over subordinates, but instead emerges among fellow citizens. Control over mutual assistance—gotong royong, or ngayah—in indigenous communities is an example of this process. Particular individuals’ resistance can be prevented by ruling out their absence. Power will be effectively realized by the sanction of exclusion— kesepekang, or isolation if a person has neglected activities in the village temple. In modern times, the Balinese have been readily subjected to biopower well. This was one of the Dutch colonial government’s tactics to rule the several small kingdoms on Bali at that time. However, since

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then it has been replicated among the militia organizations as a means to monitor all activities carried out by the leaders and the members. The historical and cultural aspects of panoptic control shaped it as an effective mechanism for embodying discipline in Bali. Scott (2010) notes that this condition tends to be pervasive in the new millennium. Individual subjects are never free from the reality of the panopticon. Disguised power continues to revolve around discourse and routine practices that make individual subjects stick to the social system. Scott (2010) calls this performative regulation via the active process of the subject obeying his social system (Bennet and Davies 2018: 31). Performative regulation is more than just the discipline power that is applied to the subject. This includes the active involvement of subjects creating their own rules that they obey. Supervision comes from each member of a peer group with forms of power flowing from various departments simultaneously, top to bottom, bottom to top, horizontal, or spin (Scott 2010: 162–164). The understanding is that the power of discipline can be seen not only vertically but through authoritative knowledge that penetrates into individual consciousness and through people who actively submit themselves to be monitored by others. Scott (2010) sees neither passive or active self-formation, but rather the tension inherent in self-negotiation and the changes that range from real coercion and latent agency. An example of this condition arises when a violation of criminal law occurs among militia members involved in street brawls with other militia members. Their interpretation of themselves and a hidden symbolic agency manifested in issues of self-pride and offense. The state fostered ormas members as a disciplined body of men and transformed all forms of loyalty with various welfare programs and their attitudes embedded in “one big family”. Understanding Bali as a region with a powerful culture and what Scott calls performative is closely actualized in Stein’s (2007: 57) conception of village biopower. The militia organizations in Bali relay extreme forms of biopower. Biopower works through a network of lower-level authority, through forms of knowledge, appearance style, and the concept of morality so that the body can be controlled and regulated (Stein 2007: 58). Obedient individual bodies that are controlled and regulated understand the militia organizations as a shared space that give rise to the bond of solidarity as represented in particular symbols and figures. This symbol or figure has a conceptual and perceptual meaning that gives rise to an understanding of the imagined community. On this understanding, at any time the leaders and members or members and members

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can seduce each other, persuade, invite, and mobilize solidarity because they have found themselves in new images of certainty about the future through the organizations that they follow (Lake and Rothchild 1996). The symbols used by the ormas cross geographical boundaries when the ormas leader welcomes members from anywhere and not exclusively from Bali. This solidarity binds members through the symbols of their militia, and presents itself in the various aspects of power. Whether power presents as peace negotiations or as violence it becomes a representation of the space of identity as one of their forms of knowledge production. The installation of ormas symbols on motorcycles and car rear windshields, printed t-shirts, the installation of ormas banners that manifest in birthday celebrations or religious holidays, are forms of peaceful existentialism. Likewise, the existentialism of violence manifests in street brawls which are often triggered by trivial cases but become serious legal problems, as described in the appendix. All of this certainly cannot be understood to have a single meaning. There is a technology of the self that makes individuals obedient. This is clearly displayed as the strongest marker of the existence of militia in Bali. When the symbols of the militia lead to criminal acts, the leaders impose sanctions. As noted above, one ormas leader said that their organizations maintain strict membership discipline that is expected to be carried out by its members. One of the rules was a ban on members displaying their organization’s attributes at work in cafes. If an unscrupulous member goes to work wearing a T-shirt emblazoned with their militia’s symbols the leader regards this member a disobedient person or oknum. Strict sanctions are imposed by various militia. If they cause a problem in cafes, they will receive up to three warnings. If these warnings are not obeyed, they will be removed and the membership card will be revoked immediately. According to several leaders, they have expelled many members because of problems like this. This is a consequence of organizations with many members, some of whom ignore the risk of bringing dishonour to the organization in street brawls and so forth (Interview, 2017). Every leader the writer met emphasized that members of the ormas should not cause trouble or problems. Some violent incidents involving militia, according to the leaders, were perpetrated by members who did not understand the rules. All of this depends very much on the militia’s field coordinator. If many people want to become members, the field coordinator (korlap) risks recruiting incompetent people. There is a perception that the militia are ‘asal ramai’ or full to the gunwales with

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many members, including many pre-teenagers known as ‘just grown up’. When a young man feels he is a member of a militia, his ego grows and this can cause conflict (Interview, 2017). To reduce this problem, some of militia have decided that the minimum age for prospective new members is 25 years. The formal education of members is also limited, requiring members to have graduated from senior high school. Prospective new members must go through an interview process. The ormas do not randomly recruit members. Similar procedures also apply to the membership of the central board, along with branch managers in each district and sub-district. The opinions of various militia leaders noted above explain that each local militia in Bali is already aware of how to organize their members in ways that avoid conflict areas and conflict triggers. Setting a minimum age of membership, issuing group identity cards, imposing sanctions, and localizing group attributes are small things but are thought to have a large impact. Individuals from the militia follow the rules and the productive power of their culture controls their consciousness and behaviour. All of this manifests in the leaders’ successful welfare programmes for members and citizens. Self-identification within particular adat—traditional—communities is a means of reducing conflict between ormas and often used by the state apparatus. Although adat is not part of the fabric of solidarity in the formation of ormas, adat can be part of a solution to problems. All ormas leaders and members return to basics, namely brotherhood as fellow citizens (semeton) of Bali. The Governor of Bali, Made Mangku Pastika drew upon this discourse when responding to the brawling between undisciplined militia members in Denpasar. The discourse raised by the Governor was a reminder to the militia members to remember their identity as Balinese people who are renowned for their politeness and hospitality and therefore refrain from emotional outbursts. The Governor’s discourse is more about the self-image of Balinese citizens who are hegemonized by the wealthy interests behind the tourism service industry, which expects no conflict because of the negative implications for tourist visitor numbers. The reminder of the Balinese identity is implied in his words ‘if you claim to be Balinese, then you should be ashamed to brawl’. In this statement, the Governor went on to identify the importance of belonging to tradition-bound communities, and like him being a ‘Pasemetonan Patemon’ a meeting attender, and a member of an extended family. In this solution the Governor emphasized that fellow

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Balinese should not cause mischief and harm others and any violation of this culture means violating the law which requires firm action by the law (Merdeka.com, May 28, 2016). The habit of Balinese citizens who like to gather in various groups is even more regulated by the state when it is as matter of supporting state order and stability. The Governor’s opinion above implies a direction for the awareness of Balinese who are reluctant to enter into conflict. Affirmation through the choice of the words ‘ashamed of mischief’ underscored the Governor’s self-identification as ‘part of the adat organization’. This implies a panopticon that turns individuals into supervisors and controllers of their own behaviour. Actions of the state, in this case the local government or security apparatus, shows how the state maintains the existence of the militia as bearers of the commitment to government welfare programmes.

Conclusion Solidarity does not merely turn militia members or their leaders into mannequins in artificial spaces. But solidarity can reveal how militia members and leaders negotiate their interests within the formal structures of power. The presence of the militia organizations does not expose a gap between various images of the body ethnic they display. Disciplined bodies governed by ethnic references appear to be vague about identifying the existence of external markers. Borrowing from Geertz (2017: 223), such markers are important for the Balinese who tend to be perceptive and prioritize representation and actualization. In this context visualization is important. Visualization means seeing, which leads to imitating and then manifesting what has been visualized. There are artificial contradictions between two different statuses. On the one hand, the members of open militia organizations appear to drive and promote welfare programmes. On the other hand, these same members appear to easily get involved in fights that invoke the criminal law. On various occasions, newly organized militia appear to mimic their ethnic cultural phenomena rather than any underlying structural reality. As a social group, the militia exist as part of efforts to build a symbolic identity in the spaces and representations available since colonialism. The militia use a variety of means of symbolic production, which link various people to a shadow community as citizens within the boundaries of an imagined community with external markers. The discipline involved in

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this explains the meaning of an ethnic identity that has been incarnated in stereotypes that produce the sense of inferiority felt by members within each militia. The birth of new ormas after Laskar Bali, such as Baladika, Bali Youth United, Sanur United, Padang Sambian United, Buleleng Dogen, and so on, demonstrate that the obedient bodies of ormas members can quite quickly turn upon and resist their former organizations and just as readily conform to the rules and methodological mimicry of new militia. The emergence of new militia does not merely require defining the institution’s formal rules, procedures, or norms’ it also requires symbols, cognitive references, and moral frameworks that provide the basic framework for the actor and its actions (Kurniawan 2009). In this context, the appearance of new militia was more a matter of re-interpreting identity and meaning for social interaction and how the new organization would influence the choices and identities of various actors. Institutions are believed to affect not only individual strategic calculations but also the choice of people’s most basic identities. In this way the leaders and members of the militia act according to their choice of identity. Understanding the logical discipline of the body of militia members from the perspective of sociological institutionalism is to make sense of their understanding of the logic of propriety. This refers to conditions where organizations always act conventionally so as not to be considered different from other organizations and actors. The organization will always try to adopt normative ideas about good and bad that develop in its environment and these ideas also operate when one of the leaders decides to leave and form a new militia (Kurniawan 2009: 20–22). Each militia organization will grow and develop following its different ideological meanings. Understanding the development of ideology in Bali cannot be separated from understanding ideas about ethnic authenticity, such as the ajeg (steady) Bali campaign. On the battlefield of ideological discourse related to ethnic authenticity, each idea is reinforced by three main actors. These actors have a pedigree of knowledge from different political economic bases (Dwipayana 2005: 47–50). The first group relies upon romantic conservatism influenced by Indologists’ work on Bali. Conservatism in the sense of the Indological imagination represents Bali and Balinese as unchanging. Socioeconomic change is actually seen as a threat to the social order that is already unsteady. The romantic style can be seen from the way in which Indologists confront modernization. For them, the only way to deal with social transformation is to return to the

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existing social order. This resembles Balinization in the colonial era but metamorphosed with new actors or agents. If the colonial era constructed culture to support the authority of the system of government, the Indologists drove a movement back to tradition. They sought to strengthen a return to traditional political structures which were experiencing a crisis of legitimacy. The second group on the ideological battlefield emphasize the interpretation of order, balance, and diversity. These are key aspects of dealing with social change. This presupposes that harmony and social interaction can only be built within the framework of individual discipline in social life. The main actor within this group is the state apparatus (bureaucrats, the military, and later the police) who borrow from intermediaries such as the news media and adat (customary law). All disciplinary steps are part of the normalization of individual political participation so as not to conflict with the interests of the state, the market or the oligarchy of the local political elite. The third group reflects upon market invasion and uses the ajeg Bali campaign as a means of reinventing modernity while utilizing tradition. They promote the creativity of modern actors or agencies for the benefit of industry and capital accumulation. The same strategy is undertaken by the State in its tourism development projections, which utilize traditions for its own interests. This is put forth in the name of economic growth, stability, and so on. The groups of actors above are always discursive and their realities are interconnected with each another. Certainly, in the context of militia organizations, conditions are completely shaped by the interests of those who depend on the knowledge produced by the leaders. The militia leaders construct their ideology based on their ability to identify and maintain their symbolic capacity in order to increase the mass of members’ loyalty to the leaders and the organization. Vickers’ observation that some Balinese people sometimes face ambiguity about their citizenship status remains timely, especially since the end of the New Order. On the one hand, ‘citizens’ in one sense are part of the clan or group closest to them, but on the other hand, are in another sense part of an Indonesian citizenry. Reconciliation of local and national identities still needs to bridge a gap between loyalty to Balinese identity bound by local kinship patterns and pan-Balinese solidarity manifested in the ajeg Bali campaign. However, in certain phases, they can be very nationalist citizens when implementing welfare programmes or facing a state crisis (Vickers 2003: 10). All transformation of this status once

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again very much depends on the discourse relayed by each of the militia organizations within the corridor allowed by their political interests.

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Tantra, Dewa Komang. 2015. Solipisme Bali : Antara Persatuan dan Perseteruan. Press Wisnu: Kuta. Vickers, Adrian. 1989. Bali: A Paradise Created. Periplus Editions: Singapore. Vickers, Adrian. 2003. ‘Being Modern in Bali after Soeharto’. In Equality, Crisis and Social Change in Indonesia: The Muted Worlds of Bali. Thomas Reuter, Ed. Routledge Curzon: London. Wilson, Lee. 2015. Martial Arts and the Body Politic in Indonesia. Brill: Leiden. Wilson, Lee & Bakker, Laurens. 2016. ‘Cutting off the King’s Head: Security and Normative Order Beyond the State, Conflict’. Security & Development 16(4): 289–300. https://doi.org/10.1080/14678802.2016.1200311.

CHAPTER 9

Power and the Security Organisations in Bali: Drug Gangsters, Neighbourhood Watch Groups, or What? Andrew Vandenberg and I Gusti Agung Oka Mahangganga

The political structure of a modern democratic state requires… as a fact of power, that there be free associations standing between families and smaller communities and publics, on the one hand, and the state, the military, the corporation, on the other. —C. Wright Mills (1958: 40–41)

Introduction There is a widespread view that Indonesia’s security organisations are led by charismatic strongmen who are part of local oligarchies of predatory capitalism, who routinely extort “protection” money from local

A. Vandenberg (B) Arts & Education, Deakin University, Geelong, VIC, Australia e-mail: [email protected] I. G. A. O. Mahangganga Faculty of Tourism, Udayana University, Denpasar, Indonesia e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2021 A. Vandenberg and N. Zuryani (eds.), Security, Democracy, and Society in Bali, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-5848-1_9

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businesses, and harass challengers against the politicians who offer them “backing” in return for mobilising voters on their behalf (Hadiz 2007; Hadiz and Robison 2014; Wilson 2011; I. D. Wilson 2015). The security organisations purport to be part of their local communities but their leaders, their political backers, and their business associates are regularly regarded as belonging to an elite who have undermined the transition to democracy since the end of the Suharto era in 1998. Such views have quite a lot in common with what is known as the community power debate in the USA, which began in the 1950s and culminated in the 1970s when European views about power became more prominent. Since crime involves flaunting the power of the state, and organised crime challenges the legitimacy of the state, the community power debates are a pertinent starting point for interpreting the importance, role, and meaning of the security organisations in Indonesia. The first part of this chapter briefly notes the very extensive literature about power per se as a context for reviewing arguments about oligarchical, patrimonial, and discursive power advanced by recent observers of security organisations in Indonesia. The second part of the chapter draws on interviews and reflects on tensions between the police and the security organisations over a poster campaign in 2015, the prison brawls in 2012 and 2015–2016, and warnings by Bali’s chief of police and two successive Governors during 2017–2018 that any acts of gangsterism by the three largest organisations—Laskar Bali (Soldiers of Bali), Pemuda Bali Bersatu (Bali Youth United), and Bali Baladika (Bali Army)1 —will see them lose their licences to operate under the law about societal organisations.

Concepts and Discourses of Power By way of introductory context, the long-running debate about concepts of power has two noteworthy features: one, case studies of local government have often featured in the debate; and two, over the long run the debate has mostly revolved around successive disagreements about

1 McDonald and Wilson (2017: 255, note 2) observe: “The term bala is Sanskrit for

‘army’ or ‘military force’. The name might play on a reference to Baladhi Karya, a nationalist militia force founded in 1963 as a counterforce to the Indonesian Communist Party (PKI; see Beittinger-Lee 2009: 167), often referred to by the contraction Baladhika, although Suka Duka Baladika Bali seems to have no obvious connection to Baladhi Karya and is clearly a Bali-based militia.”

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epistemology. Floyd Hunter’s (1953) seminal study of elite decisionmakers in Atlanta (see also Domhoff 2005, 2010) informed C. Wright Mill’s (1956, 1958) sociology of elite power structures. Their arguments about anti-democratic elitism prompted Robert Dahl (1957, 1958) to defend positivism and behaviourism (identifiable actors making observable actions and wielding discernible power) and then undertake a case study of a plurality of interests ruling in democratic fashion in New Haven, Connecticut (1961). Peter Bachrach and Morton Baratz (1962) accepted Dahl’s epistemological strictures but resurrected the arguments of elitism with their argument about a second, hidden face of power when elites mobilise bias, set agendas, and thwart action to address the concerns of less powerful interests. Steven Lukes (1974, 2005) built upon Bachrach and Baratz’s proposals when he too accepted Dahl’s epistemological strictures about identifiable actors and actions but grafted a version of Gramsci’s arguments about hegemony or a ruling culture onto a Weberian concept of power as actor A causing actor B to do (or think) something they otherwise would not do (or think). Where Bachrach and Baratz had contributed a second face of Weberian material power, Lukes saw himself as adding a third dimension. John Gaventa’s (1982) study of three-dimensional power in a coal-mining valley in the Appalachian mountains deployed Lukes’s (1974, 2005) interpretation of community power in yet another case study of local government. Not long after Lukes wrapped up the American debates about power, Michel Foucault’s (1977, 1979, 1980, 1981, 1991) contemporary studies in French came out in English translation but he paid no attention whatsoever to the community power debate (see also Clegg 1989; Clegg et al. 2006; Hindess 1996; Lukes 2005). Foucault’s studies of prisons, power-knowledge or discursive power, and governmentality (or the rationality of governing) presupposed an entirely different epistemology of discursive analysis that wholly ignored Weber’s concept of power along with elitist sociology, positivist political science, and class analysis. Bent Flyvbjerg’s (1998) study of conflict over the implementation of a pedestrian and cycling-friendly town centre in Aarhus, Denmark deployed Foucault’s notion of discursive power. Given that introductory background, where does debate stand today? Since the publication of Lukes’s widely influential book Power: A Radical View (1974) and Foucault’s (1977, 1979, 1980, 1981, 1991) almost contemporaneous and also widely influential work, some authors have proposed a “Lukes-plus-Foucault” amalgam. They attempted to

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interpret Foucault’s discursive power as a fourth, all-encompassing dimension of power even more pervasive than hegemony (Digeser 1992; Hardy and Leiba-O’Sullivan 1998). This has mostly been rejected as theoretically inchoate due to the incommensurable epistemologies (Barrett 1991; Clegg 1989; Clegg et al. 2006) but in recent years several authors have opted for what can be summed up as “Foucault alongside Lukes”. Examples include Bob Jessop’s (Jessop 2015; Sum and Jessop 2013) argument that capitalist states are embedded in material power relations of domination that produce crises and require regulation, but beyond regulation these crises generate powerful discourses shaping the governance of both individuals’ bodies and the populations of bodies politic (it is noteworthy that in earlier work Jessop [1987] ignored Foucault and argued in favour of Luxembourg and Gramsci rather than Kautsky, Lenin, or Weber). Hindess (1996, 2006) argued that power as a capacity (from Hobbes to Lukes) and power as right (from Locke to Foucault) are each long-standing discourses of power and each remain important in the modern world. Guzzini (2005) argues that Weberian power as a capacity rests upon a background assumption of realist or materialist ontology but discursive analysis engages a meta-theoretical commitment to a constructivist ontology (see also Lukes [2005] for a dismissive reading of Foucault’s ontology of individuation). In the literature about decentralisation and the rise of local government in Indonesia after the Suharto regime, briefly reviewed below, there are proponents of what can be summed up as: (i) Lukes rather than Foucault; (ii) Foucault rather than Lukes; and (iii) Lukes alongside Foucault. Lukes Rather Than Foucault: The Spell of Power, Local Oligarchies, and Uncivil Society The first group presupposes that power has a material basis in the social relations among the supporters who uphold a regime of government administration, legislative assemblies, courts, police, and armed forces. They downplay culturalist or symbolic analyses of power. The leading proponent of this approach is Henk Schulte Nordholt (1996, 2002, 2004; 2007). He takes issue with both the “culturalism” of Migdal’s (2001) approach to state–society relations and the political anthropology of Geertz (1980) on the “theatre state” in Bali, and instead develops an historical approach to understanding legitimacy and violence in Indonesia

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and Bali in particular. This historical approach draws upon: first, James Scott’s (1998) critique of the state and the knowledge it generates; second, Benedict Anderson’s ([1972] 1990) early observations about Japanese concepts of power and Weber’s insufficiently historical understanding of legitimacy; and third, Charles Tilly’s (1985) analysis of the way sovereignty and legitimacy emerged from war-making and statemaking as giant rackets exploiting citizens in early modern Europe. Other historians of Bali (Robinson 1998; Vickers 1989) have also taken issue with anthropologists who ignored the political violence and grinding poverty on the island and contributed to the orientalist myths about the place as an island of gods and a peaceful paradise. Romain Bertrand (2004) develops a similar line of argument against both culturalist views about the locals running amok expressing an exotic predilection for violence and functionalist views about a weak state failing to constrain illegitimate violence. Focussing on the material social relations in which state apparatuses are embedded, Bertrand traces the historical ethnography of social forces that criminalised politics from the 1800s onwards and at key moments reproduced the criminalisation of politics during the war of independence, during the 1965–1966 mass killings, and again during the decentralisation of administration after Suharto. These arguments are consistent with both disregarding a Foucauldian interpretation of discursive power and pursuing a historically oriented and neo-Weberian political economy. This is also consistent with Lukes’s reliance upon the Weberian concept of power as a capacity for one actor to cause another actor to do (or think) something they would not otherwise have done (or thought). Nordholt presents a compelling story about violent conflict among leaders who deploy power as they cast an enchanting spell over followers and ordinary people who have lived through slavery, starvation, Japanese occupation, the war of independence, violent party polarisation, military suppression of uprisings in the 1950s, the mass killings of 1965–1966, the reinvention of colonial violence during Suharto’s regime, violent militias in Timor and other trouble spots, and the rise of local gangsters in the post-Suharto era. A more pointed version of the historical approach to the social relations of material power is offered in the work of Vedi Hadiz (Bourchier and Hadiz 1985; Chalmers and Hadiz 1997; Hadiz 2003, 2007, 2010; Hadiz and Robison 2013). He has studied the ways in which a highly centralised system of power (in the Weberian sense) and an

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oligarchy of predatory capitalism among a few politico-business families in Jakarta emerged during the Suharto regime. He has also studied how that centralised oligarchic power has, after collapsing in 1998, been reproduced as oligarchical local power throughout post-Suharto Indonesia. This localised reorganisation of oligarchical power pre-empted any effective mobilisation of labour or grass-roots civil society, making Indonesia more like Thailand and the Philippines (Hadiz 2007; Hadiz and Robison 2014) rather than South Korea or Taiwan where organised labour and middle-class citizen-action groups did arise and contribute to democratisation and liberalisation (Koo 2001; Potter 1997). On this point, Beittinger-Lee’s (2009) analysis of uncivil society organisations in Indonesia surging in number and influence after the collapse of the Suharto regime qualifies Hadiz’s arguments with a more overtly Gramscian argument about ideological conflict within civil society. She concludes that besides the militias that act as proxies for the army, on the one hand, and illiberal populist groups and terrorist groups, on the other hand, down the middle the more mainstream uncivil militias and quasi-criminal gangs work with political parties. These groups might be an infection that sees Indonesia develop its own immune system to deal with them (Beittinger-Lee 2009: 317). There are many Balinese examples that can illustrate the Lukes-ratherthan-Foucault approach, including: controversial golf courses on the dry limestone slopes of the Bukit peninsula for which Tommy Suharto was granted permission to buy large swathes of farmland despite objections about the unsustainable use of water for the grass; development of the Nirvana resort very close to the Tanah Lot temple complex despite the religious objections of the village council; and the very large reclamation of mangroves around Benoa Bay to build an extensive array of marinas and luxury resorts despite both religious objections about the mangroves’ key role in a geographic cosmology of pollution and purification and commercial objections that the development will ruin the marine ecology off Sanur beach with its many luxury hotels. These examples all illustrate how the material power of localised networks of predatory capitalism prevailed over the objections of ordinary locals.

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Foucault Rather Than Lukes: The Discipline of pencak silat and the Surveillance of Criminals The second, reverse argument departs from a sociology of material power in favour of pursuing Foucault’s arguments about discipline, powerknowledge, and discursive power. Here the leading proponent is Lee2 Wilson (L. Wilson 2015; Wilson and Bakker 2016; Wilson and Nugroho 2012). He advances a clear alternative to the concern with legitimacy in the scholarship of Schulte Nordholt, Hadiz, Bertrand, and BeittingerLee, and advocates a Foucauldian analysis of governmentality. Rather than privilege the institutions, organisations, and practices usually studied by political science and sociology—namely, states, sovereignty, legitimacy, political parties, capitalism, labour markets, and so forth—Wilson takes up Foucault’s call “to cut off the King’s head” in political theory (L. Wilson 2015; Wilson and Bakker 2016: 1). Rather than focus on the material forces that drive agrarian development and contemporary capitalism and which underlie cultural formations such as patrimonial client–patron relations, rather than study sovereignty and legitimacy, or states and societies weak or strong, he focusses instead upon the history of the Indonesian martial art pencak silat, which is comparable to judo, karate, and kickboxing in East and Southeast Asian countries. As a martial art, it combines reverence for ancient traditions and great warriors of the past with regular exercise in a modern gym and training for national and international sporting competitions. Not surprisingly, the pencak silat gyms attract many soldiers, police, and security guards. Their practices cultivate both an ancient sense of self-discipline and a modern sense of developing the country and making the nation proud. This argument about an Eastern sense of spiritual self-discipline combined with modern collective purposes departs from Geertz’s reported observations about Suharto’s fall from power when drought and financial chaos appeared to show his regime was no longer divinely ordained by economic prosperity (L. Wilson 2015: 188). Where Geertz arguably exoticises the cultural patterns of oriental power concentrated at the centre and relatively weak at its periphery, Wilson has a much stronger sense of the context within which the text of pencak silat is performed.

2 Not to be confused with Ian Wilson, whose work on protection rackets in Jakarta is discussed below.

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A directly relevant example of the power of pencak silat is offered in the story of Prabowo Subianto’s rumoured actions fostering chaos in Jakarta during the week before President Suharto resigned on 22 May 1998 (Barton 2002: 233–238). Prabowo had long been at the centre of national politics, as a former Lieutenant General in the army and leader of the Kopassus special operations force, alleged human rights violator in East Timor and Papua, ex-husband of Suharto’s second daughter Titiek, alleged mastermind behind anti-Chinese violence in Jakarta, rival of exGeneral Wiranto, and Presidential candidate in 2009, 2014, and 2019. Prabowo has also been centrally involved in leadership of the pencak silat movement for several decades. When mass protests against Suharto began to get larger during May 1998, there was speculation that outbreaks of violence against the Chinese had been orchestrated by former soldiers working for Prabowo because such violence might have provided the armed forces with a rationale for a military coup to restore order. From a Weberian perspective on the ideals of legitimacy and sovereignty, scandals around international sanctions for human rights abuse and suspected involvement in the anti-Chinese violence in 1998 should have ended his political career. How could he be a serious contender for President in 2014 and 2018, and then Minister of Defence in President Jokowi’s second term? Wilson (2015: 183–186) visited Prabowo at his home compound soon after he was elected Chairman of the national pencak silat movement in 2004. He was struck by the large number of fiercely loyal ex-soldiers and pencak silat adepts in his entourage and saw that Prabowo was very much a contemporary jago figure heading up what amounted to a private army of devoted followers with valuable expertise. This story acknowledges the Western focus on “the sovereign” but turns our focus away from whatever Prabowo has done, focusing instead on appreciating the discursive power evident in the way self-respect, physical training, and national honour around pencak silat can both shape the perpetrators of violence in East Timor, Papua, and Jakarta and also sustain serious campaigns for the Presidency as it contributed to shaping the Indonesian body politic. Another important episode is analysed by Joshua Barker (2001) pursuing a similarly Foucauldian analysis of the Suharto regime’s efforts to tame the criminal underworld in the 1980s. The regime openly set out to assert greater police control over neighbourhood watch groups with a ban on ex-convicts working for them, formal training of security guards, and a register of all security buildings or posts—pos siskamling —at bus stations,

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markets, parking stations, busy thoroughfares, rural crossroads, and so forth. The ambition was to prevent the security organisations becoming anything like the Yakuza in Japan or the Mafia in Italy. However, behind those open efforts, the police also ran secret intelligence operations to “cleanse” the cities of a new “cancer” (Barker 2001: 30). In each city, the police would draw up a secret blacklist of ex-prisoners and young hoodlums, known as gali-gali or gangs of wild youth, and then issue a general call for all gangsters to come to the local police station. There they would be asked to fill out detailed forms, agree to stop all criminal activities, carry a special card, and regularly report back to the station. Those on the blacklist who did not register along with those who did register but failed to attend regularly were then hunted down and killed. Since the youth never knew whether they were blacklisted, it was safer to assume they were and submit to the surveillance. The dead were sometimes thrown in a river or a mass grave but often enough they were dumped in a public place with hands tied behind their back and marks showing they had been tortured. The press would report these grisly spectacles with graphic photos of another “tattooed corpse” or dead gangster (Barker 2001: 31). During 1983–1985, five to ten thousand such killings were undertaken and the press came to describe them as mystery killings, penembukan misterius, which was contracted to petrus. There were three Foucauldian features of petrus: (i) nobody knew whether they had been blacklisted; (ii) if they had been, it was entirely impossible for the gangster to bribe their way off such a list; and (iii) both the press and many readers largely approved of the spectacle around the operation (Barker 2001: 32). Unlike many other parts of the courts, police, prison, and military apparatus, the incorruptibility of this operation meant the police gaze instilled real fear. These arguments offer a strong understanding of how the discursive power of pencak silat or regime law and order campaigns can drive contradictory forces of development and exploitation but they are less effective at explaining variations across Indonesia. For example, the petrus killings occurred mostly in Java and Sumatra, where the security organisations had historical roots in extensive guerrilla warfare against the Dutch and before that in the gangs of guards around plantations and major ports, but they were relatively uncommon in Bali, which the Dutch did not fully colonise until 1908 and where tourism-oriented myths about the local religion have generated a quite different legacy of colonialism. These arguments about the discursive power of pencak silat are also not much help for

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predicting what might happen in the future, and that is a consequence of the interpretivist epistemology of discursive analysis. Foucault Alongside Lukes: A Protection-Racket Regime and the Contradictions of Street Politics A third approach includes authors who analyse both the material power of social relations behind apparatuses of the state and the discursive power of pencak silat. Here the leading author is Ian Wilson (2006, 2008, 2011, 2012, 2015, 2018). Like Schulte Nordholt, Ian Wilson starts with Tilly’s neo-Weberian analysis of the history of state-formation emerging from the standover techniques of organised crime that promoted the accumulation of capital in order to fund wars, standing armies, and state apparatuses. But Wilson also draws upon Alfried Schulte-Bockholt’s (2001) argument that Tilly’s argument needs to be reversed in order to understand modern democratic or authoritarian regimes. In early modern Europe, states resembled organised crime and protection rackets; today, racketeers and entrepreneurs of violence resemble states. Where Tilly analysed the way European states used protection-racket methods but acquired legitimacy as other states recognised their authority, Schulte-Bockholt analysed the way elites in a regime threatened by rapid socio-economic upheaval and a crisis of hegemony will turn to organised crime to suppress unionists and other regime challengers on their behalf. Over time, as the interests of elites upholding a predatory regime under threat dovetail with the interests of particular organised crime groups seeking to secure their revenues and eliminate rivals, the organised crime groups will become more like public authorities and a protection-racket regime emerges. When applying the model of a protection-racket regime to Indonesia, Wilson notes that a crisis of hegemony is not relevant because the ruled never saw themselves (until the direct elections since 2004) as part of a social contract; they did not need to seek or even construct consent to the decisions of colonial or authoritarian rule. Consequently, upheaval around rapid urbanisation, drought and volcanic eruptions, and secession challenges have seen rulers over a long period incorporate a wide variety of shifting groups of entrepreneurs in violence. With this model of a protection-racket regime, Wilson looks away from the conventional focus on the state and formal legitimacy and focuses his attention instead on the informal “street politics” of urban Jakarta. After the collapse of the highly centralised Suharto regime, various local militias have “embodied”

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a contradiction between, on the one hand, organising both “networks of solidarity, identity, and opportunity” and “populist political agency for the urban poor and working class” (I. D. Wilson 2015: 170), and on the other hand, ensuring unions, radical groups, or electoral processes do not effectively challenge either their revenues or more generally the new regime’s reconfigured local authoritarianism. Observations About Community Power, Discursive Power, and Public Safety The schematic three-way contrast between “Lukes versus Foucault”, “Foucault versus Lukes”, and “Foucault alongside Lukes” was set up in an effort to clarify the epistemological disagreements at the heart of the different approaches. The three approaches disagree about whether public safety is a basic material need, and therefore shaped by the social relations in which the state is embedded, or whether public safety is a social construction, and therefore shaped by discourses that embody both individuals and the body politic. In Bali, the heavy reliance upon tourism makes public safety a particularly pressing concern in the political economy of the island. If the tourists begin to think it is unsafe to walk the streets and enjoy themselves, then they will go elsewhere for their holidays. At the same time, tourism also draws heavily upon orientalist myths about the local Hinduism and pencak silat is central to shaping the security organisations’ shifting and contradictory mix of community development and extortion. Does it make more sense to see public safety as a construction, the meaning of which shifts in the contradiction between protection from crime as a community service produced and supplied by neighbourhood watch groups and protection in the sense of an extortion racket run by gangsters who are a central threat to the community? Or does it make more sense to attempt to look at both forms of power, and deploy both epistemologies?

The Police and the Big Three Security Organisations In the decade and a half since the 2002 and 2005 Bali bombings, direct elections since 2004 and the separation of the police from the armed forces in 2002, old political patterns have been disrupted and the consequent uncertainty is still in the process of settling into new patterns.

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On the one hand, the newly organised, or perhaps only rebadged and re-organised, security organisations have made greater efforts to represent local concerns as they involve themselves in particular politicians’ campaigns for election. Similarly, the police have made greater efforts to stop the international smugglers who disguise the origin of illicit drugs from say Afghanistan, Thailand, or Colombia when they bring them into Bali only in order to send them out again amidst the large numbers of wealthy tourists returning home to countries with lucrative markets in street drugs. The police have also made efforts to stop drug distribution within Bali and maintain the island’s reputation as a safe tourist destination. On the other hand, the island’s prison in Kerobokan has become seriously over-crowded and the two largest security organisations—Laskar Bali (Soldiers of Bali) and Bali Baladikan (Bali Army)—have become very prominent in the prison with members among both the inmates and the guards. They control drugs in the prison and socialise more novices into a life in crime. Their leaders on the outside have clear influence over their young members inside the prison. The leaders negotiated the end of inter-gang riots in 2012 and again in 2015. At the same time, the police have a poor reputation for corruption and have been critical of the deeply popular Corruption Eradication Commission (Gunadarma 2014; Schutte 2013). Administration of the police remains highly centralised, so many officers in Bali are not locals. This has tended to maintain their old reliance upon the local knowledge of security groups, though recently this pattern has perhaps begun to change with the appointment of commoner Balinese as the regional Chief of Police and as Governor. The new power of citizens in direct elections has seen opinion polls become prominent (Meitzner 2009) and made public relations much more important. During 2015, the two biggest security organisations launched an extraordinary public relations campaign based upon streetside posters (see Figs. 9.1 and 9.2). This was odd in at least two ways. First, “gangs” do not advertise themselves and the security organisation leaders were not running for political office themselves. Second, like everyone else the Balinese are turning away from analogue media—such as TV, newspapers, and street-side billboard posters—in favour of reading news on mobile phone apps. It is likely the organisations used the billboard posters because they did not have to pay for the advertising space. In 2016, the police put an end to the poster campaign and in 2017 a new Regional Chief of Police, Inspector General Golose, issued stern threats that he would close Laskar Bali, Bali Baladikan, and Pemuda Bali

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Fig. 9.1 Posters from Laskar Bali and Bali Baladikan 2015 (Source Andrew Vandenberg)

Bersatu if they engaged in any forms of gangsterism, including any acts of violence, damaging public or community facilities, disrupting public order, and extortion. This warning was repeated in 2018 by the new Governor of Bali. Before taking up his new position, Golose had previously served as a Deputy for International Cooperation at the National Counterterrorism Agency in Jakarta. One form of his warning to the local security organisations was a letter to the Governor of Bali recommending that he suspend their licenses to operate if there was any evidence of thuggery. The Governor, I Made Mangku Pastika had himself been Chief of Police in Papua, chief investigator into the 2002 and 2005 Bali bombings, Chief of Police in Bali, and chairman of the National Narcotics Agency (Dalton 2013). Obviously, the Chief of Police and the Governor were natural allies and the security organisations were worried. According to a source3 at the regional police headquarters, soon after Golose was appointed several security leaders came to his office to lobby him and

3 The second author spoke to this source in the course of previous research and separately to the interviews that were conducted according to the ethics permission for this project.

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Fig. 9.2 14th anniversary, Laskar Bali 25 October 2015, Event agenda: home surgery, blood donations, nursing home social service, praying together at pura besakih, evening peak event, lottery drawn at Renon (Source Andrew Vandenberg)

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persuade him to accept and understand the existence of their organisations in Bali. They argued that they wanted to continue to work with the police and help maintain law and order. Golose was unpersuaded and repeated that the police would pursue all transgressions. Tensions escalated so much that Golose took the gun from one of his bodyguards and pointed it at one of the security organisation leaders who had been insisting that the police chief obey the “rules of the game”. The leaders left feeling dissatisfied and apprehensive, for good reason. In mid-2017, Golose organised a large meeting of community leaders to discuss law and order issues and heard widespread complaints about the security organisations. Later in 2018, he officiated at a ceremony in a park in central Denpasar for a statue dedicated to the end of gangsterism. He also authorised posters declaring an end to “drugs and gangsterism”, which are displayed at the guard posts staffed by police along the major highways and at larger crossroads (see Fig. 9.3).

Fig. 9.3 Chief of Police Golose: Narcotics gangs, No way!!! (Source Andrew Vandenberg)

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The big three security organisations did not lose their licences to operate and then a new governor was elected in mid-2018. Governor Koster had been a PDI-P member of the regional representative assembly since 2004. He has been investigated several times over allegations of corruption but never charged and has become a very popular local leader. He has maintained the threat to close the big three organisations for any acts of gangsterism but at the same time he has also publicly defended their social role. The future of the big three security organisations now seems more settled, even if gangsterism remains officially scorned. A leader of one organisation has recently been convicted of drug smuggling but the rest of that organisation, along with its counterparts, continues to act within the law and emphasise its community services. Behind the public relations campaigns and the drama among politicians, senior police, and security organisation leaders, crime statistics have in recent years been declining in Bali. Table 9.1 shows that over five years, reported crime has more than halved in total. It has also more than halved in each of the regions, in Denpasar, and at the regional level of serious crimes, even if those figures are more volatile year-to-year. The relative proportion of various crimes has not changed much. In 2017, narcotics abuse stood for 17.81% of total crime, grand theft for 10.74%, petty theft for 10.30%, embezzlement for 5.85%, and gambling for 4.94%. These Table 9.1 Criminal acts in the jurisdiction of the Bali regional police 2013– 2017 District/city

Jembrana Tabanan Badung Gianyar Klungkung Bangli Karangasem Buleleng Denpasar Regional serious crime Total

Year 2013

2014

2015

2016

2017

500 442 788 795 398 269 409 927 3052 840 8420

429 427 540 840 408 206 368 843 2559 736 7356

488 420 380 840 299 294 268 128 3559 488 7164

374 292 488 754 231 208 279 617 2231 495 5969

188 197 409 373 172 126 146 344 1399 492 3846

Source Central Bureau of Statistics, 2018

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statistics do not go back very far because in the past crime was more closely integrated with the regime and what Ian Wilson calls a protectionracket regime was not interested in compiling crime statistics. Career criminals in the security organisations were responsible for most crime, which largely went unreported. In the first years after the end of Suharto, uncertainty about new alliances among parties, politicians, the parties, and the reconfigured security organisations saw reported crime increase only to decrease more recently. Beyond these statistics, how the police and the security organisations interpret the problem of crime is more than a matter of numbers. How the problem of crime is interpreted depends on the different security organisations and their relationships to other powerful actors. As Hadiz has argued, during 1999–2004 various actors from the lower levels of the Suharto regime formed new security organisations and filled the local power vacuum left by the collapse of the Suharto regime, the decentralisation of administration, direct elections, and the ongoing national organisation of the police. In Bali, however, these various organisations are not all supporters of a predatory local oligarchy. The big three can arguably be characterised that way, but the smaller organisations have closer links to community concerns. Where the big three organisations are often seen by locals, the media, and the police as a central part of the crime problem, and certainly have a large presence in the prison in Kerobokan, the smaller, local organisations are widely supported as neighbourhood watch or self-help groups that make a real contribution to community security and address crime rather than hide it. Unlike the new security organisations that Ian Wilson studied in Jakarta, the new security organisations in Bali are not all supporters of presidential candidate Prabowo’s dreams of resurrecting elements of the Suharto regime. Security organisation leaders’ taste for fascist fantasy is complicated by the political history and culture of the island. Laskar Bali, LB has around 40,000 members and was initially aligned with Golkar, Suharto’s election vehicle which lost many votes in 1999 but has since worked out how to win votes in free elections. Pemuda Bali Bersatu, PBB with 10,000 members was associated with Gerindra (led by Prabowo). LB and PBB offer plenty of illustration for Ian Wilson’s thesis about a protection-racket regime. For example, we interviewed journalists at a newsroom and they told us about a deputy leader with around fifty burly members of a large security organisation visiting to threaten them in person for unfavourable reporting about their leader. The reporters

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were seriously frightened and changed their reporting. By contrast, Bali Baladika, BB with 30,000 members was initially associated with PDI-P (Indonesian Democratic Party of Struggle, led by Megawati and Jokowi). BB pursues a more overtly Balinese populism and competes against both Golkar and Gerindra. Sukarno’s mother and Megawati’s grandmother was a Balinese Brahmin and this heritage has been important for PDIP, which has been the most popular party in Bali since 1999. Contrary to this diversity among the big three organisations, however, since the direct election of the president and governors, the parties have abandoned ideological differentiation and disappointed citizens (Hatherell and Welsh 2017; Meitzner 2009: 182). Within BB, we met several leaders with backing from leaders of different parties. Individual party leaders back individual security organisation leaders who then provide campaign support for the person rather than the party. Consistent with Lee Wilson’s arguments, all of the security organisations in Bali have many practitioners of the martial art pencak silat , but this cannot readily explain differences between the big three and numerous small security organisations that remain closely allied to local communities. For example, in the northern port city of Singaraja the leader of a security organisation comprising a hundred transgender members who provide protection around sex workers was not only a champion practitioner of pencak silat and something of a jago figure herself, but also a promoter of campaigns against homophobia, an advocate of LGBTQI rights, and an admirer of Nelson Mandela. Along comparable lines, in Seminyak the village council authorises their own security guards to keep the streets safe late at night around several gay and transgender bars. These guards, or pecalang (see Fig. 9.4), have traditionally been responsible for security around temples during large ceremonies but here they are ensuring local businesses are not thwarted by homophobic violence. Given the rise of Islamic populism in the rest of Indonesia, such violence is obviously a real threat to their business. In Sanur, another local security organisation provides security at the market and is backed by large hoteliers with local aristocratic heritage who sought to exclude the big three organisations along with the large dance clubs and the risk of drugs. In these three cases, the local security organisations are providing protection that local businesses and communities directly value. As such, they have not been part of re-organising a local predatory oligarchy or reconfigurating the protection-racket regime that developed during the Suharto era.

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Fig. 9.4 Pecalang in Tanjung Bungkaka Village (West Denpasar), 2018 (Source Andrew Vandenberg)

Conclusions The arguments about the security organisations constituting a predatory local elite or a protection-racket regime are reminiscent of Gramsci’s aphorism about politics entailing both a pessimism of intelligence and an optimism of the will. The same blend of pessimism and optimism was illustrated in the opening quote from C. Wright Mills on the antidemocratic power structure of political, military, and corporate elites in America. Calling out these organisations and naming them drug gangs, civil militia, predatory elites, or protection rackets implies a will to civilise them and turn them back into neighbourhood watch organisations providing security that local communities actually value. Beyond what to call the organisations, a moral position is presupposed by analysis of semi-criminal elites, corrupt police, their political backers, their business associates, and how they collectively undermine the legitimacy of the state. There is an implicit call to action to stop what is wrong and improve

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what is good. An implicit political morality also lies behind Lukes’s three dimensions of power. What is attractive about Foucauldian analyses of discursive power and governmentality is the effort to understand and interpret the continuity of discourses about personal discipline and loyalty to the nation and national development within various organisations of youths and young men—pemuda—ranging from the guerrilla units of the war for independence, through the party youth wings of 1950–1965, the civil militia of 1960–2000, and the re-organised security organisations since 2000. A Foucauldian interpretation of the continuities around pencak silat not only explains why Prabowo could continue to be a serious contender for President despite serious scandals in the past, but also offers an appreciation of why the security organisations are likely to keep going no matter what a Chief of Police or a Governor may decide about particular organisations’ licences to operate. Maybe one or more of them will cease to exist in the near future, but the members will simply go elsewhere, rebadge themselves, and continue to act in ways they believe are right and honourable. At the same time, for all the worry about the populist Islamism driving the security organisations involved in the campaigns to end the political career of former Jakarta Governor Basuki Tjahaja Purnama, known as Ahok (Hatherell and Welsh 2017), the Balinese security organisations are more inclined to uphold a national dialogue of tolerant pluralism that maintains the rights of the Balinese Hindus as a religious minority within a largely Islamic country. All up, this means that pencak silat can contribute to both progressive and regressive social practices. For all the attractiveness of a Foucauldian analysis of the discursive power of pencak silat , it is astute to remember that it operates alongside material power embedded in social relations. More particularly, in Bali it operates alongside the income derived in many different ways from tourism, which affects everyone from the semi-criminal, political, and business elites, to foreign investors, aristocrats, commoners, middleclass office workers, and low-skilled workers from around Bali and other parts of Indonesia. Like everyone else, the security organisations participate in reproducing orientalist myths about an island of the gods and peaceful locals who are generous hosts, creative artists, friendly guides, family-oriented, and deeply religious people. The security organisations will continue to rely on the myths to make money at the same time as

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they support communities that continue to actively practice and develop their own cultures.

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Jessop, B. (1987). Capitalism and Democracy: The Best Possible Shell? Power and the State. G. L. e. al., Ed. London, Croom Helm: 10–51. ——— (2015). The State: Past, Present, Future, Cambridge, Polity Press. Koo, H. (2001). Korean Workers, the Culture and Politics of Class Formation, Ithaca, NY, Cornell University Press. Lukes, S. (1974). Power: A Radical View, London, Macmillan. ——— (2005). Power: A Radical View. 2nd Ed. Houndmills, Palgrave Macmillan. McDonald, M. & L. Wilson (2017). “Trouble in Paradise: Contesting Security in Bali.” Security Dialogue 48(3): 241–258. Meitzner, M. (2009). “Political Opinion Polling in Post-Authoritarian Indonesia: Catalyst or Obstacle to Democratic Consolidation?” Bijdragen tot de Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde 165(1): 95–126. Migdal, J. (2001). State in Society: Studying How States and Societies Transform and Constitute One Another, Cambridge, University of Cambridge. Mills, C. W. (1956). The Power Elite, New York, Oxford University Press. ——— (1958). “The Structure of Power in American Society.” The British Journal of Sociology 9(1): 29–41. Nordholt, H. S. (1996). The Spell of Power, a History of Balinese Politics, Leiden, KITLV Press. ——— (2002). A Genealogy of Violence. Roots of Violence in Indonesia, Contemporary Violence in Historical Perspective. F. Colombijn & J. T. Lindblad, Eds. Leiden, KITLV Press: 33–62. ——— (2004). Decentralisation in Indonesia: Less State, More Democracy? Politicising Democracy: The New Local Politics of Democratisation. J. Harris, K. Stokke, & O. Törnqvist, Eds. London, Palgrave Macmillan: 29–50. ——— (2007). Bali, an Open Fortress, 1995–2005: Regional Autonomy, Electoral Democracy and Entrenched Identities, Singapore, NUS Press. Potter, D. (1997). Democratization at the Same Time in South Korea and Taiwan. Democratization. D. Potter, D. Goldblatt, M. Kiloh & P. Lewis, Eds. Cambridge, Polity/Open University: 219–239. Robinson, G. B. (1998). The Dark Side of Paradise; Political Violence in Bali, New York, Cornell University Press. Schulte-Buckholt, A. (2001). “A Neo-Marxist Explanation of Organized Crime.” Critical Criminology 10(3): 225–242. Schutte, S. A. (2013). “Against the Odds: Anti-Corruption Reform in Indonesia.” Public Administration and Development 32: 38–48. Scott, J. (1998). Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed, New Haven, CT, Yale University Press. Sum, N.-L. & B. Jessop (2013). Towards a Cultural Political Economy, Putting Culture in Its Place in Political Economy, Cheltenham, UK and Northampton, MA, USA, Edward Elgar.

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CHAPTER 10

Gender Dualism as Degendering Cosmic Multicultural Tolerance of Wargas: Community Security Practices in North Bali Nazrina Zuryani and Tedi Erviantono Translated by Hannah Mansfield

Introduction Until recently, Judith Butler (1990) and several researchers have viewed all forms of social, economic and political activism in society as having a heteronormative bias (Johnston and Longhurst 2010). But the production of knowledge of those outside of hetero society has proliferated rapidly and has generated its own meaning (Johnston and Longhurst 2010). As an example, discourse always occurs with position activism in transgender circles, and this changes time and time again complying with the space and the place. Petra Doan (2007: 59) contends that those who are transgender are people whose identity is seen as an “other type of sex”.

N. Zuryani (B) · T. Erviantono Faculty of Social and Political Science, Udayana University, Denpasar, Indonesia © The Author(s) 2021 A. Vandenberg and N. Zuryani (eds.), Security, Democracy, and Society in Bali, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-5848-1_10

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As a result of this, they only have the chance to access their gendered identity half of the time, not like those of the majority in hetero society who can behave according to their gendered character all the time. Even if they accessed their gendered identity full time, a series of medical procedures must be performed, such as hormone injections or cosmetic surgery. In this context, many transgender people hold the belief that their body is actually not in accordance with the gender identity they first imagined. Following this sentiment, they assert that they are either a male who is stuck in the body of a female or vice versa. Only this is quite contradictory to what has been displayed in the region of north Bali, where transgender people have gathered together to form a community organisation. They constantly display their strong gendered identity through every activity that they perform. This chapter evaluates their social interaction, gender dualism and the cosmic dualism that is practiced by one of the transgender individuals in the community. She is a transwoman who leads a community that aims to accumulate transgender people who have transitioned to become transwomen. This organisation is not a collection of men who feel themselves to be stuck in women’s bodies. They have been able to develop a small community within an organisation in a village in north Bali, where they have become guards for the organisation’s members. Transwomen in the community endeavour to discourage stigma against them by being active members of society. This section will further explore the role of this transgender community leader who is not only received by the broader society, but also plays a part in government and is empowered through other social institutions. This transwoman’s experience began with her individual background yet has been extended through the relationships in the community that she has developed. This chapter describes this experience and the gender relations and role models that embolden her lobbying work and see this transwoman welcomed and appreciated by the broader community. The lobbying work is mutually linked with her Balinese Hindu philosophy. The formation of this transwoman’s leadership begins with the understanding of the Balinese Hindu philosophy of dualism (Rwa Bhineda, the complementarity of opposites); black and white, good and bad, and of course, the formation of male and female. It originated from a traditional Hindu concept formally equivalent to the role of negative and positive, and the principle of spiritual and material as a part of the cosmos. This cosmic dualism was re-created by the transwoman leader as a circle that is

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repeated with black and white magic, for the individual and the community which still harbours negative stigma about her. She performs various demonstrations, actively participating in activities that are organised by the local government. One of the regular demonstrations is to walk in the procession that commemorates Indonesian Independence Day. Another regular action is rubbish cleaning. She and her security group also participate in social activities to allocate help and food donations visiting aged care homes. In the beginning, the Balinese community was permissive about the existence of transgender people and did not view them as different. Discrimination was absent. This was noted by Lewis and Lewis (2009), stating that the existence of transgender people in Bali follows patterns throughout the archipelago, and has been known of since the 1800s. Their existence has been long recognised in community art. For example, this is seen in the erotic dance Gandrung, performed by young men who show their character with a woman’s singing voice. The ‘Joged’ Dance is performed by erotic women who tease audiences of men, yet the dancers can also be men (Lewis and Lewis 2009: 113). Art, dance and drama display a very liberal gender agenda, which has been performed since at least 1825. At the cremation of I Dewa Agung Gde Kusamba, a ceremony usually performed by women was instead performed by male performers. The presence of Walter Spies in Bali during the 1930s amended the context of the Gandrung. The original version of this dance was a sexual aesthetic with erotic expression that performed a masculinity not always opposite to femininity and it was well received by the local community. Walter Spies naturalised cloth covering for women’s naked chest as a way of introducing the life of homosexuals in Ubud. After the Dutch surrendered and Indonesia’s Independence was proclaimed, a new order formed the Arts and revitalised the content of the Arja dance as Arja Muani. Arja Muani better displayed the masculine side of the new regime while simultaneously reducing the popularity of the female Arja performance. As these changes in sexuality developed within Bali, the role of the transgender person gave rise to forms of sexual transaction where previously there was only an identity issue. The biggest challenge was actualising the elite who are mainly conservative, with the exception of northern Bali. The character of the Buleleng people in the north is unique compared to people in the rest of the island. They have a more open nature and are regarded as more democratic, in contrast to the feudal mindset among most of the south Balinese. The Buleleng people like to express everything directly and face what exists head on. Buleleng people

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do not like to keep worries in their hearts for a long time. They are known to be dynamic, aggressive and expressive.

Life Experience The transwoman community leader’s father is a martial arts expert and has accepted the real identity of his child, who he believes was born sweetly yet tragically. The father of the community leader is a well-respected senior citizen in Buleleng. She acquired skills in the martial arts of pencak silat and karate from when she was ten years old, a primary school student. Moreover, her father demanded she be brave. At the critical moment she must challenge herself to beat her opponent. As a specific example, when she was 19 years old she and her father fought two enemies without knives and won. At the age of fourteen, she experienced and enjoyed anal sex with someone who was much older. At the age of sixteen, she realised that she was stuck in the body of a man and became angry with God. But clearly her extended family, especially her mother, accepted her as she began to transition into becoming more feminine. After experiencing anal sex, she started to alter her appearance to become more feminine by copying and using her older sister’s make-up. Apart from that, every day she would jog and practice yoga 45 minutes in order to maintain her body. When she was nineteen years old she got her first tattoo which was of a symbol representing a ‘broken home’. This tattoo evolved to become her own branding after her whole neck and chest were covered in the tattoo of a cobra when she was twenty-seven, in the year 2000. In her teenage years, she had many friends who later invited her to descend into the world of prostitution. Instead of doing that she formed a dance studio to practice various forms of Balinese and modern dance, which resulted in the community starting to notice her. That is when her name first became widely known and she received many offers to perform at weddings, rituals and New Year celebrations. When she appeared, she also conversed with the public about her organisation with the aim of recruiting new dancers for her studio. Occasionally the studio was also visited by other transgender people. After accumulating around nine members, she then started to consider establishing her new community as inspiration for other transgender groups that had experienced social obstacles, such as those in other communities or the working world. In 1993, she changed her appearance by cutting her long hair to

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look the way men’s hair generally is cut. Only she still presented as a woman. The obstacles they encountered pushed her to create the ‘Singaraja Transgender Association’ (PWS) before the 1990s. In this umbrella institution, a large portion of those who became members were sex workers or other commercial-sex working women. Conflict erupted as a result of jealousy about sex services to clients which divided this second group of prostitutes. Trying to separate herself from this, she started to clear a path for the ‘Singaraja Gay Transgender’ (WGS) organisation with more structured programmes, like the health, education and neighbourhood programmes, many of which actively involved the community. On various occasions, the WGS was invited to send guest speakers to meetings of organisations in the neighbourhood. In 1990, the PWS community merged with the Singaraja Gay and Transgender organisation (Wargas). Balinese society is very patriarchal, and they objectified Wargas as a group of commodities, flaunting their feminine figures. This tendency has persisted for years in demands for photographs with the Wargas members who are chosen for their interesting appearance. In 2003 as a consequence of their popularity, the Wargas sought to march in the opening of the activities organised by the local government and the national sports committee. In 2003, the Wargas also started to join in the Bululeng Festival (Bulfest) parade. They were made a part of the Bulfest agenda as a routine activity to promote tourists in Buleleng. From 2007 until 2008, the Wargas created costumes and were considered guest stars, making different appearances. The appearance of the Wargas always attracted special attention from local society. Their appearance is always anticipated. This gives them some power over the organising committee because if the Wargas do not appear, crowds will not come to watch the parade run by the government and the committee. Since 1990, the Wargas have been at the centre of Buleleng society through the activities they have developed, some more social in nature and others that educate the society about health and especially the prevention of the HIV AIDS epidemic. Since 2019, Wargas have as many as 90 members. There are families who have three generations of Wargas members and each generation reflects members’ seniority and experience in the organisation, regardless of religious or ethnic background.

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Social Networking and Lobbying In his book ‘Masculinities’, Connell (1995) depicts men’s bodies as a mechanical conceptualisation, as a landscape which becomes a visual spectacle starting from puberty. The metaphorical image of David by Michelangelo comprises the male image imposing aggression on a boy’s body as a sportsman and muscular with a six pack until the time his body grows old. During this time of change, it follows a natural progression as the fatherhood body like the motherhood body has already performed the mechanics of reproduction. The transwoman primarily explored in this section has a masculine body that cannot be separated from her feminine role. Since leading the Wargas and increasing the number of members, she firmly displays both the dichotomy and duality of her transgender body. Her womanly body appears sexy and charming, even though the male appendage is still attached. The idealised feminine body, which is not so common, became the starting point for her lobbying efforts to open new social networks. It needs to be noted that this research about the body is somewhat less important when the culture has accepted the presence of the Waria, transgender people. According to Piliang (2010), ‘the female body is prone to become the victim of “passive commodification”’. Transpeople exist naturally and no longer haunt society, so the expression of stigmatisation is discriminatory in nature. Transition can be an inherent problem for the person undergoing transition if ‘the transitioned body is an image and gives signs and meaning to commodity’. During the initial networking, a transwoman from the Wargas group is coerced into ‘passive commodification’. Such coercion within this particular culture invites trans people to become accustomed to rituals appropriate in their culture and where they are. In other words, there is a human openness. The cultural scene in north Bali is open and accepts a cosmic dualism that recognises only two types of gender, however gender dualism around interaction between male bodies and female souls is conducive to her presence. Certainly, in every approach to and pursuit of a social network, this transwoman has not fought by herself. Connell (1995) advocates for a collective practice of exit politics. The purpose of Connell’s exit politics is to develop a masculinity that is not only in power structures, like that of patriarchy in which women are subordinated to men. Nor is it a general symbolism about femininity that opposes masculinity. Exit politics engages with gender politics, whose history has proven to engage as

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a platform for women’s liberation, gay liberation and men’s liberation, all of which still needs to be thoroughly degendered. The purpose of this degendering is to eliminate a gendered nature and recreate it through a humanist approach that is consistent with the local cultural climate. In north Bali, lobbying efforts and the community leaders’ approach to the Wargas leadership involves exit politics. This means that the steps taken by these transwomen to find work are widely accepted by the other ormas (security organisations) such as Baladika, Laskar Bali, Pemuda Bali Bersatu, Buleleng Dogen and others which are masculine in nature. However, one particular newspaper editorial (DewataPos.com) praised Wargas when they participated in a parade protesting against the blasphemy conviction of Ahok in Jakarta. They gave voice to a marginal community as they pursued an example of exit politics. The Wargas emulate international figures such as Mother Teresa, Anne Frank and Nelson Mandela, as role models for personal liberation from societal oppression. As providers of security for other transwomen from ormas such as Baladika, they mobilise support through a mother’s allure and as a community group they emulate and pay homage to Mother Teresa. This has already happened in Buleleng, where the Baladika group has become increasingly hostile and a rift has formed between them and the Laskar Bali group. Through maintaining neutrality and protecting others, the community leader is respected by both the Laskar Bali and Baladika locals despite their feud with each other. This issue is also related to other local figures who are seen as role models, like Sum Kuning and Marsinah. These two figures are representatives of vulnerable groups not given attention by the nation and are analogies for transgender groups who are seen as sharing the fate of little recognition. Figures that experience boundaries as a minority suffer stigmatisation by not only the state but also by the hetero society and it’s ‘structure of feeling’ (see Jung 2011, on Raymond Williams’s concept) for individuals as well as community members who lobby, represent their interests and so on. In this case, they stress that their psychological pressure is akin to that of Bali in conflict with global social and political currents; each relates to the culturally positive aura of Hindu culture and religion. The role of the Wargas is to monitor and understand Bali’s situation as a part of the karmaphala chain of actions (karma) and consequences (phala). The karmaphala chain is a logical consequence of past actions which give colour to present life. The karmaphala chain of the community leader is to spread love and affection, to nurture and if there are

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mistakes, to correct them. They perform a Hindu penance ceremony to absolve sins. Therefore, in various lobbying actions to the general public, the understanding that white magic triumphs over black magic is key. It is important to dispel the elements of black magic and invite in the elements of white magic. The white magic adept persona is adopted by the community leader as she embodies the spirit of their community. In another work by Connell (1987), there is a cynical tone directed towards men and women’s bodies that reveals a politics of personality and gender personalities in power, but these are minor for this community leader. The Wargas Organisation does not use personality politics for their community leader as a transwoman. A sense of belonging is the first and main issue for the Wargas members who are supported by the community leader in routine sessions every month. Extending advice to the younger generation of the Wargas promotes better self-control while their participation in the programme Buleleng Unggul (Excellent Buleleng) allows them to bravely proclaim their true self with dignity. Of course, this approach increases their bargaining power and the economic value of the Wargas. For example, on Heroes Day, 10 November 2018, the Baladika security group invited the Wargas and the Laskar Bali security organisation to organise a human rights society. This means that even other organisations which are very masculine acknowledge that exit politics for the Wargas is a necessity. For the Wargas, other security organisations that join the community leader can each explain their position and then dissolve, merge, affiliate with or stand alongside the Wargas around their common vision and mission to develop the north Bali area for the better. According to Connell, this means that every lobbying effort and approach by the Wargas community leader presses the importance of gender order re-composition. When Connell talks about degendering and recomposing the gender order, it means something that is rich, strange and thus important, as a source of fear and at the same time, a zest for life (Connell 1995: 234). Here what the community leader is demonstrating is her ability with black magic that has already been transformed into white magic. The theatrical form of that ability was shown to us in phases of a Hindu ceremony. The first phase comprises praying at the Plangkiran (small alter) in an alcove and then going outside to make offerings of prayer in the Pura (temple), thus appropriating the white magic by praying to God in the ritual of the prayer for safety. After the prayer was finished, the next phase involved lighting a handful of incense and

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performing white magic movements to dispel the black magic. When that was done she consumed the lit incense. As a presentation for us interviewing her, the community leader shared her cosmic philosophy which accommodates black magic destroyed by white magic. This happened when she consumed the fire which was visibly extinguished by her saliva (see the next section with photos). In every appearance as a transwoman, the community leader presents as masculine, but in a degendering form. What Connell means by degendering and recomposing gender practices is not only a matter of operations (removal of the penis, removal of Adam’s apple, breast enhancement, nose, lip, cheek and face surgery) but rather a radical departure from the gender order. As Connell hopes, maybe the presentation of the community leader is more a matter of an exotic, gender multiculturalism as well as a mode of multicultural tolerance in the form of entertainment. An ability to entertain, making points with charm and wonder, is an exotic aspect of this group of transwomen. The wish to become a mother is sublimated within a fashion style as if they are breastfeeding a child, raising a child in a feminine way, holding and caring for the child. The fashion reflects the community leader’s desire, within an exotic gender multiculturalism. This is on top of their other multiple desires and hopes to continuously help fellow human beings. This community leader has become more spiritual and entered into the purity of a cosmic duality where only two sexes are accepted. This community leader has reached the end of the social-humanitarian approach, already preparing herself for the removal of her penis in the near future. This is so she can spiritually experience cosmic purity. There must be a spiritual degendering also. After the operation to remove the penis, the socio-religious laws in Hinduism apply for starting a new life. One becomes newly born as a woman. The ceremonies as a new-born girl can be performed by the community leader of the Wargas. The spiritual dilemma posed by her birth in April 1973 can be dissolved within the concept of degendering (Connell 1995). Loss of the masculine side after the penis removal operation will allow her to be a transwoman in a fuller sense; that is, having the proper body of a woman. Living the next step will see the lobbying, the social approach and all sides of her femininity received both spiritually and materially. Various social roles as a woman await her. She wishes to be married to the one she loves and be a genuine wife. Greed cannot be part of this and she hopes the community around her can be more powerful. It is still her

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goal to establish an internationally recognised English language school; so that children from the villages can come into an empowered community while generations of planned children can be realised and family planning can become a firm family principle in Bali. In her old age, she hopes to have a nursing home so that there would be an inheritance for her adopted children. The community leader continues to utilise her erotic capital in her lobbying capacity. Elements of charisma and social interaction, as stated by Hakim (2010), are displayed in her various behaviours. Erotic capital is a combination of aesthetic, individual, physical, social and sexual attraction that one uses to attract others. Thinking of it as capital explains the details of how one utilises these assets in contemporary society. Erotic capital was formally known as sexual capital, or body capital. Based on interviews with this community leader, certain elements of erotic capital developed by both herself and inner members of the community were incidentally patriarchal. Sexual attractiveness refers to the attractiveness of the body, how one moves, talks and behaves. In this regard, the community leader is more capable of playing the diplomatic role when addressing the general community as well as mass media and social media. This is especially the case for uploading photos to Instagram and Facebook, or live videos related to public appearances. It was a diplomatic challenge for her to visit the north Bali region, where the tourism sector had not been as fortunate as in the south (Soethama 2016). She is popular with her YouTube audience who like her entertaining and informative content. Through this medium she is highly respected by many, including formal authority authorities because she is regarded as contributing to tourism promotion in her area. The element of social ability is linked with interactional skills, charisma and the ability to keep other people interested. The Wargas both learn and favour these skills. This ranges from members who sing and become wedding singers, to the more mystical nuances of performances (white magic), through the mastering of white magic specifically. Apart from automatically generating charisma, white magic further strengthens ties between the patrons of the community leader and the members of the group. From this point of view, the function of ‘security’ becomes more effective, conferring greater status on the community leader who is already considered ‘the elder’ within the organisation. During formal occasions she will appear subdued, later becoming agile and lively when playing her role.

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The element of liveliness is a combination of prime physical condition, social energy and a good sense of humour. People who engage in several activities seem more interesting to others because they appear active and easy to get along with. In many cultures, liveliness is demonstrated with dance ability or skills in sport. This is shown by community leader and the members of the group through their dancing, both modern and traditional. They participate as traditional dance performers during temple ceremonies, including the Teruna Jaya and the Rejang Renteng dances. At the same time, the creation of modern dance emerges through the Joged dance. Because of their dance abilities, the community leader and the group members are often asked to teach children and youth dance moves at events such as Teruna Teruni in their traditional villages (Fig. 10.1).

Fig. 10.1 Activities and lobbying of political parties and organisations (Source The photo is given by MS from her Instagram)

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These forms of erotic capital can be reflected upon to investigate her position in the midst of a markedly heteronormative society. When this erotic capital is deployed in a permissive society, it tends to be well received. In fact, the community actor and the Wargas members are not just considered passive objects of entertainment. A more active role has been passed down culturally from generation to generation. However more active lobbying with local power players creates ties with the paramilitary security organisations in Bali. The presence of large organisations like Baladika, Laskar Bali, Pemuda Bali Bersatu and others rests upon masculine representations that are often hampered by the stigma of violence. These problems are increasingly compounded by the inclusion of particular members from security organisation off shoots from outside north Bali. These new members’ value systems are often at odds with organisations in the centre of north Bali. As a socially marginalised group, the definition of LGBTQ in wider society is not beneficial for the Wargas. Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender face mass stigmatisation, viewed as a ‘disease’ in society, not only by certain religious groups but also formal state institutions, such as educational institutions and so on. Transgender people specifically are considered to be very damaging to the rights and dignity of gays who have not chosen to change themselves into women. In this context, in every interview with the writers the community leader always declared openly that she is transparent. At the same time, this is consistent with what Connell (1995) regards as exit politics and entails radical change of the gender order. Connell views this as more than just a package of social justice overlaid with the heroic side of gay men, queer theory and a gay identity project developed by Butler.

Understanding LGBT Stigma One of the biggest challenges faced by transgender people in Indonesia is the pressure that is always exerted by conservatives. By way of the negative stigma towards LGBT people, the kind of rejection they face is massive and intense. The Wargas as a group has never faced stigmatisation from the community or the local authorities directly. Only discourse, and especially national discourse, about her status compels the community leader to always act in a ‘guarded’ way. In the experiences that the community actor has spoken about, she has dealt with two cases regarding restrictions placed on the Wargas activities. The group selects a Miss Transgender, justifying it as a way to promote the prevention of HIV AIDS. One of

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Miss Transgender’s duties is as an ambassador for HIV AIDS prevention. In every implementation of her activities, the community leader must always consider multiple allowance mechanisms, one of which is calculating potential security risks that might arise. At the election of Miss Transgender Indonesia in Jakarta, there was a very violent attack from the Islamic Defenders Front (FPI) security organisation, which demanded the dissolution of all such activities. Given her shrewdness in utilising her erotic capital during negotiations with the police, as well as displaying a masculine side and charisma for members, this dissolution can hopefully be prevented in the future, and she can still get escorts from the police. Her ability to use her erotic capital, and her magnetism from mildness to severity, has meant that this community actor is very well known among transgender activists in communities throughout Indonesia. Moreover, the Wargas select a new Miss Transgender on a regular basis. LGBTQ issues are still very sensitive and between 2016 and 2018, these events were blocked on a national level due to protesters waving religious flags. Although they had previously received approval from both the local and official authorities, conservatives demanded that the activities they organised be disbanded. This situation can still become heated, especially towards the end of the organised events. If that happens, the community actor again uses her erotic capital and charisma. At one Miss Waria event that became heated, she reassured all sides arguing it would be better for everyone if the organisation gave in rather than resuming the event. They did this because the escalation of LGBT issues can lead to the intimidation of fellow citizens in other provinces and leads to the dissolution of other events. The choice to close down the event was taken as a step towards solidarity with other cases of violence taken against them at a national level. Connell notes that exit politics itself suggests that this caused the community leader to be popular in various circles and also represents multicultural gender in strongly nuanced terms of tolerance. There is not only growing solidarity with fellow transgender people, but they are also able to attract national attention. However, the heated situation that arose when the FPI confronted the Miss Transgender activities violated the country’s fundamental rights, as well as specific laws on the freedom to gather and carry out one’s activities. It was at this exact moment that they forfeited the concept of degendering and replaced it with an attitude of tolerating the conservatives’ activity in West Sumatra. West Sumatra and Banda Aceh in north Sumatra are two of several provinces with Sharia

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law. Similarly, the FPI recently banned a particular transgender Muslim boarding school in Yogyakarta. In addressing the value system developed by their organisation where one must face the accusations of stigma and intimidation, the community leader and the other members prefer to hide behind social activities that promote the prevention of HIV AIDS and other sexually transmitted diseases. Moreover, they make serious efforts to approach their living space as a place of solace, from both prostitution and entertainment. They experience limitations in their ability and opportunity to fill formal work spaces. Their work activities remain limited to those that fit with their outward image of beauty, as entertainers working as wedding singers, comedians and bridesmaid party entertainers in the world of prostitution. The limited work has long been on the agenda of the community leader and the Wargas members. However, the presence of Wargas in north Bali means that it has become a special area, ensuring an open and non-hostile climate that is different from other areas in Bali. Avoiding LGBTQ stigma is a struggle in itself. Lewis and Lewis (2009) intensely investigated the transgendered person ‘Ani’ in the village of Seminyak (Lewis and Lewis 2009: 122). She was a dancer ready to compete in a sexy costume. Compared with traditional dances such as the Gandrung and Joged, restaurants and pubs that host sensual dance with transgender performers have extra value as tourist attractions. Some tourist sites like several cafes in the villages of Seminyak, Legian and Lovina present transgender performers and refer to them as Drag Queens. Bali Joe’s and Mixwell are bars well-known for such performances, including go-go boys for those who enjoy watching minimally dressed burly young men dance. The existence of these bars in the middle of a heterosexual district is highly favoured by both transgender and foreign gay people. They always hold their shows routinely at 10 pm and there are special shows every new year. Stigma is continuously negotiated by various levels of society. In, for example, the beauty profession, a salon might only employ those who are transgender. It is as if transgender people are deconstructed as half human just because in certain professions they appear as women but happen to have the biology of a male. The tourism industry in Bali is both massive and competitive, forcing the owners and investors to innovate within limited spaces to get the maximum profit. Through the inclusion of transgender people in the entertainment world, a structured marginalisation process occurs within tourist power relations in Bali. However, not all

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members of the community fully understand this and consciously accuse and interpret transgender people as a public disease. For the Wargas, the idealism that they have pursued actually makes them a representation of transgender people as ‘actors’ in community development. In this actualisation, they are not just on stage. Their activities in entertainment or prostitution are an interpretation of themselves as objects. In the observations made by the authors, the community leader became a very active and attractive figure when she approached the elite of certain political parties and the central management of the civil militia security organisations in north Bali. In several activities, it appears that this community leader lobbied not only officials but also policy makers in the legislative realm. The community leader maintains her strategy of using erotic capital and charisma. This charisma was formed not only through diplomatic ability, but also through an ability to manage the ‘science’ of white magic strengthening her self-legitimacy in front of members and the surrounding community. With this ability the support for the leader is very strong, and even deputy leaders become key to the relationship between Wargas members and local community actors, the government, political parties, and other civil militia organisations. On one occasion, after a long interview with the writers the community leader performed a demonstration of white magic in action for us (see pictures below). First, the community leader prayed following the Balinese Hindu ritual that she professes. She prayed fervently in front of the sanggah (place of prayer outside the house) and plangkiran (place of prayer in the room). After praying, she then prepared and lit five sticks of incense. She held the burning incense in her hands and put them in her mouth. Strangely, she did not feel the heat at all, even on the tip of her tongue. She claimed it was like eating potato chips. After clapping, she gargled while several members offered their prayers and applauded (Fig. 10.2). The white magic show presents a performance designed by the community leader to tactfully strengthen the legitimacy of her members in the community and the nation. According to Weber (2009), this strategy amounted to the community leader deploying her charismatic authority. This authority is built on the recognition and acceptance of followers who in turn inspire others to have faith in her as a charismatic leader. The induction of new members relies upon her unique qualities, which she puts on display. Both followers and others consider this display a strange power, so they continue to legitimise the authority of her leadership.

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Fig. 10.2 Prayer and attraction of the community leader before extinguishing the incense sticks in her mouth (Source Nazrina Zuryani)

In this form of authority, the community leader must be continuously able to show leadership in her performances for her followers in order to strengthen the legitimacy of her power. For some Balinese, as part of Eastern society, magical power becomes a significant means of binding patron and client relations in all its forms. In Covarrubias’s (2014) notes, it states that the use of magical power can be an effort to gain charisma, especially by appealing to sympathy. In his notes, this magical power is used to attract the opposite sex, or even same the sex in a homosexual or transgender context. This is similar to the Gandrung erotic dance performance, where the supposedly male players are women. In this stage play the mantra of allure is directed to lure the love of people from the lower caste for the upper caste through supernatural powers. Covarrubias notes are still relevant as an explanation when we look at the narrative of this community leader who said that she also has objects of attraction in her body (more explicitly, breast implants). It is just that the implants are a form of charisma that are not used as much as they used to be. She has already had many removed, assisted by senior members of the Balinese Hindu religion in north Bali but she admitted that there are still some magical objects in her body. The community leader is now considered to be a figure who can release magical objects and transfer

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them to her subordinates. This impacts the security of her subordinates when she is close to them. Her members believe that community treatment of transgender people is balanced by the community leader, who acts courteously towards those from the East. This is also the reason the community leader sets standards by which the Wargas members must act. She emphasises being mature and upholding the good name of the surrounding community. These standards are more relevant for the community leader’s appeal among members who mostly work as sex workers. They should continue to indulge in eroticism and be flirty but in public also uphold the good name of Eastern ethics. The expected attitude is politeness. In this completely controlled environment, transgender people in north Bali are often addressed in polite terms, such as ‘miss’ or ‘mother’ rather than terms that marginalise them, such as ‘bencong’. Bencong means that they spend half a day, morning to evening, as a man and the next half day, evening to night, as a woman. For the community leader and members, the greetings of ‘miss’ or ‘mother’ are for more respectable, so when they are used they feel there is no discrimination against their position in the community. When Wargas and the community leader are respected, the people of north Bali openly accept the existence of transgender people. In this open society, the community leader is very consistent in encouraging their members to always appear confident and be more willing to articulate their interests for local, formal and informal ruling actors in north Bali. The community leader gained self-confidence from her father’s training in martial arts, which also shaped her to have a strong will and an attitude of willingness to provide protection for her members as marginal people. This is the value system that is expected by the community leader to be passed on to generations of members who will continue their struggle.

Conclusions The existence of a transwoman as a community leader of a transgender group is very much defined by her role in social interaction, gender dualism and the cosmic dualism that she possesses. In this capacity, Wargas is a community actor and the main focus of this chapter. The purpose of their organisation is not just to be a collection of men who feel themselves trapped in women’s bodies. Rather, they have been able to turn a small group into a community organisation that safeguards its members

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in north Bali. The transgender stigma is pushed aside by social practices carried out by the Wargas community leader. The ambition of gender elimination or degendering is translated into cosmic tolerance which is multicultural in nature, full of tolerance and certainly promotes pluralistic solidarity. When establishing an early network, the community leader initially accepted coercive ‘passive commodification’; that is, particular cultural practices that invite transgender people to become accustomed to rituals that are compatible with the culture in which they are located. The local cultural climate in north Bali is open and accepts the cosmic dualism that recognises not only two sexes, but also the possibility of gender dualism; namely the soul of a woman in the body of a man. The charisma of the community leader then strengthens this along with active participation in the community, undertaking tasks such as beach cleaning, visiting nursing homes, donating food and clothing, rehabilitating homes and also preparing compensation for orphanages, all of which have become a routine part of the agenda of Wargas activities. In every approach and search for social networks carried out by the community leader, she does not compete alone. Through exit political advocacy aimed at nullifying gender in degendered social roles, her group develops a masculinity that is not only in power structures, such as men subordinating women in patriarchy. Nor is it a general symbolism of femininity juxtaposed against masculinity. Exit politics uses gender politics, which historically is a starting point for women’s liberation, gay liberation and men’s liberation in a way that is both free and unbinding. The purpose of this degendering is to eliminate the nature of gender by recomposing gender orders in a humanist approach according to the local cultural climate. The existence of Wargas in north Bali is made possible due to the approach of the community leader as a leader and protector of Wargas groups as an exit politics. This means that efforts to look for work and income for the transwoman are widely accepted, including by other security organisations that possess very strong values of masculinity. This masculinity in the hands of Wargas turns into an entertaining femininity symbol and does not collide with cosmic dualism (due to the complementarity of opposites) and also does not need to be an identity project. One of the biggest challenges for transgender groups in Indonesia is the pressure that conservatives always introduce. Through the negative stigma about LGBTQ, the rejection of them is both intense and massive.

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The Wargas as a group has so far never faced direct stigmatisation from the community or the office holders in the local formal authority. The anti-LGBTQ discourse takes place takes place nationally and this forces the community leader to always be ‘guarded’. This condition of vigilance leads her to develop her erotic capital. Another element of her survival is liveliness; a combination of excellent physical condition, social energy and a good sense of humour. This is demonstrated by the ability of the community leader and members to perform both traditional and modern dance. They are also involved as traditional dance performers in training classes for children and youth groups at the hamlet level. Other elements are about social ability, especially related to skills in interacting, charisma, and the ability to get other people interested. This skill is used by the Wargas group through their abilities to sing and perform mystical rituals of white magic. This the mastery of white magic creates charisma and strengthens ties between the community leader and her members.

References Butler, J. 1990. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. London and New York: Routledge. Connell, RW. 1987. Gender and Power. Sydney, NSW: Allen & Unwin. Connell, RW. 1995. Masculinities. Sydney, NSW: Allen & Unwin. Covarrubias, Miguel. 2014. Pulau Bali: Temuan yang Menakjubkan. Denpasar: Udayana University Press. Doan, Petra L. 2007. “Queers in the American City: Transgendered Perceptions of Urban Space.” Gender, Place and Culture: A Journal of Feminist Geography 14(1): 57–74. Editor Dewata Pos. 2019. “Aksi Warga Di Singaraja Sambut Ahok Keluar Dari Penjara,” 24 January. https://dewatapos.com/aksi-Warga-di-singarajasambut-ahok-keluar-dari-penjara/. Hakim, Catherine. 2010. “Erotic Capital.” European Sociological Review 1– 20 (March). https://doi.org/10.1093/esr/jcq014. Published by Oxford University Press. Johnston, Lynda & Longhurst, Robyn. 2010. Space, Place, and Sex: Geographies of Sexuality. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield. Jung, Youjung. 2011. “The Concept of ‘Structure of Feeling’ According to R. Williams and the Stratification of Class-oriented Labor Movements in Contemporary Japan: A Case Study on ‘A’ Local Union”. Paper from the Conference “Current Issues in European Cultural Studies”, Organised by the Advanced Cultural Studies Institute of Sweden (ACSIS) in Norrköping 15–17 June. Conference Proceedings published by Linköping University

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Electronic Press. http://www.ep.liu.se/ecp_home/index.en.aspx?issue=062. Accessed 23 February 2019 from http://www.ep.liu.se/ecp/062/064/ecp 11062064.pdf. Lewis, Jeff & Lewis, Belinda. 2009. Bali’s Silent Crisis: Desire, Tragedy, and Transition. Plymouth, UK: Lexington. Piliang, Yasraf Amir. 2010. Hipersemiotika Tafsir Cultural Studies Atas Matinya Makna. Yogyakarta: Jalasutra. Soethama, Gde Aryantha. 2016. Menitip Mayat di Bali. Jakarta: Gramedia Pustaka Utama. Suara Dewata.com. 2016. 26 September. Accessed 23 February 2019 from https://suaradewata.com/read/2016/09/26/201609260012/RSUDBangli-Didorong-Jadi-RS-Pendidikan-Utama.html. Weber, Max. 2009. Sosiologi. Yogyakarta: Pustaka Pelajar.

CHAPTER 11

Digital Activism in Bali: The ForBALI Movement Fiona Suwana

The New Type of Connective Action for Digital Activism Digital media have been successful in mobilising participation in activism, and have become an influential tool for protest movements. This is because these new media make activism easier and cheaper thanks to their broad capacity to communicate and coordinate (Bennett and Segerberg 2012; Denning 2001; Mitu and Vega 2014). Several characteristics of social movements have improved thanks to digital media (Bennett and Segerberg 2012; Castells 2012; Chadwick 2006; Gerbaudo 2012), although some argue that the internet can erode social and political movements (Gladwell 2010; Juris 2012; Keen 2015; Morozov 2011). Furthermore, digital media have developed rapidly and there has been a recent increase in global online participation in activism that has included the Arab Spring, los indignados , Occupy Wall Street, #Blacklivesmatter and the #Metoo Movement.

F. Suwana (B) University of South Australia, Adelaide, SA, Australia e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2021 A. Vandenberg and N. Zuryani (eds.), Security, Democracy, and Society in Bali, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-5848-1_11

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Digital activism has been referred to as hacktivism or hacker activism (Sorell 2015), slacktivism or lazy activism (Amgott 2018; Gladwell 2010; Morozov 2011) and clickactivism or using clicks/online activity in place of activism (Nugroho and Syarief 2012). These activisms are not democratic activism. However, participants in digital activism have also undertaken different types of action, such as digital storytelling (Bakardjieva et al. 2012) hashtag activism or using unifying hashtags to support and maintain activism (Baer 2016; Stornaiuolo and Thomas 2017), and countering tyranny (Amgott 2018). Hashtag activism is a benefit too for controlling narrative or creating a counter-narrative. A range of research has argued that digital media has also played an important role in communicating, coordinating, mobilising and organising social movements, even when it was not a principal factor in those movements—for instance in the Arab Spring (Castells 2015; Gerbaudo 2012; Ramli 2012), the Indignados Movement in Spain (Bennett and Segerberg 2012; Gerbaudo 2012), the Occupy Movement in North America (Bennett and Segerberg 2012), the Umbrella Movement in Hong Kong (Lee and Chan 2015; Lee 2015; Phillips 2014; Tsui 2015), the Tunisian Revolution (Castells 2015), the Save KPK 2012 Movement in Indonesia (Mahditama 2012; Molaei 2015) or the #Metoo Movement (Hosterman et al. 2018). However, few studies have analysed how activists have been motivated and equipped to undertake political participation when adapting to new media logics, or what effect these engagements have had on their digital activism. It is therefore vital to explore and analyse digital activism and its advantages and drawbacks, particularly in Indonesia, the third-largest democratic county in the world, because the findings of such a study could progress digital activism.

Digital Media for Indonesian Digital Activism Indonesia, as the world’s third-largest democracy, has experienced fundamental changes since it progressed from an authoritarian state to a democratic one after the Reformation period (reformasi) of the mid1990s (Antlov and Wetterberg 2011; Aspinall 2014; Gazali 2014; Lussier and Fish 2012; Mietzner 2012; Tapsell 2015b). Freedom of speech and assembly are now legally protected; direct election of the President began in 2004 and direct election of provincial leaders in 2005; and authority has been decentralised (Cochrane 2014). Furthermore, the Reformation period in the late 1990s led to an upsurge in Indonesian information

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society as people utilised new media in support of the reformation movement (Hill and Sen 2005; Holik 2011; Lim 2011; Nugroho et al. 2011; Romano 2005). Digital media have opened up many opportunities for citizen participation that contribute to Indonesian democracy, including political opportunities such as organising mass rallies, creating a sphere that better accommodates freedom of expression (Jurriens and Tapsell 2017) and monitoring elections (Jurriens and Tapsell 2017; Postill and Saputro 2017). Digital activism also provides a voice and freedom of expression for marginalised citizens who may not have one. Examples of this are campaigns that target political leaders and large governmental organisations, such as Save KPK 2012 (Gazali 2014), Save Ahok (Franciska 2015), #ShameOnYouSBY (Freedom House 2015b), #SaveKPK in 2015 (Freedom House 2016; Tapsell 2015a), Election Guardians (Kawal Pemilu) (Postill and Saputro 2017) and the ForBALI Movement (Bali Tolak Reklamasi) (Bräuchler 2018). Digital media have also been used for civic purposes, such as ID-Blokir, Internet Sehat/ ICTWatch, and Jalin Merapi (Nugroho et al. 2012), #supportFEBRY, online petitions on the Change.org site calling for the dissolution of the FPI (‘Islamic Defenders Front’) organisation (Gazali 2014), and Coin for Prita (Lim 2011; Postill and Saputro 2017). However, these new media have not played a significant role in Indonesian democratic development, particularly President Suharto’s resignation (Groshek 2010; Hill and Sen 2005), or in reducing community conflict (Bräuchler 2003). The new (online) media alone have not been able to accomplish political change, as interactions in the physical (offline) spaces mainly involved in political changes are complex and shaped by sociocultural, historical and political factors (Bräuchler 2018; Lim 2017; Treré et al. 2017). The people are the vital instruments of the social movement (Bräuchler 2018; Lim 2017), and digital media have both great potential to amplify activists’ capacities for social and political movement, and sufficient complexity to support these movements. Therefore, an analysis of the digital activism and digital literacy levels of digital activists in Indonesia could contribute to understanding how participants can continue to develop their activism and participate in the contemporary democratic system.

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Digital Media Literacy Among Digital Activists The fundamental problems motivating the distribution of disinformation and hoaxes in Indonesia are the decline of trust in democratic leadership and the mainstream media, and low levels of digital literacy (Tapsell 2018). The skill of analysing and evaluating online information to identify fake news or hoaxes is a necessary element of digital media literacy, and awareness of the ability to deliver good information via digital media could act as a useful preventive to the distribution of fake or hoax information and other strategies to win the battle of public opinion in the Indonesian digital environment. This awareness also fits within broader concepts about the essential conditions for sustainable government and a healthy democratic system, which include access to right information (Buckingham 2017; Dijk 2012; Wineburg et al. 2016). However, participation also depends on activists having both key skills and access to resources (infrastructure, time, experience, social and cultural capital) (Bräuchler 2018). Robust participation also requires literacy so everyone can have production skills and creative knowledge. Digital media users must also develop certain skills in order to become digitally literate. Many scholars have argued over which are the most important digital media literacy skills for civic life in the twenty-first century. For example, Hobbs (2010) suggested that people need a configuration of well-developed communication and problem-solving skills that include these five digital media competencies (Hobbs 2010: 19): (1) Access: finding and using media and technology tools skilfully and sharing relevant information with others, (2) Analyze & Evaluate: Comprehending messages and using critical thinking to analyze message quality, veracity, credibility, and point of view, while considering potential effects or consequences of messages, (3) Create: Composing or generating content using creativity and confidence in self-expression, with awareness of purpose, audience, and techniques, (4) Reflect: Applying social responsibility and ethical principles to one’s own identity and lived experience, communication behaviour and conduct. And, (5) Act: Working individually and collaboratively to share knowledge and solve problems in the family, the workplace and the community, and participating as a member of a community at local, regional, national and international levels.

The skills involved in digital media literacy include information access and retrieval, analysis and evaluation, communication and creation, and

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reflection and action (Hobbs 2010; Kahne et al. 2012; Lin et al. 2013; UNESCO 2013). Moreover, digital literacy also includes the ability to use digital platforms to critically read online texts in different modes, interpret online media, question, solve problems and create (Leu et al. 2017). Digital literacy therefore serves as a lens for practicing digital activism and critical ability (Amgott 2018). Moreover, these digital literacies are important, even urgent, for active citizens in the digital era. There are relatively few existing studies of digital activism that discuss both the process and the digital media literacy necessary for digital civic engagement and political participation in Indonesia. However, several studies have explored the benefits of civic and political participation (Lussier and Fish 2012; Nugroho et al. 2011; Ramli 2012; Tumenggung and Nugroho 2005) and digital media for activism or participation (Gazali 2014; Lim 2011; Nugroho and Syarief 2012; Postill and Saputro 2017; Yasih and Alamsyah 2014). The process of connective action and digital media literacy in digital activism is therefore exciting to explore and analyse in the context of Indonesian online movements, in this case, the ForBALI Movement.

Methodology The ForBALI Movement has used digital media to create an autonomous space that combines online and offline work to promote activism in Indonesia. There are limited data on the advantages and drawbacks of digital activism for political and social movements, which are important to identify in order to improve future cases of digital activism. This research therefore takes a qualitative approach that combines various sources to study individuals’ experiences in the movement. It also examines their motivations and digital media literacy levels with regard to the forms of digital activism that have been created by Indonesian young people to support social and political movements. Through a series of in-depth interviews, it explores how participants have actively created and organised online information using digital media and applied digital strategies during the movement. Teams within the ForBALI Movement are the fundamental strategists of the movement, as they have skills and resources in different areas such as environment, law, social science, music, events, fandom, artists, youth, films and others, and they have placed these in the service of the movement. I therefore conducted interviews with individual activists

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and people associated with organisations that supported and participated in the ForBALI Movement. I found their names in media stories regarding the movement, and used snowball techniques to get the names of more potential participants from my first interviewees. The interviewees included ten (n = 10) people who took part in the ForBALI Movement (activists, citizen journalists, filmmaker, musicians, students, professionals, security group member and youth leaders). This research indicates the advantages, drawbacks, motivations and digital literacy levels of the digitally-based organisers of this political movement in Indonesia that grew to become a national and international movement.

Case Description The ForBALI (Forum Rakyat Bali Tolak Reklamasi) Movement was established in 2013. It aims to annul Presidential Regulation No. 51, an official Amendment to Presidential Decree No. 45 of 2011, which removed Benoa Bay’s conservation status and declared it a commercial zone. This regulation is for land reclamation in Benoa Bay, South Bali, which supports the development of mega-tourism in that area. The movement has mobilised Indonesian and international people to fight against the government and persist with the slogan of ‘Reject Reclamation. Annul Presidential Regulation No. 51/2014’. The movement was founded by activists, artists, citizens, citizen journalists, lawyers, musicians, NGO (non-governmental organisation) members, public figures, students, and village representatives (Bräuchler 2018). It has been coordinated by I Wayan Gendo Suardana (Gendo), a Balinese lawyer and environmental activist who has experience in advocacy, activism and youth in Bali, and was also the former leader of WALHI (Wahana Lingkungan Hidup Indonesia) Bali. However, it is not only the coordinator that drives the movement, but also a group of activists and youths who have become a team (Bräuchler 2018). The group have been responsible for the development of strategies, mass mobilisation, actions and digital media, while its participants also voluntarily organise and contribute their time, skills and experience to the movement without being paid. The ForBALI Movement was a creative grassroots campaign that aimed to support democracy in Indonesia against an undemocratic and corrupt system maintained by the government and corporations. There are several reasons why the ForBALI Movement is a strong candidate for this research. First, it is a political movement that uses digital activism

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(Freedom House 2016). It has also attracted national and international participants (Bräuchler 2018). Moreover, the movement is one of long standing, as it has been fighting since 2013 and is still in existence (see the official website, ForBali.org). Finally, the movement has approached members of Indonesia’s government, from ministers to the president, by various means, even though it is still waiting for the government to change its policy on land reclamation. The persistence of the ForBALI Movement signals robust progress towards the significant development of digital activism in Indonesia. Additionally, the ForBALI Movement has utilised several digital media platforms. Its official website is ForBali.org, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and YouTube. While the movement started offline with two dozen protesters in 2013, it grew to include more than 30,000 people in 2016 (Bräuchler 2018). As of June 2019, the movement has now existed for six years and it addresses a combination of controversial situations in Indonesia, such as Indonesian environmental and cultural integrity, economic inequality, democratic participation and evidence of politicaleconomic corruption. Its digital activism has become a popular method of supporting online and offline mobilisation.

The Advantages and Drawbacks of Digital Activism for the ForBALI Movement’s Connective Action to Expand the Movement In connective action logic, digital media extends a group’s network to become a set of large-scale, flexible social networks (Bennett and Segerberg 2012; Castells 2015), without strong organisational control or a representative group (Bennett and Segerberg 2012). While the ForBALI Movement is not directly run by the organisation, it had already gained the trust of and a relationship with its members before beginning its campaign against the reclamation of Benoa Bay. The coordinator, Gendo, started the movement together with activists and musicians (Muhajir 2019), while some activists are WALHI members and Gendo himself was a former head of WALHI (Bräuchler 2018). One respondent shared that this movement has been successful in developing solidarity that crosses boundaries, identities and background both nationally and internationally (B2, February 2016), so the success of the ForBALI Movement is partly

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due to the activists’ organisational skills and their capacity to develop solidarity and distribute information nationally and internationally through media. The ForBALI Movement has expanded to include a set of large-scale and dynamic networks, as the respondents indicated by their statements that ‘The ForBALI Movement was the longest movement in Balinese history’1 (B2, B8, B9, February 2016) and the fact that it has continued until now (2019). These participants were members of civil society, such as workers, youth, students, fishermen, teachers and traditional community leaders (B2, January 2016), and already had full-time jobs or responsibilities (B8, January 2016). As digital networks provided fluidity, flexibility and voluntary participation, these characteristics helped to create what I term ‘volunteer activists’ in the online political movement. Research on the ForBALI Movement has found that the Indonesian people involved in civic and political actions do not primarily identify only as activists, but also as workers, youth, students, fisherman, teacher and traditional community leaders. In addition to activism, these individuals have daily needs and obligations to their families. I use the term ‘volunteer activists’ to indicate how these people participate in digital activism. This term helps to identify people who are unable to attend actions or protests because they have their own full-time jobs or duties, but who still use digital media to participate in the movement. This study revealed a small coalition group inside the movement that was developed by activists and volunteer activists such as members, workers, youth and musicians. The digital activism strategy of the ForBALI Movement focused on a big coalition. One participant shared a view that ‘coalition or network group included activists, artists, bloggers, celebrities, journalists, labours, lecturers, musicians, officials, professionals, students, traditional leaders and writers’ (B2, January 2016). There were different strategies for managing the movement’s main media (website) (Fig. 11.1) and supporting media (Facebook, Instagram, YouTube and Twitter), communications media (email and WhatsApp), and targeting certain supporters like youth, music lovers, group members and community youth groups.

1 Dr. Suwana conducted her own interviews separately from the those of researchers from Udayana University and Deakin University.

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Fig. 11.1 Images courtesy of official website of ForBALI Forum

This team also developed, discussed and divided up tasks that included distributing, uploading and scheduling online information, and creating digital content focused on issues chosen by the movement. Lastly, they created a timeline for conducting these tasks that could be achieved by a single person in charge (B2, B3, and B7, February 2019). This was similar to how small groups managed digital media in other political movements like Occupy Wall Street in the US, the 15M/Indignados Movement in Spain, and UK Uncut in Great Britain, which played a vital role and yet remained invisible (Gerbaudo 2017). It also echoes previous findings on the ForBALI Movement, which has a visible face and consensual leader, and a strategic team creating a hidden leadership system (Bräuchler 2018). While the coordinator, Gendo, becomes the key player for the movement, even Gendo shared ‘this is not individual movement but collective’ (Muhajir 2019). This is shown by the way that the ForBali Movement still has a collective and strategic leader and a leadership mechanism by Gendo. The digital strategies of the ForBALI Movement are characterised as ‘digitally enabled action networks’ (Bennett and Segerberg 2012), which use interactive digital media and personalised action to engage with the public and help citizens spread the message on their networks, email lists and digital coordination platforms (Bennett and Segerberg 2012). This combination of digital media and personalised action has helped social connections to become larger networks. For example, ‘Digital media facilitated communication and coordination between Bali, Jakarta as well as other cities in the world’ (B2, B10 February 2016). Moreover, one community member shared that: ‘Our closed community group in

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social media (WhatsApp and Facebook) also helped us to get information of ForBALI Movement for action. Even in the group, there are some people were agreed while some were not agreed with the movement but we still could talk and share about it’ (B10, February 2016). Therefore, the ForBALI Movement has growing transnational networks, as the movement was able to gain support thanks to publications in Hamburg, Washington, London and Melbourne (Bräuchler 2018) as well as in Sydney and Perth. This has resonance with connective action logic, as the participants have wider access and more connections than before, and therefore are able to coordinate and communicate their strategies through digital networks and media. Moreover, the ForBALI Movement has its own official website, as well as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and YouTube accounts. These digital platforms receive content not only from coalition members but also from the movement’s audience and supporters. All respondents (affiliated or unaffiliated with organisations) are familiar with digital media. Thus, they are easily engaged with the multi-platform media or activism, in which these coalition groups have supported each other and expanded volunteers’ numbers for the movement. Even, one participant stated that ‘we could support For Bali Movement in online easily, but it is based our personal decision, as our affiliated organisations (ormas ) are neutral organisation for political actions or movement’ (B10, February 2016). This is similar with another research that found security groups in Bali like Baladika and Laskar Bali claim neutral in politics but their members were still active in political participation (McDonald and Wilson 2017; Wilson 2017). So, the connective action in this movement identifies digital multiplatforms as a way of encouraging subsequent collective awareness and actions, and reshaping citizens’ individual attitudes to support social and political change. Figures 11.2, 11.3 and 11.4 show the official profiles of the ForBALI Movement: A further advantage of digital activism is its ability to connect local, national and global experiences by sharing individual narratives under a hashtag that can reveal larger structures of inequality and highlight the intersectional nature of key issues. This idea is evidenced by the global hashtags #YesAllWomen, #MeToo and #Occupy. Hashtag activism reveals global structural inequalities by collocating the rich narratives of individual online users so that they become united and actionable (Baer 2016;

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Fig. 11.2 Images courtesy of official account ForBALI on Facebook and Instagram

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Fig. 11.3 Images courtesy of official account ForBALI on Twitter

Fig. 11.4 Images courtesy of official account ForBALI on YouTube

Stornaiuolo and Thomas 2017), and supports individual accounts and the interlinking of narratives (Bräuchler 2018). In the ForBALI Movement, the effectiveness of digital activism in fighting neoliberal or capitalist ideology is shown by its use of the content and stories contributed and shared by members and supporters, and hashtags in Instagram (per May 2019) like: #balitolakreklamasi (68,900 posts), #tolakreklamasitelukbenoa (30,000 posts), #savebali (18,200 posts), #forbali (16,300 posts) and #batalkanperpresno51th2014 (12,300 posts). These hashtags helped to create counter-narratives, distribute credible information and unite communities or society in action in a way that recognises the power of collaborative action in digital activism.

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Maintaining Actions But Not Changing Policy Digital media can be used as an alternative means of creating, developing and participating in public issues and empowering citizens with democratic values such as openness, transparency and egalitarianism, helping them to become active citizens who challenge and engage with their government. The participants in the ForBALI Movement coalition group used digital media to become an alternative media source and counter dominant discourses. This fits with previous findings that digital media can be used as an alternative channel to counteract dominant discourses (Dahlberg 2007; Feltwell et al. 2017; Poell and Borra 2012). All respondents explained that digital media have become an alternative to mainstream media because they provide an arena for everyone who wants to create, contribute and share facts, opinions, perspectives and comments. Thus, digital media can publish alternative content to counter the mainstream media (all respondents, February 2016). Furthermore, digital media can be used to spread information to the wider public easily and so to create public opinion (most respondents, February 2016). Therefore, the ability to proliferate controversial or alternative information about social and political issues is supported by digital media that have become alternative media sources. Individuals participate and act in digital activism as they devour affective or emotional connections (Castells 2012; Juris 2012; Papacharissi 2015). These individuals do not need to engage with the complexities of political affiliations to be associated with the collective ideology of activist movements, as they can simply express the general idea of mobilisation using digital media such as Twitter (Papacharissi 2015), while the leaders use it to mobilise emotion online to make action possible (Ganz 2010). This research found that the participants expressed emotional connection and resistance actions through multiple digital platforms, and they successfully propagated affective and logical connections to sustain momentum and focus on issues. Personal stories are challenging because social media movement participation provides a vision that combines criticism and hope (Ganz 2010). While issues of injustice and corruption were one motivation to participate in the #SaveKPK Movement (Suwana 2019), criticism and the hope for justice have been perpetuated emotionally through online visuals and audio-visual content that inspire participation and the goal achievement. Social movements are concerned with short or medium term goals related to direct physical and social needs or citizens’ rights (Juris 2012),

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and their strategies focus on current action for future goals (Ganz 2010). Digital activism in the ForBALI movement achieved a specific shortterm goal because it could expand to become bigger, growing into the longest movement in Balinese history. However, the participants in this movement have been fighting to change public policies in relation to the termination of the Presidential Decree No. 51/2014 regarding the reclamation of Benoa Bay for six years (since June 2019). Thus digital activism could shape citizens to gather and become agents of change in the issues of anti-reclamation, but it has not changed policies.

Digital Media Literacy Necessary for Participating in the ForBALI Movement The members of the ForBALI Movement have different affiliations, backgrounds and levels of expertise, but they joined together and collaborated to organise and mobilise the movement’s actions. Participation itself is not only about mobilisation but also about sources and capital (Bräuchler 2018; Norris 2001). One respondent shared that ‘we do not have the same level of digital technology as some people are smart with their digital strategy technology, legal, visuals, blogs, or designs; therefore, in this movement, we divided our roles to support this movement based on our expertise or levels’ (B2, February 2016). Digital media provided political opportunities which created awareness for activists and civil society members who had various digital skills necessary for actions. Affiliated citizens initiated and discussed actions together with the collaborative network of the ForBALI Movement, because those citizens had certain skills (advocacy, organisation and mobilisation) that were perfect for collaborating and expanding the movement with different individuals, communities and organisations. This is similar to the Lung Mei Beach Movement in Hong Kong, where self-mobilised citizens forged a largely collaborative affiliation with formal organisations (Lee 2015). However, this research is focused on the different capacities and experiences with digital media that were used by ForBALI’s members as they employed collaborative online strategies to support and maintain the movement. These members admitted that the most important digital media literacy skill for supporters or potential supporters was the ability to critically analyse online information, because they first need to verify online information and then need to differentiate between fact and fake (hoax)

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information. Additionally, in the words of one activist, ‘Indonesian people should be able to distinguish which is right or wrong, so the society would not confuse and mislead by online information’ (B2, February 2016). Many Indonesians today receive information through digital media, so they need to have skills that enable them to think critically about the media. The competencies of using critical thinking to analyse and evaluate digital media include being able to question and criticise, and challenge the quality, veracity, credibility and point of view of its content, while also considering its potential effects (Hobbs 2010; Lin et al. 2013). All respondents in this research also pointed out that everyone needs to be critical in their analysis and evaluation of digital media and check the profiles and backgrounds of online information sources, and specifically that when citizens receive information online they should have a mindset that not all information is true and not all sources are credible and reliable. All respondents (B1–B10, December 2015–February 2016) had the ability and understanding necessary to analyse and evaluate online information, and therefore they were concerned about the trustworthiness and credibility of information on Indonesian digital media platforms. Online information is shared widely on social media, but that does not mean all of it is true. Most respondents explained that it is vital to analyse and evaluate online information, and one of them stated that ‘Indonesians need to be capable of sorting information, especially which information can be trusted, and which cannot, or which is only from investor (pro-reclamation), so, the checking and re-checking of information are very important in digital media’ (B2, December 2015). It is much easier for fake news and misinformation to circulate online, as online information can bypass traditional media’s gatekeepers and circulate directly from individual to individual (Buckingham 2017). The skill in getting accurate information is vital because the number of fake news and hoaxes in circulation on digital media is massive. The members of the ForBALI Movement believe that they have a greater responsibility to develop digital media literacy skills than their potential supporters or digital media users, as they stated that they must create online information based on facts, good values and ethics because this can both help them to spread the truth, facts and correct information and help them to tackle wrong information, false information and hoaxes. For example, one member stated: ‘Creating content is very important after analysing opponent’s strategy and contents, as we can educate public

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with the real content, for example, the investor use greenwashing narrative for the reclamation then we need to counter this with the fact from the investor’s proposal plan of commercialisation’ (B7, February 2017). It is argued that having greater access to the internet does not lead directly to increased civic or political engagement, or political trust, because access to the internet may be inspired more by entertainment than by political activity (Papacharissi 2009). This is similar to research on the internet and democratic engagement in the Australian context, which has argued that the internet will become an additional place for participation rather than an alternative one (Bean 2011: 29). In this case, digital media removes barriers to political participation and civic engagement for members of civil society, who use this new media for facilitating information about campaign issues, mobilising community groups, arranging coalitions, creating counter-publicity, expressing identities and oppositional discourses and contesting the boundaries of the dominant voices. The activists we interviewed used websites as the base platform for the ForBALI Movement, to disseminate information about: actions; chronologies; the impact of reclamation; and regulation of the movement. They shared what they had created using Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and YouTube accounts as links to amplify this information’s reach. Digital multi-platform activism is an essential tool for these activists as it is a more effective and efficient way to reach a larger public and to mobilise them to participate in the movement. It is similar to the Umbrella Movement in Hong Kong, in which activists established a website and Facebook pages to express their views and deliver their messages, and to interact with the public (Lee and Ting 2015). Indonesian activists also utilised multiple digital platforms, including email, Facebook, Telegram, Twitter, websites, WhatsApp and YouTube to disseminate truthful information about the Save KPK 2015 Movement (Suwana 2019). Hence, it is clear that digital literacy is important to maximising the usefulness of digital platforms that are multiple and connected for content distribution, as this new mechanism and space for influencing society itself takes on more of a role in progressing social and political movements. There was a linking of digital media use by the coalition groups of the ForBALI Movement, who supported each other’s media as they organised the movement. This is in line with several movements across the world, such as: (1) the Corsari Movement in Milan, which also showed the role played by websites and digital media platforms in creating a

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shared sense of unity by linking different networks together while still respecting groups’ individual autonomy (Barassi 2015); (2) the Umbrella Movement (Hong Kong), in which students used websites to express views, distribute messages and interaction (Lee and Ting 2015); and (3) the Sunflower Movement (Taiwan), in which students used websites to organise and provide information (Chen et al. 2014). In the ForBali Movement, the website was still the main digital medium with which the group disseminated information about the movement to national and international readers (as they use two languages for their content: Indonesian and English). And they also shared and build their narrative by linking to different digital platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and YouTube. Thus digital media provides a space for citizens, in particular, to participate in the consumption, creation and sharing of their information, ideas, culture and knowledge.

Collaborative Acts of Mobilisation in the ForBALI Movement Collaborative acts of mobilisation are another level of digital media literacy which could become a goal or purpose for digital activism. This skill is the last level of digital competencies developed by Renee Hobbs (2010). The activists interviewed explained how they formed a coalition group planning collaborative actions with ForBALI members from different backgrounds (academics, activists, artists, filmmakers, musicians, professionals, security community groups and youth) on digital platforms. Like one activist explained, some people also created their own online group or participated with their individual social media. At this point, we were in one big coalition group. We discussed it together. Everyone could contribute their content or strategy, as long as those strategies were supporting the movement and reaching the public. (B2, February 2016)

Skills in digital collaboration varied considerably among members of the ForBALI Movement. Having the ability to act using digital media platforms means having the ability to share information and knowledge, resolve problems in families, workplaces and communities and participate at local and international levels. Some respondents in this study have participated in every level of activism; meanwhile, others have only

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participated in the local context so far. All members of the ForBALI Movement actively share information and knowledge with their society, as they believe that it is useful to accelerate the facts and right information about the situation behind land reclamation in Bali as well as to mobilise people to join the movement. The movement’s members were very active in their varying communities, inviting and mobilising their networks to participate. One activist discussed the digital media advantage: Before, we created and printed public letters in the evening and distributed those in the morning. Now, we can create them on our social media any time we want, also invite people, do crowdfunding, and share updates. Digital media is fast, cheap, effective and efficient to invite and mobilise others to become active. (B3, February 2016)

Several respondents also shared other online strategies used to persuade young people to participate in the movement. When creating information for the movement, they used a combination of text and visual elements such as infographics, memes, posters and videos to portray both facts (logical) and feelings (emotional). Some members focused only on providing online videos and photographs to support the movement as these were their skills (B9, February 2018). The combination of text and visual information in Indonesian digital movements has been growing to include animations, digital posters, memes, photos and videos (Lim 2013; Yasih and Alamsyah 2014). For example, the filmmakers supported the online campaign using their video or film skills, as one explained: I like to create teaser videos before and after the actions with many symbols of anti-reclamation and ForBALI. I also like to use footage of musicians and public figures that support this movement as it is very effective to attract their followers and fans to join the movement. Likewise, musicians, artists, or other creators also created contents like me and published in their social media. (B9, February 2016)

As respondents stated, this movement has artists and musicians involved in their vanguard collective action, such as Navicula, Nosstress and Superman Is Dead (SID); they share information about the movement to their large followers on social media. Some members have the real credibility and reputation that bring them instant recognisability but not instant respect in the participatory culture, and like the state leaders,

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sports idols, writers and celebrities can offer valuable influence in the short term merely because of their recognisability (Henderson 2013). Even some musicians from ForBALI Movement from different genres like folk, ska, reggae, punk, pop and traditional collaborated to create album together (Mujahir 2015). This album had contributors including SID, Navicula, Nosstress, Eco Defender, Ugly Bastard, etc., and was not for commercial sales but to encourage rejection of land reclamation in Benoa Bay, Bali (Mujahir 2015). Collaboration between music and activism can create trendy activism to attract and influence young people, as they make up most of the fans or followers of those musicians. Moreover, digital media permits the development and maintenance of a dialogic relationship between a creator and their fan-base through ‘relational labour’ (Baym 2015), which involves regular, ongoing communication with audiences over time to develop social relationships that substitute for paid work (Baym 2015). This ‘labour relationship’ between musicians and fans on digital media is a strong catalyst for creators to use their ongoing content and relationships to influence and mobilise their followers and fans. Since the beginning of the movement, Jerinx had been successful in inviting his fans to join action by the ForBALI Movement; and he shared in an interview that ‘OutSIDer (the SID band fans group) always attend every actions and their demonstrations are getting better and more crowded’ (Triyono and Mujahir 2017). This shows that musicians and celebrities can become vital influencers for the digital activism with their strong and vocal actions and contents. Collaboration actions between other filmmakers, videographers, musicians, public figures and celebrities could help the movement to expand more, as these figures can also attract and mobilise their fans to participate in the movement. Visual online content is also a resource for forming a collective identity and political purpose in digital activism (Gerbaudo 2015), and online visual content is vital; both are potential tools for mobilising people to come and act together (Castells 2012; Gerbaudo 2012). For example, in Indonesia, a viral Twitter video released in June 2016 led to fundraising for Ibu Eni (Ria 2016; Topsfield 2016), and the ForBALI Movement’s transmedia use includes transnational activism and documentation of offline practices through YouTube videos and other new and traditional media (Bräuchler 2018). Likewise, respondents in this study believe that audio-visual materials can mobilise other people to participate in the ForBALI Movement. Therefore, its capacity to create online content and digital media activism strategies has been expanded,

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because it requires more than simple text as this is the era of combining text, visuals, audio and visuals information for social and political movement (Suwana 2018). Creative collaborations and the maximisation of social networks and online contents are therefore important elements in persuading people to participate more.

Utilising Digital Media in Critical and Ethical Ways The ability to engage in reflection and ethical thinking is essential in digital life, and the capacity to produce content, express opinions and use digital media tools in innovative ways can make literacy experiences more relevant to citizens and current events. A previous study about the democratic potential of online political discussion found that the difference between respect and politeness in online discussions is significant, especially as a way of distinguishing between discussion that is harmful for democratic values and discussion that lacks a basis in ethics (Papacharissi 2004). Respect is essential for participation to be valued (Henderson 2013). Youth also consider ethical concerns in other ways, as many of them talk about pausing and reflecting on the hurt feelings that could arise from things posted or shared on social media (James 2014). The individual’s awareness of participatory culture and literacy in ethical conduct is developed by participation and experience. In this study, most respondents had the same perception of online ethics, specifically that digital media users should not talk or share things carelessly. Moreover, they argued that online ethics can help to prevent offensive and hoax information from circulating. For example, B2 shared a belief that having online ethics means that ‘Both the sharing and the receiving of information need attitudes to always crosscheck. I have seen many social media users did not prioritize the ethics, meanwhile many people deliberately shared hoax news or bad information’ (B2, December 2015). Other members were concerned that digital media users should filter the information they post online based on online ethics. They shared that online ethics are important for controlling emotions when talking or responding to others, especially to avoid being harmful or rude, or exaggerating. The ForBALI Movement members have therefore been concerned with sharing information and expressing themselves ethically on social media, as this is important to maintaining their reputation as the true source of anti-reclamation information, while their opponents

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can use fake accounts, information and social media bots to spread their pro-reclamation content. The focus of digital activism must be ethical, with positive and encouraging social actions. The Indonesian government has taken further steps in this area, as it has prepared ethics guidelines for social media in an effort to prevent hoax information circulating online, and these guidelines will be distributed to Indonesian students (NTA et al. 2017). As reported by a story in Kompas, the Indonesian Education Minister has also stated that ‘the Indonesian government will keep applying the awareness of the ethical principles of social media use for all elements of society and collaborate with the Indonesian Communication and Informatics minister to develop the principles or ethics of social media use especially for the educational sector’ (NTA et al. 2017). The massive amount of hoax information and fake news in circulation has also provoked citizens to act and combat both in online environment. However, while there was an expectation that the revision of the Indonesian cyberlaw (ITE Law) in 2016 could help to prevent hoax information from circulating, and that ‘this law is expected to be able to curb the hoax information and slander on the internet, but not to be excessive’ (Pratama 2016), one activist in the ForBALI Movement was very concerned about the Law on Electronic Information and Transactions (UU No. 11/2008) in Indonesia (ITE Law) having the potential to silence the public, as it places restrictions on social media use in cases of defamation or hate speech case (B2, February 2016). The ITE Law is still debatable, as it has been misused to create public silence on digital media (Freedom House 2015a), extend the fear of freedom of expression and prevent civil society from exercising its freedom of expression via digital media (Suwana 2016). The focus of the ITE Law on defamation or hate speech cases has been proven to be steadfast, as in the same year as the interview in 2016, Gendo, the coordinator of the ForBALI Movement, was reported to the police for online hate speech under the ITE Law because of a tweet made in August 2016. Gendo was accused of breaching the Law on Electronic Information and Transactions (UU No. 11/2008) and the Law on the Elimination of Racial and Ethnic Discrimination (UU No. 40/2008) (Bräuchler 2018). While his tweet should be analysed in the larger context, at that time, the activist spoke in his capacity as the ForBALI Movement’s coordinator to criticise the government and express disappointment after the Indonesian Minister of Marine and Fisheries, Susi Pudjiastuti, once again released a

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permit to PT Wahana Tirta Bali International (Ardhiangga 2016; Safenet 2016). This indicates that navigating freedom of expression and sensitive issues is still a complex situation. Even in the US, online ethical sensitivity among young Americans can provoke a situation involving hate speech towards an unspecified race or religion (James 2014). Sharing information and expression in digital media need carefulness and cultural sensitivity, as these can backfire citizens in unexpected ways. However, the criminalisation of Gendo also triggered Indonesian citizens’ solidarity and supported him being released from the case, with several hashtags emerging that became trending topics on Twitter (Ardhiangga 2016; Bräuchler 2018). Thus Indonesians in this movement who are aware of the Indonesian regulation that could silence them in the online sphere are not afraid of this harmful or unsafe situation in online participatory culture, as they still use digital media to express themselves.

Conclusions Digital media supports and complements both online and offline activism, and several examples show that digital media has supported the mobilisation of civil society in Indonesia (Mietzner 2012; Nugroho et al. 2011; Nugroho and Syarief 2012), particularly the ForBALI Movement addressed in this study. Indonesian activists have explained their experiences of creating an online coalition group to support this movement. The digital activism strategy of the ForBALI Movement used large coalition groups made up of not only activists, musicians, filmmakers and youth, but also artists, bloggers, celebrities, community leaders, journalists, labours, lecturers, practitioners, students and writers. These participants were invited to get involved in this movement, to utilise their roles and expertise in order to contribute to and formulate online strategies for conveying political messages and support this political movement. Most volunteers also have daily duties and jobs, so they are only part-time activists with a voluntary role and digital use in this movement. However, the good coordination and hidden leadership system maintained this volunteer activists to join and participate in the ForBALI Movement. This analysis of the coalition group in the ForBALI Movement has showed that digital activism was beneficial in mobilising information and citizens. The group was able to develop into a large-scale network

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thanks to the members’ different social backgrounds, experiences, expertise and digital media literacy, which they used to support the movement, distribute information and pressure the Indonesian government. In addition, the group was able to use multiple online strategies to support their anti-reclamation movement, as the volunteers came from different communities and organisations but participated in the coalition group and connected via digital media to coordinate, communicate and mobilise information as well as citizens during the movement. Thus, this digital activism also shapes these citizens to become agents of change in the issues of anti-reclamation. The coalition network or group in the ForBALI Movement was volunteer-based and acted outside of the hierarchical system. Conventional collective action has a different logic from connective action, as collective action requires centralised information and an organisational community. However, the ForBALI Movement shows the fusion characteristics of connective action, which depends on personalised communication and digital media consolidation as well as a solid connection of networks at the outset and organisational mechanisms. Connective action logic is also evident in work of the Indonesian citizens who developed their coalition group, communicated freely and without fear, organised with other members of the group, and effectively mobilised information and society during the movement. This digitally connective action in the ForBALI Movement could help to support the long-term cycle needed to foreground the issue of opposing land reclamation. This is because the coalition group involves a strong collaborative network. As this movement has been sustained from 2013 until now (2019), it has the organisational mechanisms and coordinators needed to discuss initiatives or actions, maintain focus on key issues, collaborate with the networks, and provide the spirit of the movement. All of those are beneficial, especially when the issues raised by the ForBALI Movement suddenly appeared again, as the movement was able to continue to act and aim for achieving their goal of annulling Presidential Regulation No. 51, an official Amendment to Presidential Decree No. 45 of 2011, and returning Benoa Bay’s conservation status. In the ForBALI Movement, digital activism is able to facilitate direct engagement and conversations between the Indonesian government and its citizens, but overall that action has not changed public policy in relation to the issues of permit allocation. This is shown by the case of the digital public debate between the citizen and the government official.

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Digital media reduces the distance between powerful decision-makers and citizens, and generates opportunities for citizens to engage directly, share aspiration and create public pressure. Digital media can also propagate emotional connections through the distribution of footages or symbols of injustices, and images and videos that raise issues as well as maintaining the movement. However, such digital activism in this case has still not successfully changed policy such as the Benoa Bay reclamation permit and the Presidential Regulation of 2011. The ForBALI Movement’s activists already have a high level of digital literacy to support their digital activism; it requires experience and daily use to understand the opportunities provided by various digital media platforms, an active following with the capacities necessary to successfully mobilise a long, complicated and sustained movement, and the ability to critically differentiate between true and hoax or fake information, create online content, and analyse an opponent’s digital strategy. These Indonesian activists had the ability and understanding necessary to analyse and evaluate online information, and they were deeply concerned that its truth, trustworthiness and credibility should be maintained in the Indonesian digital media environment. Therefore, they used their digital literacy skills to direct citizens with different backgrounds and levels of expertise, including by maximising the opportunities afforded by the digital platforms through their skills in areas such as creating hashtags, visuals and audio-visual materials for the movement. I also argue that their analysis of their opponents’ digital strategies has been very important for digital activism, especially in enabling them to create and distribute counter-narratives for the movement. Digital activists must have the ability to engage in reflection and ethical thinking about their digital life in order to produce meaningful content, express supportive opinions, accept differences and use digital media tools in creative and innovative ways that can make literacy experiences more relevant to Indonesians’ interests, everyday lives and important current issues. Nevertheless, self-confidence and moral belief are needed for members to continue not only expressing themselves but also developing online ethical principles and safe means of participation, as well as applying and educating all members (old, new and prospective participants), thus enabling digital media to function as one of the cornerstones of a healthy democratic system and culture. Volunteer activists in the ForBALI Movement have had a good spirit and commitment to maintaining focus on key issues, and have stayed

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in the longer-term movement (for six years in 2019) via digital media because there are organisational mechanisms like the coalition group that provided coordination and agreements for action and mobilisation. They have also had a strong leader to guide, coordinate and maintain these volunteers, as these are still important in the online social and political movement. This study argues that a better understanding of the advantages and drawbacks of new types of connective action and digital media literacy could strengthen the process of digital activism that supports democracy.

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CHAPTER 12

Elected and Non-elected Representative Claim-Makers in Indonesia Michael Hatherell

Introduction The organisations considered in this volume help us to understand a number of local dynamics, but it is also important to contextualise them within broader social and political trends in Indonesia. Having now observed the 20-year anniversary of the beginning of the Post-Suharto period of reformasi, we have two decades of evidence to assess the institutional, structural and ideational forces which have come to shape Indonesia’s new political reality. These forces not only impact the broader struggles for power at the national level, but also provide a context for regional and local political competition. We have a significant literature to draw on when considering the changes to Indonesia’s political system during this time. Scholars such as Mietzner (2013) and Aspinall and Sukmajati (2016) have considered some of the forces shaping political competition and electoral contests in

M. Hatherell (B) Strategic Studies, Deakin University, Melbourne, VIC, Australia e-mail: [email protected] Australian Defence College, Canberra, ACT, Australia © The Author(s) 2021 A. Vandenberg and N. Zuryani (eds.), Security, Democracy, and Society in Bali, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-5848-1_12

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Indonesia. Bourchier (2019) has surveyed the larger ideological contests, while Hadiz (2016) has considered the role of Islamic populism. More recently, the future of democratisation in Indonesia has been explored by a number of authors, including Power (2018), Davidson (2018), and Aspinall and Berenschot (2019). Many of these studies have also contributed to our understanding of political trends at the local level. This chapter instead focuses on an area of analysis that is less well developed: the nature and impact of representative claim-making in Indonesian politics. In doing so, I argue for the utility of a theoretical framework that seeks to understand how both formally elected and non-elected political actors make claims to be representative of a particular section of society. This framework is important, because the act of being formally elected alone does not insulate representatives such as parties and leaders from the claims of other actors within a society. Instead, both elected and non-elected claim-makers coexist within the same intersubjective arena, and their claims not only compete, but also shape the way in which representation is understood. This framework is particularly useful in Indonesia, where the fall of Suharto and the institutional reforms of the democratisation era have provided new space for both elected and non-elected claim-makers to act politically. Formal political representatives, including political parties and individual leaders or legislators can now compete for an array of political offices at the national, regional and local level. We have also begun to see political candidates build a profile at one level before using the reputation they have developed to jump to higher office. Joko Widodo (better known as Jokowi) is a good example of this phenomena, having served at the local level as mayor of Solo, the regional level as Governor of Jakarta and the national level as President for two terms. However the opening up of Indonesia’s political system has not only assisted formal political representatives. More liberal political rights and a competitive political system have also provided space for community organisations and figures to engage in political discourse and debates. Some of these organisations have also made claims to represent a particular community of people within the political process. Front Pembela Islam (FPI—the Islamic Defenders Front) is one such example. Begun as a street gang (with suspected affiliations to political actors), FPI has transformed itself first into a vigilante organisation and then later into an organisation seeking to play an active political role. Despite never competing as a political party for office, FPI claims to speak and act

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for a portion of Indonesia’s community, possesses a structure similar to Indonesia’s political parties, and engages in public outreach activities. In this chapter I argue that applying the framework of the representative claim to Indonesian politics allows for us to compare the representative claims made by prominent elected and non-elected political actors. Both groups are capable of making claims to represent politically, and in the context of Indonesian politics their representative claims interact and compete. Importantly, this competitive space of representative claim-making can help us to understand who does and does not make claims, how these claims create meaning about both the subject (the representative) and the object (the represented) of the claim, and ultimately what the competition of these claims means for Indonesia’s political system.

Theoretical Foundations---The Representative Claim In order to understand the meaning-making claims of political representatives it is important to see politics itself as a human construction, and a construction that can be ‘made’ in different ways. This means that while we sometimes treat objects of political analysis as fixed and enduring, there is nothing inevitable about their formation or their ongoing survival. It follows, therefore, that political representation, that is the notion that an individual or group acts politically on behalf of others, emerges because of the way in which individuals and societies collectively understand and practice ‘representation’. The interpretive study of political representation has been significantly influenced by the work of Michael Saward (2010), who has explored the way in which representatives engage in meaning-making claims about themselves and their societies. While Saward is not the only author to present an argument for approaching political representation in this way (see, for example, Rehfeld 2006), his work has been the most influential, and has inspired new theoretical and empirical analysis. According to Lisa Disch (2012, p. 118), his idea of the representative claim is having a nearly revolutionary effect on the way political theorists think and speak about political representation. It has brought to the fore that political representation is a creative activity and has directed political theorists to the tools of rhetorical analysis for understanding it. Saward is, thus,

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the first theorist in over 50 years to achieve conceptual innovations in the normative analysis of representative politics.

This approach to political representation conceptualises representation as an ongoing and dynamic phenomenon which is not simply ‘a static fact of electoral politics’ (Saward 2010, p. 3), but instead seeks to understand ‘what representation does, rather than what it is; to explore the effects of its invocation rather than its institutional embodiment; to stress its dynamic character rather than its correctly understood forms or types’ (Saward 2010, p. 4). In other words, in our analysis of political representation we should not neglect the way in which the meaning of representation is constructed within a given political system, including by both the would-be representatives and the ‘represented’. Instead of trying to assess the ideal form of political institutions or the quality of leaders in the eyes of the researcher, this approach asks how leaders or institutions present themselves as ‘good’ representatives, and why communities either accept or reject their claims to be so. It also opens the possibility of exploring multiple cross-cutting claims to represent a particular section of society, or even different claims about the characteristics of that section of society. In order to assess this relationship between representative and represented, Saward introduces the concept of the representative claim, which is a claim: …to represent or to know what represents the interests of someone or something. It is a claim; it may or may not be a well-founded claim. I could claim, for example, to represent the interests of a person or a group of people or of animals. I could claim to stand for or embody the true character of a country or a region…moreover, all of these claims are directed to an audience, which might consist of a large or small, proximate or dispersed, or self-aware or disparate set of people. (Saward 2010, p. 38)

By focusing on the meaning attached to the making and assessment of representative claims, this approach rejects the idea that ‘representativeness’ can be defined by the researcher and then simply measured. Instead, this approach is interested in the ideas and narratives that inform how would-be representatives make claims to be representative (and crucially, how they claim to be ‘good’ representatives), and the ideas used by audiences of those claims to make their own assessment. The audience of the

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claim—those citizens and societies that are ‘represented’—become the main assessors of representative claims, and the researcher thus plays a second order role in seeking to understand the basis of their assessments. Thinking about political representation in this way presents significant value in the context of a volume such as this. By moving on from the notion that representation is simply embodied within formal institutional relationships (i.e. the act and nature of election exhausts the meaning of representation), we can instead turn to the way in which the dynamic process of representative claim-making shapes our understanding of the represented as well as the representative. Effectively, this means that constituencies do not: Precede acts of political representation but are, rather, figured by them so as to solicit them into being in relationship with a particular representative. Political representation is not literal and mimetic; it has an inescapably figurative element. Viewing political representation as possessing inescapable figurative elements means paying attention to the constitutive and creative aspects of representation. (Disch 2012, p. 115)

Considering how meaning is generated through the act of representative claim-making and reception should not exhaust our study of political dynamics. There is significant value in considering the institutional, structural and organisational realities of political representation. Yet it is important to compliment this analysis with a greater focus on the generation of political meaning, for the way in which the concept of political representation is understood can have very real political implications. In a world where intense focus is now directed towards the words and claims of President Donald Trump, the connection between discourse, perception and political outcomes is arguably even more apparent. While constructivists ‘focus on the role of ideas, norms, knowledge, culture, and argument in politics’ alongside ‘stressing in particular the role of collectively held or “intersubjective” ideas and understandings on social life’ (Finnemore and Sikkink 2001, p. 392), Saward (2010, p. 39) similarly argues that the representative claim concept: Is less about pinning down meaning, more about asking how meanings are generated and contested; or, again, how something absent is rendered as present. How is the impression of presence constructed, defended, and contested? What determines the success or failure of the effort to construct such an impression?

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Hence in the context of this volume we should remain open to the potential for the meaning generated about political representation to be important. By assessing representative claims in this way, we will be able to produce stronger conclusions about the nature of political organisation. In doing so, we reject the ‘unalloyed presence’ of representation, and are instead interested in how representation operates ‘as a set of practices, of events and in particular of claims, claims to be representative’ (Saward 2010, p. 39). Through applying the concept of the representative claim, we can consider the full range of ways in a society in which one actor claims to speak or act for another in a political sense. This is expected of candidates and political parties seeking office, but we should also remain open to the possibility that representative claims are regularly made by actors with no formal political role or claim for formal office. An emerging section of literature is looking at the representative claims made by non-elected organisations. Teivanen and Trommer (2017, p. 29), for instance, look at the dynamics of representation when it comes to transnational non-state actors, arguing that political theory needs to pay systematic attention to the ways in which representative practices are and can be applied in radical democratic politics. Dodging the question of representation in non-state, transnational policy contexts leaves these dimensions unquestioned, and therefore leaves power too many places to hide.

This is true of Indonesia, where increased civil and political rights in the post-Suharto period have opened up civil society to a greater range of representative claims. At the same time, this also means that there is significant potential for cross cutting and overlapping representative claim-making.

Representative Claim-Making in Indonesia’s Past This is not to say that patterns of representative claim-making were not evident during the long years of the Suharto regime. Representative claims are important in authoritarian contexts too, and authoritarian regimes are often particularly focused on and adept at making claims of representativeness. von Soest and Grauvogel (2017, p. 299), for instance, survey a range of different claims of legitimacy made by authoritarian

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regimes, and argue that closed authoritarian systems ‘rely predominantly on identity-based legitimation strategies – namely, references to the regime’s ideology, its foundational myth and/or the person of the ruler – in constructing the mix of legitimation dimensions they draw on’. Suharto’s regime was adept at developing a sense of the appropriateness of the regime as a representation of society, and Suharto’s legitimate place as bapak pembangunan (the father of development). During this period, civil society organisations faced significant limitations on the representative claims that they could make. In some cases, forthright claim-makers, such as the political parties, were more tightly controlled. In the early years of the regime, the main priority of Suharto and some of his military supporters, such as Ali Moertopo, was to bring Indonesia’s political party system into line. Only three parties were allowed by the 1970s, including Suharto’s own political vehicle, Golongan Karya (GOLKAR). The two non-GOLKAR parties that were allowed to remain, Partai Pesatuan Pembangunan (PPP—the United Development Party) and Partai Demokrasi Indonesia (PDI—Indonesian Democratic Party), were barely independent of the regime itself. Within these parties, ‘Democratic decision-making structures, where they existed, gave way to administrative centralisation, reflecting a New Order preoccupation with order, obedience, patronage and a father-knows-best style of rule’ (Bourchier 2014, p. 161). These parties faced crippling restrictions, including being barred after the 1971 election from having an organisational presence at the local and regional level, and lacking many of the advantages accrued to GOLKAR through its fusion with the civil administration and the military. As such, their main purpose was ‘to demonstrate a broad consensus around the government’s national leadership and to enhance the democratic credentials of the regime’ (Eklöf 1999, p. 6). Other civil society organisations who had been heavily involved in politics chose to engage in a form of ‘self-censorship’. This was particularly true of some of Indonesia’s largest religious organisations, like Muhammadiyah and Nahdlatul Ulama, which withdrew from formal politics altogether. This naturally limited the sense of representation that they may have been able to claim on behalf of their members and followers, though we should not underestimate the way in which representative claims can still be made in relation to social and educational functions. During this period other civil society organisations:

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were given no room by the regime to express arguments opposing the government or to challenge government policy. Extra-legal measures, such as kidnappings and tortures, were also used by the regime, targeting those who actively challenged the government. (Nugroho 2013, p. 14)

And so it was that representative claim-making during the Suharto era was dominated by the pyramid structure of legitimacy that Suharto was effective in establishing. In an essay published as part of a 1996 collection, Liddle (1996, p. 32) argued that there is clear evidence of the institutionalisation of the New Order pyramid. The complex strategy of repression, performance legitimation, and symbolic legitimation has created, and now sustains within and outside the political system, a solid base of support that is committed to the system itself…

In this way, this institutionalised pyramid of the New Order, which included a strong role for the bureaucracy, the state party GOLKAR, and the military, became a supreme claim-making body in its own right, with Suharto at the head. Together with the government’s efforts to ‘monopolise the representation of major interest groups’, Eklöf (1999, p. 7) describes the situation under Suharto as a ‘waterproof system of political representation’. And yet, even ‘waterproof’ authoritarian regimes face challenges. Despite the hegemonic position of the regime in the making of representative claims, it is important to note that throughout its history, there were voices of opposition and criticism that might occasionally engage in claiming a sense of ‘representativeness’. Aspinall’s (2005) major work on opposition and compromise in the Suharto regime offers the most detailed analysis of these avenues for opposition. One of the best examples of a representative claim made outside of the regime is the ‘petition of 50’ (petisi 50), signed by a group of 50 high profile serving and retired leaders in 1980. This document began by invoking ‘the deep concern of the people’ (keprihatinan rakyat yang mendalam). Yet, as noted by Aspinall (2005, p. 66) ‘because of the continuing media blackout, their broader impact was limited. Only the group’s modernist Islamic members retained a link to a readily identifiable mass base’. The ability of the members of the group to connect their concerns regularly with the public varied during the next two decades, and ‘although the government had successfully

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isolated the group, its members retained considerable moral authority and were widely respected in the broader public’ (Aspinall 2005, p. 67). The group would later split, particularly as the relationship between the regime and political Islam changed and some members were co-opted by regime forces. The waterproofing of political representation under the Suharto regime was further eroded through the 1990s. At this time, new reform leaders emerged, including Megawati Sukarnoputri, Abdurrahman Wahid and Amien Rais. Perhaps most prominently, Megawati’s contentious election to lead Partai Demokrasi Indonesia (PDI) in 1993 developed into a three-year struggle between Megawati and the Suharto regime over the leadership of the party. This would eventually lead to a violent assault on PDI’s headquarters in 1996. These events demonstrate the extent to which the Suharto regime was intent on restricting representative claims that could not be subsumed under the formal structure of power that it had built. Megawati was a threat not only because she implicitly criticised the regime, but because she began to make quite effective claims to represent the voices of many within society in a way that challenged the legitimacy of Suharto’s New Order. The fall of Suharto and the beginning of the reform movement (known in Indonesia as reformasi) in 1998 established new political institutions and impacted to some extent the structural conditions of power in Indonesia. These developments also had implications for the ideational basis of political representation—both in terms of practices and discourse. Competitive elections for the presidency, for instance, opened up new dynamics in competition between the most prominent politicians in the country. Megawati and Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono’s competition for the presidency in the first direct election of 2004 established new practices in presidential politics, which would later be further developed in subsequent electoral contests. The extensive televised political debates between Jokowi and Prabowo in 2014 and 2019, for instance, would have shocked Suharto and his adherence to the traditional Javanese notion of how power should be employed: Several observers have likened Suharto’s style of leadership to that of a Javanese king. Ideally, as described in the old Javanese court chronicles, a king should possess spiritual powers, wahyu, which supposedly allowed him to rule without visible effort. As long as the king possessed these powers

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people would automatically follow his wishes, invisibly guided by the divine energy. (Eklöf 1999, p. 15)

There are many other examples of institutional changes that have led to new forms of representative claim-making. The direct election of regional and local leaders, for instance, has shifted the ideational burden of these offices and has seen the emergence of a new class of innovative local and regional leaders who develop more direct relationships with local citizens and communities. The significance of this particular change can be seen in the campaign by some political parties to attempt to reverse it, following Jokowi’s success in the 2014 presidential election (Hatherell 2019, pp. 148–149). There are other examples too. Political parties are now able to more freely emerge and to make representative claims more openly. Government ministers have been able to use their positions and responsibilities as a launching pad for their own representative claims and the development of their own representative profile. The former minister of maritime affairs and fisheries, Susi Pudjiastuti, for instance, developed a well-defined political identity (Ahlstrand 2018, p. 69). Overall, the institutional and structural reforms during the reformasi period have led to an environment that allows for a wider range of dynamic representative claims that are conducted by a diverse set of political actors. Broader international shifts, such as the availability of social media tools, have also contributed towards the dynamic nature of representative claim-making.

The Space for Claim-Making in Contemporary Indonesia Yet space to make representative claims does not necessarily mean that these claims will be successful. Effective political representation relies on more than just favourable institutional and structural conditions. If political representation is understood as the act of making claims and the processing of these claims by an audience, then there is always a contested nature to these claims. Where political actors are unable to convincingly make claims using ideational resources, then the perception of representation, and potentially the perception of legitimacy in the political system, will suffer. In this regard, it is important to note the failure of Indonesia’s political parties to establish a strong ideational basis for their representative claims. In the early years of reformasi, it seemed as if Indonesia’s political parties

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would be able to construct their identity around the aliran that had shaped the party system in the 1950s. Aliran, as Geertz (1964) outlined them, were cleavages in society based on cross-cutting religious, cultural and political identities. The election result in 1955 saw a number of large parties representing different streams of society achieve electoral success, including Partai Nasional Indonesia (PNI , National Party of Indonesia) representing nationalist and secular abangan Muslims, Partai Komunis Indonesia (PKI , Indonesian Communist Party) representing communists and socialists, Masyumi representing modernist santri Muslims and NU representing traditionalist santri Muslims. Over time, however, the place of aliran as an ideational basis for the political system faded. This was already evident by the time of the 2009 election, where Liddle and Mulyani (2010, p. 39) found through their survey research that: Neither adherence to a particular world religion nor belonging to a certain aliran had a significant direct influence on voters… Moreover, regional differences, specifically the oft-mentioned gulf between the residents of Java and those of other islands, did not greatly influence voting behavior. These conclusions contradicted previous scholarly claims that aliran and locality largely determine how Indonesians cast their ballots.

These authors instead argue for the impact of other factors, such as the state of the economy and the identity of individual leaders, as being more important in influencing votes in the 2009 election. We should not completely dismiss the continued power of the society– party relationships founded on the identities captured in the notion of aliran. Partai Kebangkitan Bangsa (PKB), for instance, retains strong connections to the Muslim organisation Nahdlatul Ulama (NU), and to the NU network, particularly in East Java. Other parties like PDI-P and PKS have developed relationships with specific identity communities in Indonesia and these relationships endure. Yet the ability of Indonesia’s political parties to make representative claims that are acknowledged by large sections of Indonesian society is relatively weak. In a survey conducted in 2011, for instance, only 20% of respondents replied that they felt closer (‘merasa lebih dekat’) to a specific political party rather than the others—a reduction from 86% in 1999 when aliran connections were more influential (Lembaga Survei Indonesia 2011). By 2015, this figure had further dropped to 15.9% (Lembaga Survei Indonesia 2015).

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This weakness of Indonesia’s political parties as claim-makers is important for two reasons. Firstly, political parties are unlikely to disappear from Indonesia’s political system. Candidates for local, regional and national legislative elections must be nominated by the national political parties, and the parties also occupy an important role in nominating presidential candidates. The continued central position of political parties was clearly evident in the difficulties faced by Jokowi in obtaining PDI-P’s backing for his presidential nomination in 2014—despite his very positive personal approval ratings at the time. Even where local and regional candidates for executive office are able to run independently, most candidates seek the support of parties, as the administrative and organisational burden of running for office as an independent is immense. Importantly, these same political parties occupy the national parliament—the government body through which changes to party regulation must pass. For this reason, it is difficult to see the role of political parties in Indonesian politics being weakened. If political parties continue to occupy such a strong institutional position, it is important to also think about the impact of their inability to construct meaningful representative claims. Secondly, in the context of this particular volume we should consider how the largely ineffective role of the political parties provides a vacuum in the political landscape that can be filled by other claims. Indonesia’s political parties may possess institutional advantages that other political actors do not. And yet, where they are unable to develop meaningful claims to representativeness, we are likely to see other individuals and organisations emerge to fill this gap.

Filling the Gap: Formal and Informal Challengers to the Political Parties Indonesia possesses, therefore, a political system where political parties play a central institutional role, but lack the ability to make broadly accepted representative claims. In this gap, there are a number of elected and non-elected challengers who seek to make their own claims to represent the political interests of society or specific sections of society. In many cases, these challengers are making claims that the political parties themselves have been unable to do so successfully. Some of these challengers do seek to be elected to office. In my previous research I have explored the success of innovative local and regional leaders to make compelling representative claims (Hatherell

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2019). Together, this group of leaders employ an approach to political representation based on a technocratic obsession with the details of policy outcomes at the local and regional level, while also finding innovative methods to engage with the public. These ‘innovative technocrats’ emerged in the wake of the political success of Jokowi as mayor of the small city of Solo in Java, but have now developed their own unique identity in local and regional offices around the country. The innovative technocrats share a number of common practices and forms of discourse. The reform of public space, for instance, has become a central idea at the heart of claims made by the innovative technocrats, including by Jokowi in Solo and Jakarta, Basuki Tjahaja Purnama (better known as Ahok) in Jakarta, Ridwan Kamil in Bandung and Tri Rismaharini (Ibu Risma) in Surabaya. While their local and regional contexts differ, these local leaders have employed some of the same forms of discourse or political practices, both of which allow for the sharing of their claims. Importantly, their claims, whether expressed through words, deed or symbolic appeals, are public acts, and have shaped public attitudes and expectations towards political representation. Other would-be representatives can see the way in which a leader like Jokowi or Ibu Risma engages with the public or captures public policy stories on Instagram. The repertoire is never stagnant, however, and new innovations or ‘twists on the theme’ can be employed to capture the attention of the public. A good example of innovation is the use of social media by Ridwan Kamil, which draws on some of the same form of claims as the other technocrats while harnessing new technology in order to share the claim more widely (Hatherell 2019, pp. 116–127). Unsurprisingly, other would-be representatives in Indonesia are increasingly turning to social media to share their claims too. The innovative technocrats have been remarkably successful, but the meaning generated by their claims is limited in important ways. By centering their claims on technocratic ideas and innovative engagement with the public, they typically avoid other potentially potent sources of claim-making. Instead, the appeal of the message they deliver is that they are only interested in the delivery of public good for citizens, going so far as to present themselves as ‘reluctant politicians’, drawn into the world of politics in order to apply the technical skills they possess for the good of the community (Hatherell 2019, pp. 110–111). Between the relative weakness of the representative claims of the political parties, and the specific technocratic focus of popular local and

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regional leaders, there remains a significant potential for other representative claims that draw on the many forms of identity that exist within Indonesia. The country has a long and dynamic history of civil society organisation, including foundations, unions and identity-based organisations. While different names are used for these organisations, many membership-based organisations and foundations are grouped under the title of ormas (organisasi kemasyarakatan—community organisations), and many of these organisations are centred on a particular form of regional, ethnic or religious identity. The two large Muslim associations previously mentioned in this chapter, Nahdlatul Ulama and Muhammadiyah, are good examples of ormas that centre on traditionalist and modernist Muslim identities, respectively. While these organisations do not formally compete for office as political parties in their own right, they have throughout their history been active political players. Other smaller ormas have emerged during the reformasi era and transformed themselves into active claim-making organisations. In perhaps the most prominent example, FPI had operated largely as a violent vigilante organisation during the late Suharto period and the first decade of reformasi, but has recently sought to develop into an organisation with a more political orientation. FPI and its leader, Muhammad Rizieq Shihab, were particularly influential in the 212 movement protests in December 2016 which sought the arrest of Jakarta governor Ahok on blasphemy charges (IPAC 2018). In subsequent reunions of 212 and in the presidential election of 2019, Rizieq Shihab continued to play an active political role, even while engaging in self-exile to Saudi Arabia during this time. This role has seemingly expanded to take on a nationalistic as well as religious tone. This can be seen, for instance, in the claim made by the Imam of the FPI Jakarta Branch, Muhsin bin Zaid Alattas, when he argued that Rizieq Shihab would remain an opposition figure: His position from the past until now when he is in Saudi Arabia, and even if later he is able to return, he continues to have a commitment to protecting the integrity of the Unitary Republic of Indonesia if there are those who disturb or damage the community of Indonesia. (Warta Ekonomi, 12 August 2019)

Beyond these larger national claims, religious and ethnic identity in Indonesia often intersect with distinct local contextual challenges. Economic and community relations in many of Indonesia’s provinces

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often feature strong ethnic and religious issues, and apart from the innovative technocrats, these sources of representative claim-making are rarely fully capitalised upon by formal political representatives. Indonesia’s political parties, in particular, have to adhere to strict nationalisation regulations, ruling out local or regional political parties (Hatherell 2019, pp. 143–148). In this context, local organisations that project a strong sense of religious or ethnic identity such as Laskar Bali and Baladika may seek to do more than just operate as informal security networks. Instead, they may increasingly seek to make public claims to representativeness that establish their own legitimacy while challenging the legitimacy of other political actors. These types of claims are a feature of other chapters within this volume. When these organisations engage in representative claim-making, we should consider the impact for their own position, but also what their political engagement means for the political environment. This is the case because, while political representatives establish meaning about themselves and the community in specific cases, representative claim-making is inherently intersubjective. Claims are always made in a specific social setting, and always in the context of an existing and evolving context of ideas and meaning. For this reason, there is significant value in interrogating the way in which ongoing processes of representative claim-making in a given social and political context lead to the formation of ‘repertoires of representation’ (Hatherell 2014, pp. 3–5). While formal representatives frequently pay attention to the form of claims made by other elected representatives, we should also remain conscious of the way in which both formal and informal claim-makers in Indonesia draw on a common set of representative claims. Any analysis of the use of social media, for instance, quickly uncovers similar trends in the way that elected leaders and non-elected organisations such as ormas are using social media to make representative claims. Elected and non-elected representative claim-makers not only operate in an intersubjective claim-making environment—they also actively compete within the space available for claims to be made. Where existing formal representatives are perceived to not be sufficiently representative of specific interests or identities, then members of the community are likely to look to other organisations. In part, this helps to explain the growing prominence of FPI in Indonesia during the last five years: the claims that a figure like Rizieq Shihab and his organisation make are different than those presented by Indonesia’s political parties and elected

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leaders. At times, elected representatives may also seek to push back and express their own representativeness in relation to ormas. This can be seen, for instance, in the public claims made by the elected Governor of Bali, Wayan Koster, in early 2019 in relation to a warning against violence and disorder presented to three of Bali’s ormas (Laskar Bali, Baladika and Pemuda Bali Bersatu): In my opinion, after I spoke heart to heart with the leaders of the three ormas, I think there is no intention to carry out violence, I’m sure they want to do good things and be of value for the community. As governor I have to treat these ‘children’ as my own children which I need to develop. So, I can’t act carelessly. The steps that I take need to be measured and can be responsible to the community and [God]. (Antara News Bali, 15 January 2019)

Here we clearly see a representative claim made by the elected governor. This claim is full of meaning about the way in which Wayan Koster presents himself as an elected official, and the way his claim challenges the position of the ormas to which he is referring. This is just one small example of a constant dynamic in Indonesian politics: cross-cutting representative claims in a political environment full of elected leaders and parties as well as non-elected ormas and figures. The competition between these representative claims matters because it can shape important political outcomes regarding who gains institutional power, and even how society itself views the political legitimacy of different organisations and individuals.

Conclusion This chapter has argued that the ideational environment in which representative claims are made is important, and the concept of the representative claim is valuable when applied to a political context such as Indonesia. Not only does this concept highlight the way in which formal political leaders make claims about themselves as well as those they seek to represent, but also the competitive claim-making between formal political leaders and other organisations within society. As a framework for understanding the way in which representation operates, the representative claim is ideal for seeking to understand the ability of ormas in Indonesia to make claims to represent the interests of a specific part of

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the community. This is true of organisations such as Baladika and Laskar Bali which are the focus of this volume. There are, however, important future questions about the space allowed for the political claims of organisations within civil society in Indonesia. This chapter has noted the dominant role of the Suharto regime in making representative claims, and the limited space for other organisations during this period to make their own claims to represent the political interests of sections of society (or indeed the whole society). It is difficult for even authoritarian regimes to completely stifle the political claims of other organisations, and the fall of the Suharto regime coincided with a growing space for representative claim-making from other actors. And yet, after two decades of reformasi, there are signs that the space for diverse representative claim-makers within Indonesian society is again shrinking. As Nugroho (2013, p. 32) has highlighted, the increasing legal attempts to control ormas over the past decade have seen a growing power of the Ministry of Home Affairs (MoHA) and the Direktorate Jenderal Kesatuan Bangsa dan Politik (Directorate General of National Unity and Politics) to control the registration of ormas. This is problematic, as the approach of the MoHA, and especially the Directorate General of National Unity and Politics, is always grounded in the perspective of politics and security. Such a regulatory approach is not likely to lead to a healthy and strong civic sector in Indonesia. (Nugroho 2013, p. 32)

These concerns have only increased during the Jokowi administration, with organisations like Hizbut Tahrir Indonesia (HTI) officially proscribed, troublesome figures such as Rizieq Shihab allegedly criminalised, and a seemingly much greater interest in shutting down overt political challenges in the name of pembangunan (development) (Power 2018). The future relationship between state and society in Indonesia remains an open question, but the forces of the state retain the ability to manage and even remove ormas from their active position in civil society. As such, the competitive claim-making environment that now exists within Indonesia may come under threat, with implications for organisations such as Baladika and Laskar Bali.

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References Ahlstrand, J 2018, ‘A Critical Discourse Analysis of Women, Power, and Social-Political Change in the Indonesian Online News Media’, PhD Thesis, University of Queensland. Antara News Bali 15 January 2019, ‘Gubernur beri peringatan ormas Laskar Bali, Baladika, dan PBB’, Antara News Bali. Aspinall, E 2005, Opposing Suharto: Compromise, Resistance, and Regime Change in Indonesia, East-West Center Series on Contemporary Issues in Asia and the Pacific, Stanford University Press, Stanford. Aspinall, E & Berenschot, W 2019, Democracy for Sale: Elections, Clientelism, and the State in Indonesia, Cornell University Press, Ithaca. Aspinall, E & Sukmajati, M 2016, ‘Patronage and Clientelism in Indonesian Electoral Politics’, in E Aspinall & M Sukmajati (eds), Electoral Dynamics in Indonesia: Money Politics, Patronage and Clientelism at the Grassroots, NUS Press, Singapore, pp. 1–37. Davidson, JS 2018, Indonesia: Twenty Years of Democracy, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, https://www.cambridge.org/core/elements/indone sia/8E0D464AFC077007052B28FF16F7C287. Bourchier, D 2014, Illiberal democracy in Indonesia: The ideology of the family state. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203379721. Bourchier, DM 2019, Two Decades of Ideological Contestation in Indonesia: From Democratic Cosmopolitanism to Religious Nationalism, Journal of Contemporary Asia, vol. 49, no. 5, pp. 713–733. Disch, L 2012, ‘The “Constructivist Turn” in Political Representation’, Contemporary Political Theory, vol. 11, pp. 114–118. Eklöf, S 1999, Indonesian Politics in Crisis: The Long Fall of Suharto, 1996–1998, Studies in Contemporary Asia Series: no. 1, NIAS, Copenhagen. Finnemore, M & Sikkink, K 2001, ‘Taking Stock: The Constructivist Research Program in International Relations and Comparative Politics’, Annual Review of Political Science, vol. 4, no. 1, p. 391. Geertz, C 1964, The Religion of Java, Free Press, New York, c1960. Hadiz, V 2016, Islamic Populism in Indonesia and the Middle East, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Hatherell, M 2014, Repertoires of Representation and an Application to Indonesia’s Jokowi, Representation, vol. 50, no. 4, pp. 439–451. https:// doi.org/10.1080/00344893.2014.980311. Hatherell, M 2019, Political Representation in Indonesia: The Emergence of the Innovative Technocrats, Rethinking Southeast Asia, Routledge, London. IPAC 2018, After Ahok: The Islamist Agenda in Indonesia, http://www.unders tandingconflict.org/en/conflict/read/69/After-Ahok-The-Islamist-Agendain-Indonesia.

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Lembaga Survei Indonesia 2011, Pemilih Mengambang Dan Prospek Perubahan Kekuatan Partai Politik, www.lsi.or.id. Lembaga Survei Indonesia 2015, Partai Politik di Mata Publik, Lembaga Survei Indonesia, http://www.lsi.or.id/riset/436/Rilis-LSI-Partai-PolitikdiMata-Publik. Liddle, RW 1996, Leadership and Culture in Indonesian Politics, Southeast Asia Publications Series: no. 29, Asian Studies Association of Australia in association with Allen & Unwin, Sydney. Liddle, RW & Mulyani, S 2010, ‘Personalities, Parties and Voters’, Journal of Democracy, vol. 21, no. 2, pp. 35–49. Mietzner, M 2013, Money, Power, and Ideology: Political Parties in PostAuthoritarian Indonesia, NUS Press, Singapore. Nugroho, E 2013, ‘Bill on Societal Organizations (RUU Ormas) and Freedom of Association in Indonesia’, International Journal of Not-for-Profit Law, vol. 15, no. 1, pp. 13–37. Power, TP 2018, ‘Jokowi’s Authoritarian Turn and Indonesia’s Democratic Decline’, Bulletin of Indonesian Economic Studies, vol. 54, no. 3, pp. 307– 338. Rehfeld, A 2006, ‘Towards a General Theory of Political Representation’, The Journal of Politics, vol. 68, no. 1, pp. 1–21. Saward, M 2010, The Representative Claim, Oxford University Press, Oxford and New York. Teivainen, T & Trommer, S 2017, ‘Representation Beyond the State: Towards Transnational Democratic Non-state Politics’, Globalizations, vol. 14, no. 1, pp. 17–31. von Soest, C & Grauvogel, J 2017, ‘Identity, Procedures and Performance: How Authoritarian Regimes Legitimize Their Rule’, Contemporary Politics, vol. 23, no. 3, pp. 287–305. Warta Ekonomi 12 August 2019, ‘Berdasarkan Survei, 33 Persen Masyarakat Ingin Rizieq Pulang, Kata FPI Begini’, WartaEkonomi.co.id.

CHAPTER 13

Contesting Indonesia’s Democratic Transition: Laskar Jihad, the Islamic Defenders Front (FPI) and Civil Society Greg Barton

Civil Society and Uncivil Social Organisations---The Rise of the Laskar Civil society is often thought of in qualitative terms as being associated with civility, but civil society is also the domain of many social organisations that behave in uncivil ways. Every society has a space, however much it might be constrained, between the public sector—controlled by the state, and the private sector—the domain of commerce and the market. The civil sector, the third sector of society, is generally synonymous with civil society. Together with the personal domain of the family, civil society is the domain in which the majority of religious and cultural life takes place. It is the domain of voluntary organisations and most philanthropic activity belongs to civil society (Antonin 2012). It is well understood that a close connection exists between the quality of organisations and activities taking place within civil society and with the

G. Barton (B) Alfred Deakin Institute, Deakin University, Melbourne, VIC, Australia e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2021 A. Vandenberg and N. Zuryani (eds.), Security, Democracy, and Society in Bali, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-5848-1_13

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strength of democracy and open society (Antlov and Wetterberg 2011). It does not automatically follow, however, that every aspect of civil society is entirely civil (Hobsbawn 1969). Although the civil sector is generally framed as opposing criminality it is vulnerable to the activity of criminal organisations, and more benignly, many aspects of the grey economy, particularly in developing societies in which the informal sector compares in size and reach with that of the formal economy (Barker 1999, 2001, 2016). In Indonesia, as a developing economy and a consolidating democracy, civil society is home to literally millions of so-called social organisations (collectively referred to as ormas —organisasi masyarakat ), nongovernmental organisations of various sizes generally associated with religion, philanthropy, volunteerism and social activism, of which only around 4000 are formally registered (see Apriani Chapter 2, Nugroho 2013). But the space between the formal operation of the organs of the state and the formal economic sector is also home to social organisations whose provision of social services and economic opportunities is mixed, with patron–client obligations that extend into the grey economy and overlap with elements of criminality (Aspinall 2005, 2014; Aspinall and Sukmajati 2016; Aspinall and Berenschot 2019; Bakker 2016a, b, 2017; Lipson 2019; Sidel 2004). In developed economies the various levels of government, and/or licensed corporate interests, regulate public land for such things as onstreet car parking and the licensing of spaces for market stalls and street vendors. This is increasingly the case in Indonesia but much of this activity continues to be managed by ormas that pay rent to police and government officials in return for collecting rent from individuals and micro businesses that operate in their neighbourhood. This explains one dimension of ormas such as the Islamic Defenders Front (FPI—Front Pembela Islam), Laskar Bali, Bali Baladikan and Pemuda Bali Bersatu (Nordholt 2015; Wilson 2015a; Robinson 1988, 1998; Santikarma 2007). In many respects this is a natural and even necessary aspect of social life, particularly in developing economies, but it has a dark side (Bachelard 2014; Barker 1999, 2001, 2016; McDonald and Wilson 2017). The most extreme manifestation of this came with the killing of many hundreds of thousands of alleged supporters of the Indonesia Communist Party (PKIPartai Komunis Indonesia), most at the hands of vigilante ormas mobs during the bloody transition from the ‘Old Order’ of the Sukarno era (1949–1965) to the ‘New Order’ of Suharto (1965–1998) (Anderson

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2001; Cribb et al. 1990; Oppenheimer et al. 2013; Oppenheimer 2014) As the chapters in this volume have explored, the larger social organisations of Bali that are structured as laskar, or militia (from lashkar the Persian word for army or military division, also used of militiamen and soldiers in the British Raj), play on cultural concepts of strongmen, protection and racketeering. Nevertheless, as these essays have set out, for the most part, these uniformed laskar are less genuine militia than they are social service organisations dependent upon political patronage. That is to say, despite their iconography coloured by the cosmology of Bali with its mystical warrior forces and protective spirits, the Hindu social organisations of Bali are, in important respects, not like other Indonesian groups bearing the title laskar, such as the notorious Islamist groups Laskar Pembela Islam (now better known as Front Pembela Islam— the Islamic Defenders Front), Laskar Jihad (the Holy War Force), and Laskar Mujahidin KOMPAK (the KOMPAK Holy War Fighter Force) (Noorhaidi 2006; Schulze 2019). Laskar Mujahidin KOMPAK had the best-trained and most lethal fighters in the conflict in Ambon and was later revealed to be linked to the Salafi-Jihadi terrorist group Jemaah Islamiyah (JI) (Barton 2005, 2009, 2010a). It was led by JI leaders who had fought and trained alongside alQaeda in Afghanistan and modelled it on al-Qaeda’s maktab al-khidmat ‘service agency’ (Noorhaidi 2006: 202; Schulze 2019: 42–48). KOMPAK (Komite Aksi Penanggulangan Akibat Krisis—the Action Committee for Tackling the Consequences of the Crisis) was formally established in 1997 as an humanitarian aid agency by the Saudi-linked Islamist social activist organisation Dewan Dakwah Islam Indonesia (DDII) in response to the 1997–1998 Asian Financial Crisis (Noorhaidi 2006: 32–55). KOMPAK’s operations in Ambon were led by JI’s Ari Munandar (having been established by JI Bali bomber Ali Imron). KOMPAK’s humanitarian agency front proved useful cover to JI’s militant operations in Ambon. Beginning in early 2000 Laskar Jihad and Laskar Mujahidin were involved in very serious violence in Ambon in eastern Indonesia that saw at least 9000 lives lost and tens of thousands displaced (Elegant 2001; Sholeh 2006). In mid-2001 they become involved in communal violence in Poso, Central Sulawesi. These laskar not only styled themselves as militia but very much played the part. Laskar Jihad was an extremist Salafi organisation that helped to precipitate and expand communitarian violence between Muslims and Christians in Maluku, sending over 7000 fighters. It differed, however from Salafi-Jihadi terrorist groups such as

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al-Qaeda in that it presented itself as an apolitical, patriotic, movement defending the Indonesian republic and following the religious teaching of prominent mainstream Salafi ulama in Saudi Arabia. Indeed the leader of Laskar Jihad, Jafar Umar Thalib shut down the organisation on 17 October 2002, when commanded to do so by his spiritual mentor in Saudi Arabia Rab¯ı‘ _ibn H¯ad¯ı _al-Madkhal¯ı (Noorhaidi 2006: 225–26). This occurred just five days after the JI bomb attacks in Bali and followed months of pressure from senior Salafi ulama in the leadership group of Laskar Jihad’s parent organisation FKAWJ (Forum Komunikasi Ahlus Sunnah wal-Jama’ah—Forum for Followers of the Sunna and the Community of the Prophet). Laskar Jihad was a radical ormas but it was allowed to form and operate only because of certain political circumstances and when these changed its window of opportunity abruptly closed. Jafar Umar Thalib had studied in Pakistan and the late 1980s, and from there had become involved in training and fighting alongside the anti-Soviet mujahidin in Afghanistan. In Afghanistan he had met with senior al-Qaeda leaders, including Osama bin-Laden (Noorhaidi 2006: 5–10). But when he returned to Indonesia Thalib positioned himself as being critical of democracy but supportive of the government of President Habibie and of the Republic of Indonesia. As is so often the case with ormas bearing the title laskar, Laskar Jihad was backed, financed, protected and directed by elements of the military and of the former Suharto regime in opposition to the authority of President Abdurrahman and the reformist government that he formed in October 1999 (Noorhaidi 2006: vi, 7, 101, 107, 110–15, 159). As interim president, Habibie had been remarkably bold in championing reforms but was percieved to be supportive of conservative Islamic interests. And, up until the East Timor Referendum result of 30 August 1999, that shocked the Jakarta elite with a landslide of 78.5 to 21.5 in favour of independence, Habibie was thought to have the backing of the military. In the wake of the East Timor vote Habibie withdrew himself from the presidential contest, leaving Suharto’s old party Golkar without a candidate in the parliamentary vote. An unlikely temporary coalition of Islamic parties and Golkar saw Wahid defeat Megawati Sukarnoputri on 20 October 1999. Despite his paucity of enduring political capital Wahid boldly continued Habibie’s reforms and extended them to take on the Islamists and the more reactionary elements of the military (Barton 2002). The city

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of Ambon and the province of Maluku had been wracked by communal violence throughout 1999. Maluku had long had a predominately Melanesian Catholic population, with Christian missionaries arriving in the sixteenth century together with Portuguese forces seeking to control the exclusive source of nutmeg, mace and clove. The late twentieth century had seen considerable Muslim migration from Sulawesi but throughout the Suharto period Christian–Muslim relations had been stable and generally harmonious. More recent Muslim arrivals were not as well-integrated, but the postSuharto conflict was, in part, fuelled by the return to Ambon of Christian gang members, or ormas preman, who had been employed in Jakarta as ‘muscle’ by members of the Suharto elite, including Siti Hardiyanto Rukmana, Suharto’s eldest daughter. There was also a concerted push by local elites, emboldened by President Habibie’s reformist programme of decentralisation, to separate Maluku and create a new province of Northern Maluku around the island of Halmahera and the four historical sultanates of Bacan, Jailolo, Tidore and Ternate. North Malaku was formed on 12 October 1999, but this did nothing to slow the spread of communal conflict to the north. The communal violence in Maluku was utilised by elements of the military, and by Islamist ormas, to challenge President Wahid, who was seen as a liberal-democratic threat to both military power and political Islam. Wahid’s opponents in the military courted the support of Islamist militants as instruments with which to discredit and destabilise him and, despite his orders that the Laskar Jihad fighters not be allowed to set sail from Surabaya for Ambon, their travel and other logistical needs, including the provision of weapons, were readily facilitated. Under pressure on multiple fronts, and with his legitimacy and authority damaged by the widespread communal violence in Maluku and in Central Sulawesi, President Wahid ran out of political capital and was finally impeached by parliament on 23 July 2001. He was replaced by his vice president, Megawati Sukarnoputri. She retained most of the Wahid administration but did not directly challenge military interests in the way that her predecessor had done. This did not lead to a reassertion of direct military involvement in politics but it did mean that efforts to undermine the government were substantially reduced. Two months after Wahid was toppled Indonesia was shocked by the al-Qaeda terrorist attacks in New York and Washington, DC, on 11 September 2001. Although prior to the completely unanticipated Bali

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bomb attacks of 12 October 2002, that saw 202 people killed in heart of the Kuta tourist entertainment strip, the Indonesian government was blind to the full extent of the domestic terrorist threat posed by the Jemaah Islamiyah (JI) network, it was keen to play its part in the global campaign against terrorism. This led to a redoubling of efforts to broker peace in Maluku. Following extensive negotiations, on 13 February 2002 Yusuf Kalla, the Coordinating Minister for People’s Welfare, and Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, the Coordinating Minister for Political and Security Affairs, met in Malino, South Sulawesi, with seventy representatives of the Muslim and Christian Malukan communities. They signed an 11-point joint declaration known as the Second Malino Agreement (Kesepakatan Malino II ). Key points in this declaration (Noorhaidi 2006: 222–23) included: Point 5. “To ban and disarm illegal armed organizations, groups, or militias, in accordance with the existing law; outside parties that disturb the peace in the Moluccas will be expelled from the islands”; and Point 6. “To set up a national independent investigation team to investigate thoroughly the incident of 19 January 1999 and the alleged involvement of FKM, RMS, Christian RMS and Laskar Jihad, as well as forced conversion and other human rights violations.”

Despite claiming to be a patriotic militia and having the direct support of elements of the Indonesian military, in its violent extremism Laskar Jihad verged into the domain of terrorism. And, had not Thalib disbanded Laskar Jihad when ordered to do so in October 2002 the militia would certainly have risked being treated as a terrorist organisation. Laskar Mujahidin, in contrast with Laskar Jihad, was not just a violent extremist militia but was also aligned with the JI terrorist network and as such intrinsically opposed to the authority of the Indonesian Republic (Barton 2010, 2015, 2018). Laskar Mujahidin was an even more dangerous and expertly lethal group than Laskar Jihad and one that constituted a direct threat to the Indonesian Republic, even if not fully recognised at the time. It was only after the Bali bombing of 12 October 2002 that the true nature and extent of the JI network became evident.

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The Islamic Defenders Front (FPI) The Islamic Defenders Front (FPI) was formed on 17 August 1998 just four months after President Suharto abruptly resigned, ending more than three decades of military-backed authoritarian rule (Elson 2001). Ostensibly the FPI, and other ormas that formed in the wake of the ending of the Suharto New Order regime, constituted less of a threat to democratic transition and political reform than did violent extremist groups like Laskar Jihad and Laskar Mujahidin. Over the past decade FPI has increasingly played a prominent role in channelling and amplifying hateful extremism (Commission for Countering Extremism 2019; Barton et al. 2019), if not violent extremism (Wilson 2006, 2011, 2014, 2015a, b, 2019; Woodward et al. 2012a, b; Woodward 2019a, b). It has led overt, public, sectarian campaigns directed against minority groups such as Indonesia’s small Shia Islamic community, the even more controversial Ahmadiyya community and against so-called liberal Muslims, Christians and members of the LGBTQI community. Long a source of not just irritation but also deep concern, its influence and capacity to publicly mobilise hateful extremism hit a new high with the mass demonstrations of late 2016 and early 2017 target against the Chinese Christian Governor of Jakarta, Basuki Tjahaja Purnama, widely known by his Hakka Chinese nickname ‘Ahok’. By December 2016 FPI had reached the height of its powers and had become arguably the most dangerous ormas in Indonesia. The threat represented by FPI was not simply the fact that it had several hundred thousand members, and was able to contribute to the mobilisation of many hundreds of thousands of other people who are not its members, in open displays of hateful extremism, it was that it represented a concrete manifestation of illiberal anti-democratic Islamist activism. More worrying than FPI itself, was the power of anti-democratic Islamist sectarianism that was channelled through it (IPAC 2018: 4, 10–12; McBeth 2019; Petru 2015: 58, 75–76; Sumaktoyo 2019; Woodward et al. 2012a; Woodward 2019a, b). Taking stock of what this means it is necessary not just to examine the history of FPI, but also to look at the larger question of Islam and democracy in modern Indonesia. As an ormas FPI is vastly more important and more worrying than the Balinese laskar. The Balinese ormas might be curious, fearsome looking, creatures but they are very much a case of ‘the

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bark being worse than the bite’. FPI, on the other hand, not only has a threatening bark but it also has a powerful bite laced with a poison that threatens to weaken the liberal character, if not the very life, of Indonesian democracy. The series of mass protests on the streets of Jakarta in late 2016 and early 2017 organised by the 212 movement, named after the largest of the street protests on 2 December 2016 that saw as many as 750,000 people occupy the central boulevard of the national capital, represented the most worrying manifestation of populist agitation so far in Indonesia’s two decade-long democratic transitions (IPAC 2018; Berenschot 2017; Duile 2017; Hatherell and Welsh 2017; Petru 2015; Wilson 2019; Woodward 2019a, b). The 212 protest movement was successful in destroying the political prospects of Ahok, the incumbent governor of Jakarta, in the April 2017 governor elections. Not only that, the show of force represented by the angry protests resulted in a high-profile miscarriage of justice that saw Ahok sentenced to two years on charges of blasphemy. Blasphemy prosecutions had been virtually unheard of up until the second five-year term of President Yudhoyono (2009–2014). Over the past decade, however, such ‘witch-hunts’—the vengeful instrument of sectarian hatred and political manipulation—have become all too common. The ormas laskar in all of their various manifestations have always been a source of concern in Indonesia but never so much than with FPI. And even then FPI did not seem to represent a major threat with respect to broad populist mobilisation up until the wave of rising intolerance that began in the second term of the Yudhoyono government (2009–2014) and culminated in the 212 protests of late 2016 and the toppling of Ahok in 2017 (Duile 2017: 251; van Bruinessen 2013: 38). The circumstances of the incumbent governor’s political demise were in themselves worrying enough. But it was the larger pattern of mass mobilisation driven by sectarian sentiment unleashed by the dynamics of authoritarian populism that was so concerning, threatening, as it appeared to do, the very substance of Indonesian democracy. The back story to this is that throughout the presidency of Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, and especially during his second term, Islamist agitation and intimidation had been a growing force in Indonesian society and politics (Bakker 2017; van Bruinessen 2013). The Islamists were bitterly disappointed with their failure to achieve the level of electoral success that they believed to be their natural birth right and to be the

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will of God. They blamed this upon the evils of democracy and sought alternative avenues for natural justice and manifest destiny. As has been the case in Pakistan, and in many other Muslim majority democracies, the failure of radical Islamism to win over voters has seen bullying and intimidation by radical Islamist groups, harnessed to the personal ambitions of authoritarian populist politicians, manifested in street protests, public vendettas and movements of intimidation. Indonesia’s democratic transition benefited early on from the surprising success of two idealistic, reformist, interim presidents, BJ Habibie and Abdurrahman Wahid, whose short terms in the wake of Suharto’s resignation raised public expectations generally of what democracy could, and should, become in Indonesia (Barton 2002, 2008). When Wahid was pushed from office by a coalition of political forces, clustered-around the military and other elements of the ancien regime, unhappy with his reforms, the remainder of his term was served out by his populist deputy, Megawati Sukarnoputri. Despite her enthusiasm for assuming office little transpired during her tenure as a result of her leadership, although incremental reform continued as did high expectations. This saw a breakthrough in the 2004 election when the tall, handsome, confident, and apparently capable, Yudhoyono, well known to the public during his tenure as Coordinating Minister for Security, became the blank sheet onto which a public hungry for leadership projected their dreams and aspirations. Effectively assisted by his vice president, Yusuf Kalla, SBY, as he was affectionately known, began well and oversaw a series of reforms and the steady consolidation of democracy. In 1998, in the wake of Suharto’s resignation, FPI was just one of many ormas that formed in Indonesia, most with the encouragement of elements of the Indonesian military and political establishment that justified their emergence and sponsorship as being necessary provision of ballast against antisocial forces that would seek to exploit the chaos of democratic transition. Initially FPI was presented as being analogous to the Banser youth militia affiliated with Ansor, the organised youth wing of Nahdlatul Ulama. At the time there was some suggestion that FPI would be formally linked with the Islamist party PPP. As it happened, this linkage was never consolidated and there is considerable other evidence suggesting that the chief of Indonesian police at the time, Nugroho Djajusman, helped orchestrate the emergence of FPI as a useful militia to serve as an instrument of the Indonesian police both in its ostensible law and order

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role and, as was amply demonstrated over the decades that followed, in protection of its business interests in the ‘hospitality and entertainment’ sector. There is also evidence of military backing for FPI’s formation. FPI emerged in August 1998 alongside the Pamswarkarsa nationalist militia set up by General Wiranto to counter student demonstrations and to protect the government of BJ Habibie. A key early patron of FPI was General Kivlan Zein, a hawkish Soeharto loyalist who only acknowledged his role years later during the electoral campaign of 2004. In many respects, the flurry of activity that saw the formation of the FPI and other social organisations in 1998 echoed the formation of Indonesia’s first social organisations in the early to mid 1940s under Japanese military rule (Anderson 1972). Then, as in the first days of the post-Suharto Reform Era, the earlier pattern of strongman enforcers, or preman, being mobilised as the muscle of governmentality, was building on a long established cultural pattern in Indonesian society (Lindsey 2001). As Vedi Hadiz and other observers have noted, political changes in the wake of Suharto’s resignation led to economic liberalisation and democratisation that created new centres of power and increasingly diverse networks (Hadiz 2016; Kersten 2015; Mietzner 2009, 2012; Nordholt 2004). Transitional President BJ Habibie championed many elements of reform including, in particular, decentralisation and in a period of densely centralised power, local and national elites both found need to draw upon social organisations to manage competition and safeguard the interests. In Bali the rise of the social organisations not only served local powerbrokers, and their commercial interests, but also appeared as a natural manifestation of identity politics (Vickers 1989, 2003). Across Indonesia, however, groups like the FPI increasingly became aligned with Islamist identity politics. As Michael Hatherell observes in his chapter in this collection, despite the plethora of new political parties emerging to contest national and local elections in the reform era there was a dearth of political ideology. Virtually the only place in which true conviction politics could be found was amongst the radical Islamist parties (Mietzner 2013). As a result, there was a partial vacuum that was filled by a diverse range of claims by both elected and non-elected representative claim makers. After a somewhat shaky start, FPI began to frame itself as being a loyal defender of the Republic of Indonesia that was committed to the preservation and development of its moral and religious character. Some

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of the key leaders associated with the FPI, in particular Muhammad al-Khaththath (aka Muhammad Gatot Saptono), recognised that it was important for the organisation to avoid being labelled as a radical Islamist group opposed to the legitimacy of the secular unitary state of the Republic of Indonesia (Negara Kesatuan Republic Indonesia—NKRI) (IPAC 2018: 13–14; Duile 2017: 253, 259, 268; Wilson 2014: 3–4, 209). He reportedly came up with the clever formulation of ‘NKRI Bersyar’iah’: defining FPI’s core mission as being the support of the Unitary State of the Republic of Indonesia (NKRI) but with the practice of Sharia (Islamic law). Secondly, picking up on the language of mainstream Saudi organisations including NU, FPI explained its activities in the frame of the Quranic edict of amar makruf nahi mungkar (commanding the good and forbidding the bad). Groups like NU and Muhammadiyah, it said, played an absolutely essential role in ‘commanding the good’ but where they needed the assistance of smaller groups like FPI was in the second part of the edict in ‘forbidding the bad’ (Petru 2015: 61). In the words of one FPI leader: ‘democratic reform opened the door for change, the problem however is that just about anyone or anything has been able to walk through that door…pornographers, homosexuals, apostates, all manner of heresy and deviancy’. The door of democratic reform, in their opinion, needed to be closed shut (Wilson 2014: 2). Initially FPI presented itself as being supportive of the Republic of Indonesia, with the hope that it would come to properly practice Sharia, whilst being critical of democracy. “Democracy is more dangerous than pig’s meat!” FPI leader Habib Rizieq Shihab once famously declared, during a speech in 2013 (Wilson 2014: 2): If we consume pig, we are polluted, but can still be returned to a state of purity if we cleanse ourselves seven times. If we eat it we’ve sinned, however we haven’t become an infidel.

A key element in the way in which the FPI defined itself was in supporting the reintroduction of the so-called ‘seven words’ of the Jakarta Charter that had been dropped at the last minute by Sukarno and Hatta when announcing the brief interim constitution on 17 August 1945. Prominent nationalists, including key Islamic leaders, had come together in June 1945 as members of a nine-man subcommittee charged with drafting the 1945 draft constitution. On June 22 they agreed upon the text

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of a preamble to the constitution that came to be known the ‘Jakarta Charter’ (Piagam Jakarta) that set forth the five principles (panca sila) of the new republic’s theistic, humanitarian, non-sectarian state philosophy of Pancasila, taking their lead from an inspirational speech given by nationalist leader, and future president, Sukarno, at the beginning of the month. Late in the process, however, a contentious seven-word phrase was inserting stating that there was “an obligation for Muslims to implement Sharia” (dengan kewajiban menjalankan syariat Islam bagi pemeluknya). The day after the declaration of independence, and just ahead of a key nationalist meeting, Sukarno and his deputy, Mohammad Hatta, called upon Muslim nationalist leaders to request their support in removing the ‘seven words’ out of concern for national unity. This was not so much because this might come to represent a problem for nonMuslims but because they recognised that it could exacerbate divisions amongst Muslims (Noorhaidi 2006: 28). FPI found common purpose and mutual benefit in aligning its activity with the Indonesian Ulama Council—Majelis Ulama Indonesia (MUI). MUI had been formed in the late Suharto era as an instrument for limiting the power of Islamist radicals and boosting the legitimacy and religious credentials of the Suharto regime. In this role it was placed under the line-management of Vice President BJ Habibie and, as a result, MUI came into the post-Suharto period believing that it would be rewarded for its association with Habibie. MUI increasingly found itself on the wrong side of democratic governments, however, especially during the presidency of Abdurrahman Wahid. And by the time that Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono came to office in 2009 MUI was increasingly beholden to reactionary Islamist elements to oppose political and social reforms that it saw as being un-Islamic. Despite the grandiose title given to it when it was formed in the late Suharto era, MUI was never truly a peak body representing the majority of Indonesian ulama (Islamic religious scholars). That claim could be much more strongly made by NU that has a national network connecting the vast majority of Indonesia’s ulama and their 20,000 plus madrasah / pesantren teaching institutions. Muhammadiyah also had a nation-wide network of madrasah but these are largely secular institutions with very few true ulama. As a result many of the ulama associated with MUI were drawn from the conservative wing of NU (Woodward 2012a: 6–8). In both social and cultural terms as well as formal legal terms the religious judgements or fatwa issued by MUI had no binding authority.

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Nevertheless, during Yudhoyono’s two presidential terms the president increasingly began to defer to MUI and act as if MUI fatwa had legal force. The consequence of this was the strengthening of the illiberal and anti-democratic Islamist influence. Even with the President Yudhoyno’s backing MUI had no natural social mechanisms to mobilise for the recognition and enforcement of its religious rulings. FPI saw in this dynamic a perfect opportunity to align its NKRI Bersyar’iah and ‘nahi mungkar’— ‘forbidding evil’ mission with the increasingly reactionary fatwa issued by MUI. The result of this was that the second term of the Yudhoyono presidency was marked by a flurry of blasphemy charges supported by MUI and socialised on the streets by FPI. This set in place the social dynamics that were challenging the religious and social reforms championed by the Joko Widodo administration. Nevertheless, it wasn’t until two years into that administration that the Ahok case presented perfect-storm conditions for both MUI and FPI to mobilise Islamist sectarian sentiment on a large scale and openly challenge the reformist ethos of the president. Up until this point MUI was seen merely as a self-important instrument of reactionary forces and the FBI as its thuggish enforcer. Marcus Mietzner, in an interview for Carnegie Council, observed that (Duile 2017: 250; Mietzner 2016): … since around September/October [2016], we have seen an additional development, and that was the reintroduction of popular mobilization as an instrument of power play in Indonesia. That is something we really have not seen since 1998, when longtime dictator Suharto fell. Since then, the focus of Indonesian political analysis has been on the state institutions – who is controlling the parliament; who is controlling the parties; who is winning elections; who is controlling the oligarchy. All of that was important so far, and we have neglected in that analysis what is happening in terms of popular mobilization.

As it happened, the FPI was a spectacular failure in influencing the results of the 2014 election. And as a result two years later FPI showed much greater willingness to align with Prabowo’s Gerindra party and campaign against Ahok in the 2017 Jakarta governor election, with a view, it appeared, to playing a clear supporting role on the side of Prabowo in the 2019 parliamentary and presidential election (IPAC 2018: 15–23; Wilson 2015b).

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Indonesian Democracy and the Muslim World Indonesia is the world’s largest Muslim-majority country and also one of its most successful. By most measures, it leads the world’s 50 Muslimmajority countries—the ‘Muslim World’—in measures of political openness and democratic processes. Two decades have passed, however, since the collapse of the Suharto regime; long enough for Indonesia’s transition to democracy to stand judgement. The results are decidedly mixed and, even amongst seasoned observers, vary from despair and deep pessimism to moderate optimism tempered with realism about the pace and scope of reform and a focus on the longer term. It is clear that Indonesian democracy falls well short of being as good as it could, or should, be: ‘political democratisation has not produced an ideal-type liberal democracy as imagined by democratic theorists abroad and aspired by many activists in Indonesia’ (Ford and Pepinsky 2014). To lead the Muslim world is, unfortunately, at this point in time, to clear a very low bar. Ninety percent of Muslim-majority nations are not democracies and the ten percent that are democracies are mostly flawed democracies. When it is considered that the 1.8 billion citizens of the 50 Muslim-majority countries constitute approximately one quarter of humanity, the deficit of democracy in the Muslim world represents one of the greatest challenges to democratisation globally.

Islam and Democracy The relationship between Islam and democracy remains highly contested. A simplistic but popular take is that Islam and liberal democracy are inherently incompatible because, it is claimed, there is no separation between ‘church’ and ‘state’ in Islam. This claim is at odds with both the major patterns of Islamic history and with much of Islamic thought. For most of its fourteen centuries, Islam has been lived-out and developed in small sultanates woven loosely into larger alliances and empires. The modern nation state appeared only in the mid-twentieth century. But even in its rich history of pre-modern states the lived experience of Islam has generally involved a negotiated sharing of power between local Muslim communities, the sultans and the ulama. Even when given the title of caliphate, the networked states of Islamic empires, such as the Ottoman or Moghul, were never ‘Islamic states’ in the sense that modern Islamists now romantically imagine them to have been. It was the emergence of

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modern nation states, declaring independence at the closing of the colonial age, that saw the creation of Islamist political thought as an alternative to nationalism and socialism. As Nader Hashemi has so cogently argued, democratic reformers in modern Muslim-majority nation states, such as the Republic of Turkey and the Republic of Indonesia, face much the same philosophical, cultural and socio-political challenges as did European reformers such as John Locke. If liberal democracy is to put down deep roots in Muslim nations, then Islamic values need to be respected and Islamic epistemology engaged with. As Hashemi so evocatively put it: ‘First, in societies where religion is the principal marker of identity, the road to liberal democracy, whatever other twists and turns it makes, cannot avoid passing through the gates of religious politics’ (Hashemi 2009: 171). But this should be understood as enabling, not precluding, culturally appropriate forms of secularism and liberal democracy. A form of secularism is indeed essential to liberal democracy, Hashemi argues, but it needs to be recognised that: ‘religious traditions are not born with an inherent liberal, democratic or secular orientation; these ideas must be socially constructed’ (Hashemi 2009: 172). He goes on to unpack this by explaining that: ‘In order for secularism to survive over the long term as a key political principle and value of liberal democratic politics, it must develop strong intellectual roots from within society in order to survive. In this context, religious groups can play an important role in the advancement of liberal democracy. In order for them to do so, however, they must develop a political theory of secularism that is compatible both with the core functional requirements of liberal democracy and their own political theologies’ (Hashemi 2009: 172). Indonesia might be the best of the bunch, but the reality is that activists and close-up observers struggle with a thousand disappointments and persistent anxieties about Indonesia’s future. This reflects an uncertainty amongst many Indonesians about where their country is heading. Many prominent critics of the government believe that whilst on the surface electoral democracy seems entrenched, liberal democracy is under threat from populism, Islamism and renewed conservatism (Lindsey 2018). And yet, viewed from a global perspective, Indonesia’s progress, as with the global ‘Third Wave’ of democratisation of the past four decades, continues to offer some grounds for hope. It might be perennially a case of ‘two steps forward and one step backwards’ but Indonesia continues

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to muddle forward. When Suharto surprised everyone by quietly stepping down in May 1998 expectations within Indonesia about what, or at least how soon, democracy would deliver reform were wildly inflated. But so too were fears for Indonesia’s future. This was especially the case for global observers, many of whom had hitherto given Indonesia scant attention. ‘Balkanisation’, senior voices sagely intoned, was to be expected in such a large and improbable nation thrown into democratic transition without the requisite middle-class and associated civil society mass to make possible such transition. The Cold War might have ended but faith persisted in the necessity of a ‘strong man’ to hold together the disparate forces that would surely tear-apart a developing nation as plural, uneven and plain unwieldy as Indonesia. The success of this ‘improbable nation’, as Pisani dubbed it, this sprawling archipelago of peoples, cultures and faiths, owes much to the technocratic leaders of the Suharto era (Pisani 2014). But it is also true that Suharto’s military-backed authoritarian regime, whilst objectively less malign and more constructive than many of its ilk, left in its wake a highly centralised, unevenly developed nation full of unresolved issues and under-developed potential that was ill-equipped to undertake a democratic transition (Barton 2008, 2010). If nothing else, the archipelagic geography of the Republic and the fact that there’d been comparatively little economic development outside of the densely populated island of Java, combined with its multi-ethnic, multi-lingual make up, with Muslim majority populations in the west of the archipelago and large Christian populations in the East, suggested a degree of fragility, if not brittleness. In the absence of a strong leader, it was argued, the unresolved issues and simmering tensions of the young nation could quickly replace decades of stability. Even those more optimistic about democratic transition worried that the relatively small size of Indonesia’s middle class suggested a civil society lacking sufficient critical mass to act as ballast in the inevitably stormy journey to consolidating democracy. In hindsight, Indonesia was better prepared for democratic transition than appeared at the time. This was, in large measure, because Indonesia had a much larger civil society sector then was commonly appreciated in 1998. Uniquely in the Muslim world Indonesia is home to two very large mass-based organisations, NU and Muhammadiyah, representing many tens of millions of people and the majority of all observant Muslims in Indonesia. Both of these mass-based organisations had consistently

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displayed an orientation towards a balance between social conservatism and a willingness to engage in reform and adjust to the demands of modernity (Barton 1997, 2002). Both contained minority elements that looked for guidance either to the Puritanism of Saudi Salafism or to the proto-Islamist political ideas of Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood. But in both organisations the majority of supporters are comfortable with living in a non-sectarian democracy respectful of Islam rather than aspiring to achieving an ‘Islamic state’ (Barton 1997; Geertz 1964; Hefner 2000; Kersten 2015). This is a product of both culture and of religious teaching and practice and is reinforced by procedures within these organisations to elect leaders through democratic procedures. Further evidence of this support for secular democratic principles is found in the significant contributions made by leaders of both organisations to the nationalist movement both before and after the declaration of independence on 17 August 1945. Much like the unseen dark matter that astrophysicists, based on mathematical modeling, argue must account for much of the mass in the universe, the tens of millions who supported NU and Muhammadiyah, including the many non-governmental organisations and associations that sprang up organically from their youth and women wings, and were supported by hundreds of writers and intellectuals, many of whom like Abdurrahman Wahid were formally trained as a ulama, represent the majority of santri—observant Muslims—and constitute a critical mass in the civil sector. It is, of course, impossible to quantify what difference this critical mass made in facilitating democratic transition but there are nevertheless good reasons for believing that the strength of civil society was a significant factor. In a practical sense, evidence is found for this in the mushrooming of a plethora of new political parties in the wake of Suharto’s resignation, and in BJ Habibie’s facilitating a liberal approach to democratic opening, which critically included freeing many political prisoners and empowering the media as well as allowing the free formation of new parties. The fact that only a handful of the parties that successfully mobilised the threshold of support in the July 1999 election were committed to a radical Islamist platform, and conversely that the majority of successful political parties took a broad approach to representing Muslim interests, with some leaning more towards NU traditionalists, and others naturally towards a support base drawn from within Muhammadiyah, can be interpreted as a reflection of the secular democratic orientation of Indonesia’s observant

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Muslims. For most it was important, of course that Indonesian politics respected religion in general and Islam in particular. But the top-down imposition of a particular interpretation of Sharia, and the moral policing that goes with that, was rejected by the majority of Muslims. Naturally enough, non-santri ‘cultural Muslims’ were even more averse to politicians telling them what to believe and how to live but voting patterns suggest that the vast majority of santri Muslims were likewise disinclined to mix political power with authority over religious life.

Islamism and the Populist Threat to Democracy Clearly Indonesia’s democratic transition remains very much a work-inprogress. The anti-Ahok protests and other occasions of radical intolerance stand as reminders of how far Indonesia has yet to travel to fully complete a transition to liberal democracy (Hadiz 2017; Lindsey 2018). And yet, these ugly details notwithstanding, the big picture story of democratic transition remains largely positive. In global terms, Indonesia continues to do reasonably well. The five national election cycles since the collapse of the Suharto regime have been orderly and almost entirely violence free, resulting in elections that were largely free and fair. Social surveys reveal that whilst most voters are deeply unimpressed by the major political parties, the legislature and most of its members, voters remain convinced that democracy is desirable and necessary. And as imperfect and incomplete as Indonesian democracy is it does meet the minimal requirements for liberal democracy, at least as defined by Galston (2018). When, in early 2017, Jokowi reaffirmed Indonesia’s commitment to religious tolerance and the moderate nature of Indonesian Islam, the stark irony of his remarks was lost on few (Hatherell 2019; Vaessen 2017). Indeed, only a few days after the president’s statement, Ahok, Jokowi’s former deputy and gubernatorial successor, was convicted of blasphemy and sentenced to two years’ jail. The transparently confected nature of Ahok’s blasphemy conviction, whilst manifestly politically charged and driven by both the country’s Muslim elites and radical Islamist fringe, represented a serious indictment of Indonesian democracy. So too was the 2017 Jakarta gubernatorial election that preceded it, which saw both ethnicity and religion politicised to such an extent that the once unbeatable Ahok, a Christian of Southern Chinese descent, ultimately lost the election in the April run-off to Anies Baswedan, a former

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minister of education and culture under Jokowi, but also a Muslim of Hadhrami-Javanese and Sudanese descent. Having enjoyed great popular support and professional success as a political reformer, Ahok was predicted to easily retain the governorship last year, as was confirmed by early polling (Hatherell and Welsh 2017). His prospects changed dramatically, however, after a 30-second edited video excerpt of him, making certain off the cuff remarks in regard to his political foes using the Qur’anic verse Surah Al-Ma’ida 51 to discourage voters from electing him due to his Christian faith, went viral. Ahok’s blasphemy conviction and election defeat are significant for two reasons. First, they reveal just how precarious Indonesian democracy is in terms of its susceptibility to Islamic populism; and secondly, both Ahok’s trial and the gubernatorial election offered a prelude of the potential for the campaign for the 17 April 2019 presidential election.

Conclusion In today’s Indonesia, issues of race and religion, at least as they apply in the political sphere, remain sites of contestation. The anti-Ahok campaign revealed how effective engineered moral panic can be in the undoing of a political frontrunner. It also revealed just how powerful Islamic populist forces can be when they enjoy the support of both Indonesia’s religious elites, namely MUI, and the country’s political elites. In the end, however, the 212 protests spearheaded by FPI failed to achieve their longer term objective. Jokowi won against Prabowo by an even greater landside in 2019 (55.5–44.5%) than he had done in 2014 (53–47%). A popular line of commentary is that this occurred because Jokowi had taken conservative cleric and MUI Chairman Ma’ruf Amin as his running mate in a clever ploy to deny Prabowo the opportunity to repeat his 2014 campaign strategy of positioning Jokowi has not being a ‘good Muslim’ and a reliable supporter of (conservative) Muslim interests. The reality, however, appears to be that Jokowi was forced to accept the 77-year old Ma’ruf Amin as his running mate at the last moment because his political coalition partners feared that his preferred vice presidential candidate, the affable and widely respect Mahfud MD, chief justice of the Constitutional Court, represented too great a potential threat to their interests in the 2024 election. It is true that the pairing of Jokowi with Amin was one factor in causing Prabowo to take a different tack with his election campaign. It was, after

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all, difficult to play the Islamist card against the Chairman of MUI. But Mahfud was also a respected and popular Islamic leader and would have been an easier campaign partner for Jokowi than the wooden and divisive Amin. Whatever the case, Jokowi was helped by high voter turn-out (around 81%), especially amongst young ‘Millennial’ first or second-time voters. The 212 movement was effective in destroying Ahok’s electoral prospects in the 2017 contest for governor but the brazen sectarian character of the movement, reflecting the hateful extremist rhetoric of FPI, may have actually served to frighten mainstream voters into action in 2019. The election results serve as a reminder that Islamist ormas like FPI are not broadly popular, and in fact are likely deluded into believing their own rhetoric about being the ‘voice of a silent majority’. In the age of Trump, Boris and Brexit it is all too clear that populism and social movements built around aggressive ormas campaigning can be effective in changing the trajectory of democratic politics. But populist campaigns and bellicose ormas remain dependent upon having uniquely favourable conditions to succeed. Lasker Jihad was forced to pack-up and return home as soon as the favourable political winds that had enabled its jihad in Maluku shifted. Its services were needed for a time but its denouement showed that it was neither popular nor trusted. The same now appears to be true for FPI. The once supremely confident bully has been quietened, at least for the time being. Islamist disaffection with the course of liberal democracy in Indonesia remains an enduring reality that will not quickly disappear. But despite appearances the Islamist forces that FPI appeals to have limited support in wider Indonesian society. In forming his new administration Jokowi has moved deftly and decisively to ‘turn back the rising tide of Islamisation in Indonesia’ (McBeth 2019). Key appointments include retired three-star general Fachrul Razi to clean-up the notoriously corrupt Religious Affairs Ministry, Mahfud MD to take-over as political coordinating minister and Tito Karnavian, widely respected for his reforms as police chief (and before that head of the very effective Detachment 88 counter-terrorism force) as Home Affairs Minister. Even the surprise appointment of Prabowo as Minister of Defence (a prestigious position but one without any direct chain of command over

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serving troops) appears to have been calculated to close-off opportunities for the mobilising of Islamist populist forces such as FPI. Afterall, whilst the April 17 elections were peaceful, nine people died (some, apparently, from gunshot wounds consistent with sniper fire) and 200 were injured in demonstrations on May 21–23 supporting Prabowo and protesting the election results (in 2019, as in 2014, Prabowo bizarrely declared himself the clear outright winner at the polls, and a victim of electoral fraud). In this round of violence FPI appears to have been caught by surprise, with very few of its laskar positioned in the centre of Jakarta where the protests took place. Three of the fatalities were FPI members (Wilson 2019). It remains unclear who was behind the violence but the only highlevel arrest made was of a Prabowo ally, and former two-star general, Kivlan Zen. Zen, a founding patron of FPI, was arrested on weapons charges. Police also accused him of being behind an attempt to assassinate security minister Wiranto, maritime minister Luhut Pandjaitan, National Intelligence Agency chief Budi Gunawan, and presidential intelligence adviser, and retired police general, Gories Mere (Chew 2019). Some critics contend that the second Jokowi presidential term is likely to prove just as disappointing as the second Yudhoyono term. This judgement fails to recognise Jokowi’s democratic instincts and achievements, imperfect though they are. Jokowi, an outsider to the Jakarta elite, has chosen his battles carefully, cognisant of the limits of his political capital. And whilst many would wish him to be more courageous his credentials as a principled reformer remain essentially intact. There are no signs of personal corruption or over-weaning power, and there continues to be much to suggest that he is genuinely committed to pushing ahead with much-needed reforms. Nevertheless, the Covid-19 pandemic of 2020 has revealed the flaws in his leadership style as never before. One area critical to success or failure for Jokowi lies in his administration’s handling of Islamist populists and ormas. Jokowi was strongly criticised in July 2017 when he issued a regulation in lieu of law (Perppu) to ban the radical but non-violent Islamist extremist ormas Hizbut Tahrir Indonesia HTI, one of the four core ormas behind the 212 movement. HTI has never enjoyed broad support in Indonesian society, nevertheless the ban was widely seen to be arbitrary and unwarranted (Fealy 2017; Lindsey 2018). In cracking-down on Islamist extremism it is important that Jokowi’s administration is transparent in targeting bad behaviour—whether violent or merely hateful—rather than ‘dangerous ideas’. The horrors of the

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anti-PKI mass-killings of 1965–1966 continue to shadow over Indonesian society. Ormas like FPI held accountable for bad behaviour, including acts incitement-to-hatred, but it is never a good idea to ideas.

cast a long, dark, need rightly to be of hate speech and attempt to ban bad

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Glossary

Adat Customary law and traditional regulations. Ajeg Bali Let Bali Stand Strong. A campaign to maintain an “up right” or resilient Balinese culture capable of withstanding threats posed by globalisation and tourism. It was started by a local Balinese media magnate who ran for Governor but has faded since the early 2000s. Anak Kerobokan “The People of Kerobokan”, a ‘Paiketan’ or Seka. Armada Racun Literally “Poison Squad”. A Suharto-era security organisation that was a “squad” of children of military personnel in the Sudirman area in Denpasar Baladika Bali A prominent and contemporary Balinese security organisation with extensive connections to martial arts organisations. “Bala” is an Arabic word for army. Banjar The local village council, which also symbolises the unity of indigenous Balinese. Bebotoh A gambler, especially for cock fighting. Buleleng Dogen A contemporary security organisation based in Buleleng, north Bali. CSOs Community Security Organisations see Ormas Gali-gali A contraction of gabungan liar-gabungan liar. Group of “wild” youth or young gangsters targeted by police in the early 1980s. Jawara Charismatic strongmen or thugs, also known as Jago. Laskar Bali “Soldiers of Bali” the largest security organisation in Bali. Nindihin Bali Defending Bali. A Paiketan or Seka. © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2021 A. Vandenberg and N. Zuryani (eds.), Security, Democracy, and Society in Bali, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-5848-1

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334

GLOSSARY

Nyepi The Balinese “Day of Silence” for meditation and reflection on New Year’s Eve, in the Balinese saka (lunar) calendar. Ngayah Doing voluntary work at the village or family level. Ormas A contraction of Organisasi masyarakat – literally “societal organisations”. Covers all organisations in civil society but usually refers to security organisations. Paiketan Paiketan Krama Bali, PKB - Balinese Improvement Society. A cultural promotion agency based on Hindu precepts about the three causes of wellbeing Trihita Karana. Pecalang A customary security guard appointed by the village. Traditionally, they were temple and ceremony guards but their roles have expanded. Petrus A contraction of penembukan misterius, literally “mystery killings”. A police operation to crack down on gangster crime in early 1980s. Pileg Pemilihan, a legislative assembly election. Pilkada Pemilihan kepala daerah, the regency governor election. Pilpres Pemilihan presiden, the presidential election. Pitamaha A genre of painting that enriches the expertise of Ubud painters, founded by Walter Spies. Pos siskamling A guard house or “post” within the sistem keamanan linkunguan – “environment security system” set up in bus stations, market places, major road intersections, and large car parks. They are currently being used by guards policing COVID 19 regulations. Perpu Contraction of Peraturan Pemerintah Pengganti UndangUndang, A Regulation in Lieu of Acts issued by the President for urgent matters. Preman A “free” man, mercenary, thug for hire. Pemuda Bali Bersatu “Bali Youth Union”, a large security organisation that broke away from Laskar Bali. Sanur Bersatu “Sanur United” a small security organisation founded by the Brahmin nobility of Sanur. Satria A warrior or “knight”, expert in traditional martial arts and part of the nobility. Seka/Sekaa A traditional organisation that can be permanent or temporary, similar to “Paiketan” or communal groups. It describes a wide variety of groups including

GLOSSARY

• • • • • • •

seka ceki seka gamelan seka genjek seka manyi Sekaa mekepung Sekaa tajen Sekaa teruna-teruni

335

domino-card gambler group gamelan group drinking alcohol and singing group harvesting group buffalo-racing gambler groups cock fighting gambler groups youth groups endorsed by government

Suka Duka Joy and sorrow, through thick and thin. The phrase derives from Sanskrit terms for Hindu and Buddhist precepts. It often features as a subtitle or logo for security organisations and many sekaa. Tokoh Puri A royal court personality. Tri Hita Karana Three Causes of Wellbeing (or Three Reasons for Prosperity). Precepts of Balinese Hinduism 1) Harmony with God; 2) Harmony among people; 3) Harmony with nature or the environment. Tu Ajik A familiar designation for an older man of the Brahmin caste. Warna Literally “colour” but refers to clans (Pande, Ngurah‚ etc), subclans (Gelgell) and blood lineage (soroh and dadia) in Balinese clans.

Index

A Adat (customary law), 133–134, 140, 162–163, 181–187, 202–203, 205 Ahlstrand, J., 294 Ahok (Basuki Tjahaja Purnama), 136, 150, 228, 239, 255, 297, 311–312, 317, 322–323 Aliran (streams of religious, cultural and political identity), 294–296 al-Qaeda. See Terrorism Amgott, N., 254, 257 Anderson, B.R.O’G., 4–5, 11, 64, 76, 79–81, 86, 89–90, 191, 213, 306, 314 Antlov, H., 254 Ardhiangga, I.M., 274 Aspinall, E., 254, 285, 286, 292–293, 306 B Bachelard, M., 3, 102, 306 Bachrach, P., 211 Baer, H., 254, 262

Bakardjieva, M., 254 Baker, 312 Bakker, L., 13, 76, 126–128, 177, 215, 306 Baladikan. See Ormas Masyraskat Ormas (Societal Organisations) Bali bombing. See Terrorism Bali paradise. See Dutch, orientalism, “paradise” Banjar (hamlet council), 1, 32, 71–72, 83, 103, 162–164, 172 Barassi, V., 269 Baratz, M.S., 211 Barker, J., 3, 13, 79, 86, 97–99, 216–218, 305–306 Barton, G., 100, 216, 309–311 Baym, N.K., 271 Beittinger-Lee, V., 214–215 Bennett, L., 253, 259, 261 Berenschot, W., 286, 306 Bertrand, R., 95, 98, 213, 215 Bhabha, H.K., 189

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2021 A. Vandenberg and N. Zuryani (eds.), Security, Democracy, and Society in Bali, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-5848-1

337

338

INDEX

Billboard (baliho) publicity campaign, 14, 22–49, 51–73, 147–148, 180–181, 190, 192, 196, 220 and gender, 37–40 Black magic, 235, 239–241 symbolising strength, 25, 67–68, 70, 179 Bourchier, D., 9, 97, 286, 291 Bräuchler, B., 255–256, 258–262, 264, 271, 273 Bruinessen, 312 Buckingham, D., 256, 267 Butler, J., 233, 244 C Candra, P., 188 Castells, M., 253, 259, 265, 271 Chadwick, A., 253 Chen, B., 269 Chew, A., 325 Civil society, 8, 84, 117, 123, 136, 138, 156, 162, 214, 290–292, 298, 301 Cochrane, J., 254 Cock fighting, 16, 103, 169 Communism. See Ideology Connell, R., 237–241, 244, 245 Covarrubias, M., 139–141, 198, 199, 247–249 Cribb, R., 5, 95, 307 Crime cleaning up crime, 123, 128, 324 criminal activity, 6, 13, 54, 63, 70, 73, 75, 91, 95, 96–102, 113, 118, 119, 121, 192, 197–198, 203, 212–214, 217, 225–226, 306 D Dahlberg, L., 265

Dahl, R., 211 Dalton, B., 102, 221 Davidson, J.S., 286 Davies, M., 200 Democracy democratisation, dedemocratisation, 7–8, 16, 53, 83, 96–97, 103, 133, 138, 155–158, 159, 171–173, 209, 214, 255, 258, 285–287, 306, 308, 309–313, 314–316, 318, 322 electoral, elections, 10, 28, 76, 137, 156, 170 in general, 8, 12, 15, 27–28, 19–30, 47–48, 54, 93, 100, 134, 155, 158, 209–210, 218, 253–255, 265, 268, 272, 276, 290, 291, 311–312, 313, 316–323 local, 137, 138, 148, 159, 171–173, 235 Digital literacy, 255–257, 262–267, 269, 270, 272–274 Dijk, J.A.G.M.v., 256 Diphoorn, T.G., 9, 14 Disch, L., 287, 289 Doan, P., 233 Domhoff, G.W., 211 Donthu, N., 59 Drugs gangs, narkoba preman, 4, 15, 70, 102, 226. See also Gangsterism smuggling, trafficking, 3, 99, 102, 220 use, consumption, 116, 119, 161 Duile, 312, 315 Dutch Balinese as warlike, 12, 80, 86 cultural policies, Malay as lingua franca, 7, 11, 79–81 imperial control, war of independence, 7, 11, 12, 75, 79–81,

INDEX

86–90, 104, 125, 126, 162, 167, 213 Netherlands, 7 orientalism, “paradise”, 12, 15–16, 56, 82, 86, 133–134, 138–140, 148, 152–153, 213, 215, 235 Vrijman – preman. See Gangsterism Dwipayana, A.A.A.G.N., 134, 163, 204

E Eklöf, S., 294 Elites, 8, 29–30, 54, 80, 83, 86, 133–138, 140, 142–143, 152– 153, 158–169, 168–171, 178, 179, 189, 205, 210–212, 218, 227–229, 235, 247, 308–309, 314, 322–324, 325 Elson, R.E., 97, 100, 311 Evans, P.B., 6, 7 Evans, R., 112, 121 Evans, R.W., 118 Extremism. See Ideology

F Fealy, G., 325 Feltwell, T., 265 Finnemore, M., 289 Ford, M., 9, 318 Foucault, M., 13, 178, 193, 197–198, 210–212, 214, 218–219 FPI. See Ormas Masyraskat Ormas (Societal Organisations) Francese, P., 59 Franciska, C., 255

G Galston, W.A., 322 Gangsterism, 3, 6–8, 13, 79, 89, 98, 102, 134, 164, 213, 217, 219

339

Jago (cock, local tough), 14, 79–80, 85–87, 90, 136, 216, 226 Preman (free man, thug), 4, 15, 79, 80, 85–87, 89, 98, 102, 134, 147 Ganz, M., 265, 266 Gazali, E., 254, 255, 257 Geertz, C., 4–6, 7, 82, 93, 191, 196, 199, 203, 212, 215, 295, 321 Gendo, (I Wayan Gendo Suardana), 258–259, 273–274 Gerbaudo, P., 253, 261, 271 Gladwell, M., 253, 254 Golose, Bali Regional Chief of Police, Inspector General, 102–104, 148–150, 220–223 Governor Bali, 27, 55, 56, 59, 72, 86, 94, 102–104, 141, 147–152, 200–202, 219, 226 Jakarta, 136, 137, 286, 297, 298, 312, 317, 321–322 provincial (in general), 167 Grajales, J., 9 Gramsci, A., 178, 210–212, 227 Groshek, J., 255 Gunadarma, A., 220 Guzzini, S., 212 H Habibie, B.J., 99 Hacker activism, 254 Hadiz, V., 3, 9, 95, 133–135, 156, 157–160, 164, 210, 213–214, 225, 286 Hakim, C., 242 Harari, Y., 10–11, 79 Harvey, A., 3 Hashemi, N., 319–320 Hatherell, M., 226, 273, 285, 294, 299, 312, 314 Henderson, J.J., 272–273

340

INDEX

Hindess, B., 211 Hinduism in Bali, 8, 12, 63, 68, 82, 84, 88, 94, 97, 125, 133–135, 143, 162, 181, 190, 217, 219, 228 Hobbs, R., 256, 257 Hobsbawm, E., 6 Hunter, F., 211

I Ideology Ajeg Bali, 8, 62, 125–127, 142, 156–157, 160–162, 172–173, 180–181, 205–206 communism, 4, 5, 8, 11, 27, 83, 87, 92–97, 98, 104, 209, 294, 307 conservatism, 7, 87, 88, 90–94, 97, 118, 204, 226, 235, 286, 290–291 environmentalism, conservation, 143, 249 extremism, 307–308, 324 Islamism, 2, 16, 58–56, 80, 88, 92–93, 96, 99, 125, 135, 137, 228, 265 liberalism, neoliberalism, 81, 87, 89, 92, 117, 226, 264, 286–288, 290–291 nationalism, 11, 27, 79, 83–84, 90, 92–94, 97–99, 104, 127, 136, 137, 144, 158, 163, 191, 194, 205, 215–216, 225, 228–229, 268–270, 285–286 Pancasila, 88–89, 94, 100, 126, 147, 286 populism, 16, 88, 104, 194, 214, 219, 225–226, 265, 286, 296–298 social democracy, 84 Imron, A., (Bali bomber), 307

J Jackman, D., 9 Jago (cock, local tough). See Gangsterism Japanese influence, 7, 11, 77, 93–94, 97, 104, 168, 213 Johnston, L., 180 Jokowi (President Joko Widodo), 14, 216, 226, 286, 293–296, 322, 323 Juris, J.S., 253 K Kahne, J., 257 Karmaphala (karma), 136, 239 Keen, A., 253 Kerobokan prison, 3, 16, 38, 102, 147–148, 152, 198, 220, 225 Kerobokan (district), 147 Koster, W., 102, 150, 224. See also Governor, Bali KTA, membersip card. See Ormas Masyraskat Ormas (Societal Organisations), KTA Karta Tanda Anggota (membership card) Kurniawan, N.I., 177, 187–188, 204 L Laskar Bali, Laskar Jihad, Laskar Mujahidin. See Ormas Masyraskat Ormas (Societal Organisations) Lee, A.Y.L., 269 Lee, F.L., 254 Lee, W., 59 Legitimacy, 75–76, 86, 89, 167, 177, 205, 218, 227–229 Lesly, P., 68 Lewis, B., 54, 82, 95, 126, 181, 235, 246 Lewis, J., 54, 82, 95, 126, 181, 246 Lim, M., 254–257, 270

INDEX

Lindsey, T., 76, 88–90, 314, 319 Lin, T.B., 257, 267 Lipson, D., 3 Lukes, S., 227–229 Lund, C., 14 Lussier, D.N., 254, 257 M Marx, K., 75 Mass killing of communists, 5, 11, 87, 93–95, 292 McDonald, M., 13, 127, 181, 262 McQuail, D., 52, 59, 63, 68 Megawati, (Diah Permata Megawati Setiawati Sukarnoputri), 30, 98–102, 226, 293–294 Mietzner, M., 285 Migdal, J., 6, 75, 76, 122 Mills, C.W., 164, 209, 227 Money politics, 10, 58, 102, 172, 228 Moore, B., 6, 86 Morgenbesser, L., 2 Moriarty,M., 52 Morozov, E., 253, 254 Muhammadiyah, 53, 84, 96, 291, 298, 315, 316–317. See also Muslims; Nahdlatul Ulama, NU (Revival of the Ulama) Mujahir, A., 271 Munandar, A., 307 Music, 82, 118, 192, 257, 260, 271 Muslims, 8, 55, 84, 88, 91–94, 95–97, 123, 124, 246, 294–296, 298, 307–308 N Nahdlatul Ulama, NU (Revival of the Ulama), 53, 84, 93, 96, 298, 313–315 Negara, K., 80 Negara, (country, state), 5

341

Neighbourhood watch groups, 16, 86, 97, 104, 112–113, 121, 123, 225, 227, 237 Noorhaidi, H., 307–308, 310, 316 Nordholt, H.S., 8–10, 101, 119, 124–127, 156–157, 171, 181, 212–214 Norris, P., 266 Nugroho, E., 13, 76, 168, 254, 255, 257, 274, 291–292, 301

O Obedience, 198–200, 223, 291 Oligarchs, oligarchy, 205. See also Elites Open fortress, 8, 157 Oppenheimer, J., 95, 307 Orientalism. See Dutch, Netherlands Ormas Masyraskat Ormas (Societal Organisations), 6–7, 23–37 Bali Baladikan (Bali Army), 2, 23–25, 36, 57, 59–62, 63, 67, 73, 97, 101–103, 134, 144–148, 150, 160, 188, 190, 204, 210, 219–223, 226, 238–241, 244, 262, 298–300 bouncers, debt collectors, security guards, prison guards, 13, 103–104 bribery, 99, 217 definition, 15, 25, 210 Flobamora, 63 FPI, Front Pembela Islam, (Islamic Defenders Front), 136–137, 244–246, 255, 286, 298–299, 305–306, 311–316, 323–325 history, 75–104 Japanese influence, 77, 84, 90, 91, 97, 104 KTA Karta Tanda Anggota (membership card), 195–197

342

INDEX

Laskar Bali (LB – Soldiers of Bali), 2, 25, 26, 97, 101, 102, 300 Laskar Jihad and Laskar Mujahidin, 315–307 Logos, Moksa, 25, 59–64, 68–69, 189, 190, 204 martial arts, pencak silat, 13–16, 79–81, 90, 145, 163, 226–229, 236 Membership management. See Ormas Masyraskat Ormas (Societal Organisations), KTA Karta Tanda Anggota (membership card) militia in general, 6–7, 13–14, 87, 127, 135, 197–218 Permuda Bali Bersatu (PBB – Bali Youth United), 36 protection rackets. See Protection Sanur Bersatu, himpunan pemuda Sanur (Sanur United, Youth Association of Sanur), 103, 204, 214, 226 Unions of the disenfranchised, 119 Wargas Waria dan Gay Singaraja (Transgendered people and Gays Singaraja), 103, 237–251 Osama bin-Laden, 308

P Panopticon, 197–198, 203 Papacharissi, Z., 265, 268, 272 Party. See also Ideology Golkar, Sekretariat Bersama Golongan Karya (Party of Functional Groups), 97, 101–103, 136, 291–292, 308 Indische Partij, 53

PDI Partai Demokrasi Indonesia (Indonesian Democratic Party), 96, 100, 101, 291 PDI-P Partai Demokrasi Indonesia – Perjuangan (Indonesian Democratic Party of Struggle), 101–103, 166, 224, 226 PKB Partai Kebangkitan Bangsa (National Awakening Party), 295 PKI Partai Kommunis Indonesia (Indonesian Communist Party), 27, 83, 84, 92, 94–97, 295 PNI Partai National Indonesia (Indonesian National Party), 83–84, 93, 96 PPP Partai Pesatuan Pembangunan (United Development Party), 291 PSI Partai Socialis Indonesia (Indonesian Socialist Party), 83–84, 97 Patron-client system, 10, 103, 189, 215, 248, 291, 314 Pecalang (village guards), 227 Pecalang (village guards), 1, 86, 101, 103, 125, 135, 181–187 Pencak silat. See Ormas Masyraskat Ormas (Societal Organisations), Martial arts, pencak silat Pencak silat (Indonesian martial arts), 13–16, 79–81, 87, 215–219, 226, 228 Petrus penembak misterius (mysterious killings, 1983-85), 13, 54, 99, 217–218 Petru, T., 311–312, 315 Philpott, S., 193–194 Piliang, Y.A., 238 Poell, T., 265

INDEX

Police in Bali, 3, 4, 24, 39–40, 47–48, 57, 61, 73, 77, 97, 103–104, 126–127, 148–151, 198, 210, 216–219, 227–229, 245, 273, 306 in general, 4, 6, 7, 111–113, 117, 119–122, 198, 212 in Indonesia, 8, 12–15, 53, 80, 87, 90, 94, 95, 103–104, 124–127, 158, 163, 216, 306, 313, 324 Political silence, 23–24, 25–28, 52, 95, 274–275 Populism. See Ideology Postill, J., 255–257 Power, 2, 5–6, 8, 13–15, 30, 53, 54, 57–58, 70, 77, 82, 92, 95, 113, 115–116, 123–125, 152–153, 155–156, 162–165, 167–194, 201, 202–205, 210, 212–214, 216–219, 228–229, 238–241, 244, 247, 248, 250, 290, 295, 300, 301, 309, 311 Prabowo Subianto, 14, 145, 228–229, 293, 317–318 Primordial violence. See Violence, primordial Print capitalism, 11, 209 Prison riots. See Violence, riots Protection. See also Ormas Masyraskat Ormas (Societal Organisations) double meaning, 1–5, 9, 79, 103, 112–113, 114, 171, 190, 196, 209 genuine security, 1, 15, 120–123, 151, 157, 171, 227–228, 239, 250–251, 258, 298 racket regime, 10, 54–56, 77, 95, 134, 224–226, 227–229 rackets, 1, 3, 7, 9–10, 80, 89, 97, 98, 102, 103, 227–228 Protest movements

343

Arab Spring, 253 Balinese demonstration, 28, 234, 266 Benoa Bay mangrove reclamation, 15, 133–134, 140–141, 143–144, 151–152, 214, 244–277 Los indignados, 253, 261 MeToo movement, 254–255, 260 Occupy Wall Street, 253, 261 Umbrella movement, 268 Public opinion, 24–37, 48–49, 88–89, 156, 218–219, 256, 265, 271–272 Puik (Balinese: avoiding confrontation through silence), 23, 27 Puputan (Balinese: last-ditch resistanece, collective ritual suicide on a battlefield) Balinese memorialisation, 80–83, 162 Dutch response, 80–83 instances (1849, 1906, 1908), 82, 104, 125 Puri (Castle, Royal Household, Aristocratic family), 5, 7, 90–92, 102, 166 R Ramli, R., 254 Reformasi (post-authoritarian reform period), 7–9, 28, 101, 102–104, 124, 254, 285, 293 Representation Dewan Perwakilan Daerah, DPD (Regional Representative Council), 170–171, 224 in general, 23, 27, 28, 30, 32–33, 61, 87, 93, 120–122, 126, 156–157, 166, 169, 177, 192, 201, 200–203, 219–223, 236, 244, 245–247, 259–260

344

INDEX

representational claim-making, 285–294 Ria, L., 271 Robinson, G., 5, 7–8, 81, 85–89, 90–95, 213 Rodgers, D., 9, 14, 113–116, 118

S Santikarma, D., 2, 156, 306 Santri (young devotees), 53, 80, 91, 321 Saudi Arabia, 159, 160, 298, 308 Saward, M., 287–290 Schulze, 307 Scott, J., 213 Secularism, 88, 124, 125, 316, 319 Seminyak bars, 2, 103, 179, 226, 246 Sharia, sharia law, 246, 315 Sidel, J.T., 6, 9, 306 Silence. See Political silence Siskamling, 13, 98, 216 Skocpol, T., 7, 76 Soeharto. See Suharto Soekarnoputri, Sukarnoputri. See Megawati, (Diah Permata Megawati Setiawati Sukarnoputri) Soemirat, S., 68 Soethama, G.A., 242 Solo (Central Java), 286, 297 Sorell, 254 Stein, E.A., 200–201 Stornaiuolo, A., 254, 262 Subagiasta, I.K., 190 Suharto authoritarian regime, Ordre Baru (New Order), 27, 77, 94, 123, 163, 167, 218, 225, 254, 255, 290–292, 301, 320 authoritarian regime, Ordre Baru (New Order), 4, 7–8, 11, 52, 95–99, 147–148

fall, resignation, 7–10, 14, 23, 52, 77, 100–102, 124, 162, 215, 286, 293–294, 301, 311–312 father of Development bapak pembangunan, 291 post-Suharto period, 9–10, 99–102, 113, 126, 138, 159–160, 225–226, 290 Sukarno, 11, 56, 83–84, 86, 94, 97, 101, 306 Surveillance, 13, 69, 99, 152, 217 Suryawan, I.N., 181 Susilo Bangbang Yudhoyono SBY, President, 30, 143, 293 Suwana, F., 265, 268, 271–273 Symbols, symbolism, 24, 26, 28, 52–53, 59–63, 68, 70, 86, 126, 179, 181, 188, 196, 200, 201–203, 204–206, 212, 236, 238, 250–251, 270, 276, 292 T Tapsell, R., 254–255 Teivainen, T., 290 Terrorism al-Qaeda, 307, 308 Bali bombing, 55–56, 62, 101, 102, 219–220, 310 Jemaah Islamiyah, 307, 310 Tilly, C., 1, 4, 7, 9, 14, 75–76, 89, 218 Tolerance, 28, 63, 69, 143, 241, 245, 250, 322 Topsfield, J., 3, 83, 102, 271 Tourism, 1, 3, 12, 23–49, 54–57, 246 Transwomen, transgender, 234, 239, 241 Tri Rismaharini (Ibu Risma), 297 Triyono, H., 271 Twain, M., 76 Twilight policing, institutions, 119. See also Protection, racket regime

INDEX

U UNESCO, 257 V Vandenberg, A., 7, 75 Vickers, A., 12, 15, 27, 28, 80–83, 94, 97, 100, 139, 205, 213 Vietnam, 9 Violence in general, 3–15, 24, 25, 28, 35, 54, 57, 68, 69, 77, 79, 80, 87, 91, 95, 97, 104, 112, 125, 128, 166, 180, 199, 201, 212, 213, 214, 226, 244, 245, 300, 309, 322 primordial, 6, 10, 300 riots, rioting, 3, 25, 100, 166, 102, 220 vigilante, 8, 86, 123, 286, 298 von Soest, C., 290 W Wahid, A., President, 30, 294, 293, 308, 309

345

Wargas Waria dan Gay Singaraja (Transgendered People and Gays, Singaraja), 103, 251 Weber, M., (Weberian, neo-Weberian), 7, 76, 120, 123, 127, 128, 216, 218, 247 White, B., 5 White, R., 12 Wilson, I.D., 10, 226, 306 Wilson, L., 14, 53, 54, 76, 100, 127, 181, 193, 215, 226, 262 Wilson, R.T., 59 Wilson, Woodrow President, 83 Wineburg, S., 256 Wiranto, General (Minister of Defence, Co-ordinating Minister of Political, Legal, and Security Affairs), 14, 102, 314 Woodward, M., 311, 312

Y Yasih, D.W.P., 257, 270