8 th Euroseas conference Vienna, 11–14 August 2015

Panel: Indonesia’s Middle Class: A Force or Liability for Democracy?
convener: Ulla Fionna (Institute of Southeast Asian Studies)
panel abstract
There is an emerging agreement on the importance of the growing middle class in Indonesia’s institutionalising de-
mocracy. This trend is in line with existing theories on the middle class as a key agency of liberal values and democ-
racy (e.g.: Lipset 1959). Beyond the divisive connotation of the word ‘class’ that was avoided during Suharto’s New 
Order (1966-1998) however, determining who belongs to this group remains a conundrum and investigating them as 
a political entity, problematic. Although an individual’s consumption power is the main element in their identification 
as part of this group, it hardly suffices in explaining the assumed political behaviour of the group as a whole.
The middle class vote was key in the 2014 election in shifting support for different presidential candidates and argu-
ably determining the eventual winner. The various campaign tactics aimed at affecting their vote, including smear 
campaigns, suggest that they are a conservative political group. For a clearer understanding of Indonesian democracy 
today and its future, analysing the nature of the middle class as a political group is essential. Which political issues 
mobilise them, and to what extent they would choose to participate in politics are crucial in understanding the extent 
of their potential as a reliable force for Indonesian democracy.
This panel aims to put together assessments of the middle class as a political force in Indonesia. One paper being 
prepared will assess the nature and origins of their current political aspirations. Those interested in participating in 
this panel, could consider looking at their intertwined economic and political interests, their contemporary political 
culture, and perhaps the changing role of gender in their political expression among this class.

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— Middle Class Formation from the Perspective of Housing Development in Jabodetabek
Kenichiro Arai (Kyoai Gakuen University)
This paper examines the relation between the built environment (especially, housing) and middle class, and several 
issues that can be deduced from this theme. First part presents a brief theoretical background of why housing is rel-
evant and important to the issue of middle class. The importance of living environment (for example, housing estate) 
is to bind people and make their collectiveness physically visible (while the similarity of income or profession alone 
is too abstract or varied), and produce social “ideal-type” or “typical image” of middle-class. The second part will 
outline the development of large-scale satellite-city (or new town) developments around Jabodetabek. From the aerial 
pictures, authors try to give an rough estimate of the number of middle-class “core” living in these satellite cities. The 
third part will show that there are many line of social distinction both between kampung and planned housing estates, 
and among the various housing estates. This suggests the layered divisions among “klass menengah” in Jabodetabek 
in terms of the place of living. The forth part shows a few negative external effects of the past urban development 
propelled by private property developers; primarily, unaffordable housing price, heavy traffic congestion, and the 
discrepancy between the public service and privatized service. Fifth part will make a suggestion of the relationship 
between these externalities and political dynamics by showing how these negative effects are framed as major issues 
in the election and the governorship of Jokowi and Ahok. This paper will suggest that, rather than the middle-class 
core living in expensive housing estates, semi-middle class living in urban kamupung are larger in number, positioned 
between middle-class core and lower class, thus their aspirations and grievances can give greater impact to the politics 
of the region.
— Contesting Power from the Middle in Indonesia
Nankyung Choi (City University of Hong Kong)
Electoral democracy and decentralized governance in Indonesia have dramatically increased the significance of local 
elected office in the country’s politics and governance. As one of its outcomes, Indonesia’s local societies have observed 
their local elite circles broaden and diversify as entering local political institutions has gained popularity among the 
local middle classes in Indonesia. Running for a local assembly seat is now widely regarded as a good way of mov-
ing upward, by which both status and material rewards can be achieved at once. However, whether the entry of new 
power-seekers – increasingly from the educated and professional middle-classes – has brought about any meaningful 
changes to exercise of a political office is another question.
 This paper aims to examine the political representation of the middle classes in Indonesia’s local units of governance 
- i.e., provincial and provincial towns’ governments and legislative assemblies. While recent scholarship has advanced 
our understanding of Indonesia’s local politics, our knowledge of who Indonesia’s local political elites are and why 
and how they pursue office and power remains seriously underdeveloped. Few studies have examined the modalities 
by which political hopefuls from the middle class backgrounds run for elections and obtain office and power in the 
context of Indonesia’s decentralized electoral politics. This paper will examine the motivations, opportunities and 
strategies for achieving power across diverse middle-class social groupings.
 By using a life-story approach, the paper will focus on the interplay among individuals’ class backgrounds (as inter-
sected with education, family, ethnicity, religion, gender and age), motivations (public recognition, material reward, 
social prestige or service to the community) and political strategies (religion and ethnicity, civil society agendas or 
communal interests). The primary data have been collected from Pontianak (West Kalimantan) and Yogyakarta (Cen-
tral Java) and will be compared with the additional data from Surabaya (East Java).
— The Political Aspiration of Muslim Middle-Class
Ulla Fionna (Institute of Southeast Asian Studies)
While the middle class vote was key in the 2014 election in shifting support for different presidential candidates and 
arguably determining the eventual winner, the issues that trigger, shift, or mould their political aspiration are unclear. 
The rampant use of campaign tactics with religious nuances indicated their sensitivity and potency. Still, an earlier 
project on cadres of Islamic political parties indicates that there has been a strong secularisation of their political 
aspirations. Partly due to the dysfunctions of the parties, but also because of the drive to be catch-all parties, cadres 
confused and then had to conform with the reality that it is very difficult for their parties to compete with the overall 

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more successful secular parties. With the realisation that a greater role of political Islam in Indonesia in general is not 
desirable, cadres have somewhat adjusted and to an extent given up their more Islamic aspirations.
Juxtaposing the importance of middle-class and the trend of secularisation; this paper seeks to find out which political 
issues mobilise the middle-class muslims, whether they have any class awareness among them, and to what extent they 
would choose to participate in politics. Using focus group discussions, this paper aims to encourage open exchanges 
among the middle-class muslims, and capture the nuances in their discussion as groups.
— Mining Indonesian Tweets to Understand Perceptions of Fuel Subsidy Reform
Lukas Schlogl (King’s College London)
Fuel subsidies, due to their adverse fiscal, distributional and environmental impact, have been a salient problem for 
Indonesia’s economic development since their adoption in the 1970s. Shortly after his election, President Joko Widodo 
phased out a large part of the entrenched subsidy and introduced monthly adjusted unsubsidized gasoline pricing 
in early 2015. In contrast to earlier efforts, this reform step has, so far, been met with little public protest, despite a 
significant initial price hike, the absence of compensatory cash transfers and the existence of a sizeable and politically 
vocal motorized middle class.
 A politically controversial issue, subsidy reform has seen extensive reverberations in social media. This paper draws 
on data from ‘Twitter’ to analyse the content, polarity and popularity of Indonesian conversations about fuel subsidies 
since 2013 and to determine the drivers of shifting public perceptions. We compare attitudinal data from Twitter to 
data from public opinion surveys and explore the extent to which Twitter user opinions represent those of the general 
population.
— Urban Middle Class Chinese Indonesians and Political Participation
Charlotte Setijadi (Nanyang Technological University)
Throughout the New Order, Chinese Indonesians practically did not have a political voice. The banning of Chinese 
organisations during the assimilation period, along with the political trauma of anti-Communist and anti-Chinese 
killings in 1965-66, meant that many Chinese Indonesians chose to be apolitical rather than risk potential persecu-
tion. This situation changed dramatically after the fall of the New Order in 1998 that saw the revival of Chinese iden-
tity politics and mainstream political participation. Since then, Chinese Indonesian socio-political organisations have 
flourished, and there are now more ethnic Chinese Ministers, candidates, elected Members of Parliament and public 
officials than ever before, most notably in the popular figure of Jakarta Governor Basuki Tjahaja Purnama (Ahok). 
However, despite considerable media attention on ethnic Chinese political participation and figures, little is actually 
known about the political motivations and expectations of urban, middle class Chinese Indonesians who form the 
majority of Chinese voters in Indonesia. Based on fieldwork data collected in the months leading up to the 2014 leg-
islative and Presidential elections, I will examine what the voting patterns and political activities (or lack thereof) of 
Chinese Indonesians may reveal about the underlying insecurities that still linger for this small yet influential ethnic 
minority.
Panel: A Law for Land, a Land for a Nation: From State’s and Private’s Interventions to the 
Organisations of Local Resistances in Southeast Asia
convener: Téphanie Sieng (Institut National des Langues et Civilisations Orientales)
panel abstract
Since the 2008 World food-price crisis, land-grabbing has become a crucial issue in rural Southeast Asia. Local com-
munities, increasingly destitute, are expecting public policies that could sustain land-security and socio-economic 
development. But such legitimate expectations from the state are seriously challenged by numerous factors: the rise 
and integration of market exchange, the deregulation of the economy, increases in cash-crop technical farming trans-
formations, the expansion of international concessions, and the domination of the urban elite over the means of pro-
duction and unregistered lands. Southeast Asia has subsequently become an area of conflicts plagued with asymmetry 
in negotiations and violent rebellions. In addition to the consequences of unregulated capitalism, recent land-policies 

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have been paradoxically accompanied by greater land insecurity and forced displacements. At the same time, the 
progressive loss of ambition to govern at the national level is weakening institutions and it is gaping a social divide. 
This raises an important question: how far are the most vulnerable groups able to mobilize against dispossession in a 
context of state’s withdrawal?
Problems of land-conflict and social status concern relationships between people, states and international organisa-
tions. Given that this is so, does the rise of conflicts reveal a failure in the traditional systems of law, or should we 
rather speak of a “dynamic process of internal adjustment”? With the help of a few case-studies, it will be interesting 
to examine to what extent compromises and acts of resistance can be made in the event of land dispossession.
The aim of this panel is to explore the local initiatives and choices made, as well as their consequences, related to rural 
land matters. This will enable us better to understand the main trends in the relations between individuals, organised 
associations from the civil society, various lobbying groups and geopolitical forces operating in Southeast Asia.
— Land Reform and the Filipino Peasant Women’s Struggles 
Cynthia Bejeno (International Institute of Social Studies)
The Philippine land redistribution remains a struggle in the country and in many cases even agrarian lands that were 
‘redistributed’ remain contested and in the control of the landowners hence the supposed beneficiaries remain dis-
possessed of their rights. The dispossession of land in many cases is due to the landowners’ resistance to land reform 
that often results to violence against the farmers. Many studies show that the violence is up to the extent of killing or 
murder of farmer leaders. Further, looking at a case study, it shows the day to day difficulty of the land struggle which 
requires ‘peasant initiatives’, and in many cases requires peasant women at the forefront. Corollary to this, while the 
peasant women lead the struggle, it is not necessarily conducive to gender equality. While the peasant women leader-
ship contribute in engaging land dispossession yet the gender agenda has yet to be exploited, for example, to maximize 
the legal possibility of gender equality, which is also a result of women’s movement struggle.
— Shock Waves, Confined Impulses? New Forms of Contestations against Land Encroachment in Cambodia
Frederic Bourdier (IRD France)
It remains uneasy to establish some direct links between the historical turn embodied by the Arab revolutions and its 
sociopolitical repercussions in Asia, Southeast Asia and Latin America. But either locally or internationally driven, 
more and more social movements are presently on the verge of occurring with more determination in Cambodia, with 
similar claims than the ones taking place in other countries. Among the various forms taken by these upheavals, the 
opportunity for expressing the desire of not to be manipulated by diktats imposed by leading national political par-
ties (controlled by a small political elite) has called the attention from opposition groups, organized and unorganized 
segments of the rural populations. These human assemblages, usually applauded by poor segments of the society, 
are also a claim for a better social recognition, nowadays considered as a major driving force for the emergence of a 
democratization process.
Such expected social recognition does not have the sole purpose of abolishing the conventional political creed: it has 
direct concrete implications in prioritized sectors associated with land security and access to natural resources. Exces-
sive power abuses have been denounced by local leaders, followed by impoverished populations and sometimes with 
international encouragement. In that respect, there is a growing tendency among the vulnerable peasantry not to act 
anymore in isolation against repeated land encroachments and decreasing access to natural resources.
My presentation considers preliminary attempts of a series of alliance processes in which unification (of the de-
prived population along with actors supporting them) becomes the first step to surmount. The subsequent encounters 
emerging from an expected confederation do not just mechanically surface: they are shaped and contextualized with 
a long-term history and a geopolitical setting providing, along with the ongoing performances of principal actors 
involved in land protection, insightful indications related to flexible forms of both present and future styles of en-
gagement and activism, resulting in a complex networking “beyond the geographical borders” that the presentation 
intends to decipher.

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— The Problem of Land Access in Colonial Cambodia
Mathieu Guérin (CASE UMR 8170 / INALCO)
While it is commonly accepted that land issue is a recent phenomena in Cambodia and that up to 1990s the Cam-
bodian farmers have been able to obtain the land they needed by clearing a parcel of forest, the study of Cambodian 
and French archives from the beginning of the 20th century show that land access and land grabbing were already a 
problem in the colonial era. Farmers could be expropriated to establish large European concession, but could also lose 
their land during period of hardship or economic crisis. Landless peasants or very small holders forced to work for 
larger landowners already existed.
— Order, Resistance, and the Ethical Subject: Negotiating Hyper-Visibility and Precarity on the Thailand-Myan-
mar Border
Adam Saltsman (Boston College)
Based on a case-study of the Thailand-Myanmar border area, this paper considers some of the ways mobility and 
dispossession have reshaped collective social organization. In the town of Mae Sot and surrounding areas, Burmese 
migrants are targets of multiple overlapping and gendered technologies of governance, including the Thai state, mul-
tinational garment export processing facilities, plantation-style agricultural firms, international humanitarian NGOs, 
and transnational social and political networks. I ask how this complex web of discursive and relational power simul-
taneously renders migrants invisible subjects of global supply chains and yet hyper-visible targets of humanitarian as-
sistance and intervention. Invisible because actors associated with state or market forces performatively enforce upon 
migrant bodies the violent notion that they are deportable, reiterating the boundaries of sovereignty at each encoun-
ter. And visible because as migrants struggle to make ends meet working long hours for low wages, NGOs spotlight 
their social problems and offer solutions that promote individual biowelfare but not wider transformative change. De-
spite what appear to be opposing forces, both forms of power contribute to the production of gendered border subjects
that are healthy workers; ethical and self-reliant, yet docile.
Migrants interpret and negotiate these overlapping systems, exerting agency as they rely on
their own social and political networks to establish mechanisms of order that are shaped by but simultaneously re-
sistant to the disciplinary regimes of factories and farms, the juridical frameworks of the state, and the biopolitical 
gaze of NGOs. Spaces of dispossession become key arenas for the articulation of certain ideas of femininity and mas-
culinity that are yoked to conceptions of community, homeland, and survival. Thus gender becomes a key discursive 
metaphor to make sense of the widespread violence of displacement, to maintain collective order, and to offer a means 
of struggle.
— The Price of Independence: From the Sacrifice of a Province to the Competition for Lands at Ratanakiri
Téphanie Sieng (Institut National des Langues et Civilisations Orientales)
After the reopening of Cambodian borders in 1991, competition for lands does not constitute a priority for state. That 
is why in the Northeast of Cambodia, the rise in market exchange, increases of monocrop areas and international con-
cessions have become basis of the economic growth. Thus the rise of migrants from Lowlands to Ratanakiri province 
may allow minority villages to integrate into the national territory. Hence the majority of indigenous societies who 
are considered to have a different culture to that of Khmer societies, started to hope for policies that will sustain land 
security and protect their tradition. In this context, local communities accepted projects for cooperation and resistant 
from religious or international civil organizations. For example, the erection of Buddhist monasteries in Tampuan vil-
lages by migrants may symbolize the appropriation of the territory from the latter. In reaction to this, Tampuan people 
have tried to organize themselves to protect sacred areas. It raises the question how Buddhist monasteries can consti-
tute a factor of a national identity for Khmer migrants? Why competitions for lands become a strategic issue in cohe-
sion policy and international affairs? Finally, how are organized Tampuan villagers to preserve their independence? 
The aim of this paper is to present some villages in Ratanakiri where international and local actors’ rivalries can be 
both an instrument to unite people and a way to destruct social cohesion.

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— Liminal Legality, Grounded Resistance: Peasants’ Reclaiming Movement in North Sumatra, Indonesia
Yen-ling Tsai (National Chiao Tung University)
Since the 1990s, thousands of peasants in North Sumatra, Indonesia, have continued to stage occupation campaigns 
against various state and corporate plantation companies throughout the region. This paper focuses on one of such 
long-term occupation villages, and considers its wider implication for our understanding of new forms of peasant 
resistance. Self-identified as “re-claiming”, these occupation campaigns deploy both legal and extra-legal strategies , 
which are often criminalized as squatting and vandalism by the state and plantations. Most significantly, they empha-
size the traditional, communal rights of the peasants in their struggle against state-sanctioned dispossession, on the 
one hand, and plead to a universal peasants’ rights regime, on the other hand. As such, my case study demonstrates 
the ways in which peasants collaborate intensively with peasant movements at various scales, translating constantly 
between and across local, national and international legal frameworks. It therefore provides a fertile ground to theo-
retically reflect on the ambiguity of law, which I termed liminal legality. Following Saskia Sassen(2014), I understand 
today’s world-scale socioeconomic and environmental dislocations not simply in the usual terms of poverty and injus-
tice, but more fully as “expulsions” from personal livelihood and communal living space. Yet such extreme disposses-
sion also gives rise to new forms of resistance. This paper wishes to craft new conceptual tools in order to capture this 
agonistic coupling of hope and despair that characterizes contemporary rural Southeast Asian livelihoods.