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Myanmar’s coup is a disaster for Myanmar, but it also is a signifier of the continuing regression of democracy region-wide in Southeast Asia. The region, which once had made significant progress toward democratization, has backslid badly in recent years, with regression in former bright spots including Thailand, Indonesia, and the Philippines, as well as Cambodia and now Myanmar. This backsliding affects not only domestic politics in Southeast Asian states but also has an effect on other countries in the region—a kind of diffusion effect in reverse, in contrast to the diffusion effect that can occur during waves of democratization. For example, the Philippines used to be one of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) states that often vocally stood up for democratic rights in other countries, a fairly unique stance in ASEAN. Now led by Rodrigo Duterte, however, who is undermining the Philippines’ own democratic norms and institutions, Manila is much quieter on the Myanmar coup. Duterte himself has grabbed more power during the pandemic, with a new antiterrorism law giving the government extraordinary powers, amidst the ongoing extrajudicial drug “war” as well. The Philippine government, like many other regional governments, has called the coup simply Myanmar’s internal affair. Thailand, for all its challenges, in the past did sometimes have groups of politicians and civil society activists who were highly engaged in Myanmar politics and advocated for reform there. During the long period of junta rule in the 1990s and 2000s, many Myanmar activists sought safe haven in Thailand as well. Now, Thailand is cracking down on civil society, students, activists, opposition politicians, and the Thai government, dominated by military men, is not going to push for any change in Myanmar. If anything, the Myanmar generals may try to steal a march from the Thai generals who have used a wide range of judicial and election chicanery to cement their power, as Bertil Lintner argued a recent Asia Times article. The Myanmar generals may eventually, as he notes, allow an election, but with a system that, like the Thai electoral system, uses machinations to reduce the power of the most powerful parties—the National League for Democracy (NLD) in this case—and to promote the military’s favored parties and its allies. In some ways, such a system might seem fairer than Myanmar’s current first-past-the-post system, which allowed the NLD to take more seats in parliament than its actual share of the vote, and hurt the Union Solidarity and Development Party (USDP) and several ethnic parties. But the Myanmar military would not really be changing the electoral system to promote more fairness—rather it would be to try to permanently defang the NLD. Meanwhile, other countries that had led on Myanmar in the past, like Indonesia and Malaysia, have been relatively quiet, consumed by their own domestic politics, and by COVID-19; they also have suffered their own democratic regression. In the past, the Indonesian government had seen itself as playing a central role in helping the Myanmar military supposedly move toward civilian government, and give up its role as directly involved in politics. But Indonesia itself has seen a return to greater military involvement in politics and domestic policymaking under the Jokowi government, and Jokowi has been muted in response to the coup as well. And, powerful actors in Southeast Asia, like Japan, also have said little; Japanese companies have invested heavily in Myanmar in recent years, pushed in part by the Japanese government. Japan sees itself in intense competition for strategic influence with China in Myanmar, and is unlikely to prod the Myanmar military much. So, the regional democratic regression emboldens the Myanmar military, and, alas, also makes it easier for them to keep power. This post is adapted from my recent Twitter thread on the same topic.

In early November, Indonesian president Joko Widodo approved a landmark, and controversial, omnibus bill. The bill, over one thousand pages long, is supposed to bolster Indonesia’s economy by reducing regulations and bureaucracy, and cutting red tape, among other goals. Jokowi, who has touted such reforms for years, has claimed that the bill will “create an additional one million jobs a year and increase worker productivity, which is below average in Southeast Asia,” according to the Nikkei Asian Review. Indonesia certainly does need a reduction in red tape and bureaucracy, which have long hindered both domestic and foreign investment into the country. Indonesia’s economy, like most in the world, has been hit hard by the coronavirus pandemic, and could use any type of jump-start. The country also remains well-positioned to attract companies that are seeking to move some operations out of China, as the business climate there deteriorates for foreign firms, and Indonesia has become particularly attractive to U.S. tech firms. Combined with the new law, Indonesia could benefit from the incoming Biden administration reducing trade pressure that the Trump White House had placed on Southeast Asian countries, including Indonesia. But the bill also contains the seeds of multiple problems. For more on its potential impact on Indonesia, see my new World Politics Review article.

Thomas Pepinsky is Tisch University Professor in the Department of Government at Cornell University, and a nonresident senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. He is the author, most recently, of “Migrants, Minorities, and Populism in Southeast Asia” (Pacific Affairs, 2020). Joko Widodo, Indonesia’s seventh president, captured international headlines when he was elected in 2014. This unassuming furniture-maker-turned-mayor from a regional city in Central Java had reached the highest political office in Indonesia, winding his way from mayor of Surakarta (Solo) to governor of Jakarta to president. It was—and still is—the unlikeliest of stories. Jokowi—as he is universally known—had seemingly bested the country’s seasoned political elites on a campaign of results-oriented and effective governance, pragmatism, and hard work. The new book Man of Contradictions: Joko Widodo and the Struggle to Remake Indonesia, by Ben Bland of the Lowy Institute, is the first book-length English biography of Jokowi. It is a “political biography,” in Bland’s own description. For those without any background in Indonesia, it is an accessible introduction to the country’s most well-known and powerful politician. For those well-versed in Indonesian politics, it offers a thorough overview of Jokowi’s rise to power and record (to date) as president, with an argument about how we foreign observers ought to think about both the man and the country that he rules. Bland brings to bear a wealth of personal experience covering Indonesian politics over the past decade. As a Financial Times correspondent, he first came to know Jokowi during the exciting 2012 gubernatorial election in Jakarta, a race that confirmed that Jokowi was a politician who had reached a national stage. Bland has interviewed Jokowi on numerous occasions, and sprinkles his text with personal anecdotes that colorfully illustrate important points. In the context of Jokowi’s popularity both in Indonesia and in among foreign commentators, and especially relative to the excitement surrounding the 2014 election, Bland’s biography stands out in its critical evaluation of Jokowi. He portrays Jokowi’s presidency as troubled, and his record in office as mixed, and devotes particular attention to the weaknesses of the infrastructure projects which Jokowi has always considered the centerpiece of his presidency. Compared even to most academic treatments of Jokowi’s first term in office, which highlighted the precarity of Indonesian liberalism and identified Jokowi’s actions in office as contributing to Indonesia’s democratic backsliding while mostly ignoring the problems with Jokowi’s pet infrastructure projects, this is a critical evaluation. As a political biography, the book must situate Jokowi the political figure within the broader contours of Indonesian politics. Bland keeps the primary focus on Jokowi the man, an effective choice, although one bound to disappoint readers who want this book to be first and foremost about Indonesian politics. He takes us on a journey through Jokowi’s early life in Solo, a mid-sized city in the Javanese heartland where Jokowi was born and raised and became a successful furniture maker. We learn of his modest background, which gives him a natural connection with “the people” that resonates widely in Indonesian politics, and which distinguishes him from other national politicians—Megawati Sukarnoputri, Prabowo Subianto, Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, and many others—who come from well-known political families, from the highest ranks of the military, or from elite business, religious, or media backgrounds. We learn as well of Jokowi’s record as mayor of Solo. He was elected in 2005, just as Indonesian democratization and decentralization reforms had first allowed for direct elections of local leaders. At the time, foreign observers of Indonesian politics (myself included) commonly remarked that Jokowi embodied the new type of politician who could emerge under a more decentralized form of Indonesian democracy. His hands-on style, introducing the concept of blusukan (impromptu visits to check on the efforts of local administrators or to see local conditions around the city first-hand), gave him a reputation for results-oriented management, and for working incrementally to improve governance. His soft-spoken Javanese manner further made him an endearing figure. This image of Jokowi as a modest but effective leader contrasted with the other establishment politicians who campaigned with flashier styles, or by drawing on their family names, military records, or business experiences. Governance, in this understanding, is a problem of administration and management. If you work hard to figure out what the problems are in local government, then you can discover efficiencies. If you make sure that everyone knows that their boss might show up and check their work, then they will act accordingly, working harder in their posts. If their boss truly understands what it’s like to live in an informal urban settlement, or to try to write a contract with a foreign buyer, then he will have a knack for understanding what sorts of solutions might work for these problems. Jokowi did not invent this hands-on and extremely local approach to politics, but he certainly embodied it as mayor of Solo and then governor of Jakarta. It resonated with many technocrats who tired of corruption and bureaucratic inefficiency, and also with liberal democrats and progressives who saw in Jokowi a refreshing and truly genuine alternative to generals, tycoons, and the offspring of former dictators. This approach also resonated well with Indonesian voters, giving Jokowi an electoral boost among many small business owners and others eager to see cleaner and more effective government. Jokowi had an impressive but brief run as Jakarta governor after his defeat of the (initially heavily-favored) incumbent Fauzi Bowo. The blusukan continued, and Jakartans saw tangible changes in how their city was governed, but Jokowi had his sights set on higher office. By 2014, he was running for president with the tentative support of the Indonesian Democratic Party of Struggle (PDI-P), a party whose lineage includes the nationalist and social democratic currents in Indonesian politics but is centered around former President Sukarno’s daughter and grand-daughter, Megawati Sukarnoputri and Puan Maharani, each of whom harbored their own ambitions for the presidency (Megawati had held the office herself in the early 2000s). Jokowi outmaneuvered them, and went on in the presidential election to defeat Prabowo Subianto, Suharto’s former son-in-law, a disgraced former general with a stained human rights record and a demonstrated willingness to court political support from hardline Islamists. This was a landmark result. Prabowo’s authoritarian tendencies and embrace of Islamists frightened many Indonesians and distressed foreign commentators. He had the advantages of name recognition, an elite family, a record of military service, and a billionaire brother who helped bankroll the Prabowo campaign. Jokowi’s victory in 2014 showed that a different kind of politician could defeat all of those advantages by playing to the public’s interests in good and effective governance. The result was portrayed, by academics and in the local and international media, as a victory not just for Jokowi but for democracy itself against what seemed to be a plainly authoritarian challenge. Although Bland demurs on whether Jokowi should be considered a populist, the best analysts of Indonesian politics have identified the populist strain in Jokowi’s style and discourse. Jokowi utilizes a soft and managerial type of populism rather than the harsh penal populism of Rodrigo Duterte, the military bravado of Jair Bolsonaro, or the exclusionary anti-immigrant populism of Marine Le Pen. As newly elected president, Jokowi continued to push the line of what Marcus Mietzner has termed “technocratic populism.” More blusukan (now with an airplane), a presidential cabinet titled simply “Working Cabinet” (previous democratic cabinets had been given names evoking loftier ideals such as national unity and consensus), and an emphasis on infrastructure. But Jokowi’s record as president has been much more mixed than his records as mayor of Solo and governor of Jakarta. Explaining why this is, Bland focuses on Jokowi’s own governing style. In sharp contrast to Jokowi the modest and effective mayor, Bland describes Jokowi the president as self-assured and perhaps even blind to the limits of his own abilities: imperious within his cabinet, with a “cocksure confidence” that leads him to prioritize flashy infrastructure projects rather than well-planned ones. The results-oriented managerialism of Jokowi the mayor has been replaced by short-sightedness, with a marked lack of attention to the planning and detail that delivers sustainable improvements in the popular welfare, and which is critical in such a populous and geographically large country. This is a more critical interpretation of Jokowi’s development record in office than one usually encounters in coverage of the Indonesian president, because Bland focuses not just on successful outcomes, but also on the policy process itself, and the failed cases that tend to receive little attention in the English- or Indonesian-language media. This is a useful corrective to most journalistic treatments of Jokowi’s infrastructure record. Bland reserves his most serious critiques for his assessments of Jokowi’s management of two major policy problems: the chronic challenge of managing Jakarta’s massive urban growth, and the acute problem of responding to the COVID-19 pandemic. Jokowi’s plan to address urban growth by moving Indonesia’s capital to eastern Borneo (an old plan in Indonesian politics, but one usually taken not very seriously) is portrayed as ill-considered and unrealistic. And Indonesia’s response to COVID-19—which has proven a serious policy challenge across the world—was particularly ineffective under Jokowi. The administration’s response was slow, self-contradictory, and fundamentally unrealistic, with major administration figures issuing statements about the saving power of prayer and Jokowi himself seeming afraid to take decisive but unpopular steps to combat the pandemic. Although many forget this today, for a time in the crucial early days of the pandemic, Indonesian officials insisted that the country had precisely zero cases. Jokowi’s response to COVID-19 has taken some of the sheen off of his administration among foreign observers. Bland’s treatment of his COVID-19 response, however, implies that closer attention to the nature of governance and policymaking under Jokowi would have revealed all of these pathologies well in advance. Yes, Jokowi has always highlighted his record of pragmatism and results: those earned him national attention as the mayor of a medium-sized city, and were the bases of his campaign for Jakarta governor, the promise of his first presidential bid, and the foundation of his reelection. But in Bland’s telling, the further Jokowi got from Solo, the less pragmatic he became, and the more uneven his results. These critiques of Jokowi’s record as an administrator are a prelude to an even more serious indictment by Bland of Jokowi’s democratic record. There is no doubt that maintaining Indonesian democracy is tough. Jokowi became president of a consolidated but flawed democracy marked by rampant corruption, a hardening religious cleavage, and a lack of party politics organized around any ideology at all. Any well-meaning democrat would struggle to achieve effective reform under these conditions. Jokowi stepped into national politics with great promise as an outsider, unbeholden (in the common understanding) to the country’s elite establishment. Still, Bland writes, “he was revealed as a man with good political instincts and high electability, but no plan for how to manage the ranks of oleaginous politicos, tycoons, and generals that lined up around him.” There is a certain irony in the fact that the country’s most powerful politician is surrounded by elites who have proven impossible for him to manage. But there is a strategic logic to it: absent the deep-rooted familial, business, or military connections that a different president would have relied on, Jokowi needed a broad coalition in order to neutralize potential opponents. The problem is that in bringing together a broad coalition, by including such a wide range of elites in his cabinet and building such a large coalition in parliament, Jokowi sacrificed the ability to press for meaningful democratic reforms. His reliance on military figures in his cabinet and his willingness to use the arms of the state to suppress free expression reveal the fragility of Indonesian democracy. And this is disappointing, relative to the expectations of liberals and progressives. No one would be surprised if someone like Prabowo had used an information technology law against his critics, but it is dismaying that Jokowi has allowed his government to do the same. Bland provocatively brings the point home by drawing parallels between Jokowi—a results-oriented, pragmatic, culturally Javanese president—and Suharto, another pragmatic, developmentalist, culturally Javanese president who ruled Indonesia for thirty-two years. Near the end of the book, Bland turns to Indonesian foreign policy. And once again Jokowi’s inconsistent and instinctual style emerges. Writing from an Australian perspective, Bland briefly details Jokowi’s approach (such as it is) to Indonesian grand strategy. Jokowi can be personable and disarming, but he does not press very hard for a coherent foreign policy. Bland draws a distinction between Jokowi’s “free and active” approach to foreign policy and his predecessor, Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono’s “thousand friends and zero enemies” approach; yet, I find both of these to be mostly vacuous. Bland’s overall argument about Jokowi is contained in the book’s title: Jokowi is a man of contradictions. In the conclusion, Bland expands on this point, reflecting on why “we”—foreign observers—continue to “get Indonesia wrong.” Setting aside the broader point about how foreign observers fare in understanding Indonesia writ large—the book, really, isn’t about that—the book does highlight some notable contrasts. Jokowi can seem at times modest, and at other times supremely confident. He is an outsider, yet he bested the insiders and then became beholden to them in his policymaking. He speaks about infrastructure and getting things done, yet he completely whiffed on COVID-19. He is a democrat who allows his government to pursue illiberal, anti-democratic measures against opponents. In my read, though, Bland has given us all the material we need to draw a simpler conclusion, one that does not rely on Jokowi’s enigmatic character or on broader questions of whether or not foreigners need to have a “single, overarching theoretical framework” of Indonesia. Jokowi is a skilled electoral politician who cares about Indonesia and diagnoses—correctly—just how much infrastructural development the country needs. But being the president of Indonesia is not like being the mayor of Solo. What were good instincts based on first-hand experience with city politics could never be replicated across a country this large with governance problems this complex. So, his instincts now often fail him. What’s more, as mayor and governor, Jokowi’s task was to achieve results within the context of a democratic system that he was not able to control on a national level. There was no need for him to display any sort of meaningful commitment to democracy or liberalism because, on a national level, that was not up to him. As president, the very nature of Indonesian democracy depends in no small part on his choices. And we have learned over the past six years that pragmatic choices for Jokowi the man are not always the best choices for Indonesian democracy.

Hunter Marston is a PhD candidate at the Australian National University. His research focuses on great power competition in Southeast Asia. According to recent surveys of Southeast Asia, China is now the most influential strategic and political power in the region. Yet China’s rise has been so rapid and consequential that few book-length studies have captured the complexity of Beijing’s expanding regional influence. The new book by Murray Hiebert of the Center for Strategic and International Studies and Bower Group Asia, Under Beijing’s Shadow: Southeast Asia's China Challenge, fills this gap and shows in significant detail how Southeast Asian states are responding to China’s rise. Given his decades working in the region as a foreign correspondent and political analyst, Hiebert is well-suited for this challenge, and the result offers valuable insights on issues related to Southeast Asia, China, and broader rivalries in the region. The book portrays a region riven by a diversity of views toward China; this diversity prevents any unified response to China’s growing influence over Southeast Asia. As Hiebert shows, Southeast Asian states are of two minds regarding China: on the one hand, they are deeply dependent on China’s rise for their own economic growth and keen to continue trade with Beijing. On the other hand, they are increasingly nervous about China’s growing economic, diplomatic, and military power, its more assertive diplomacy, and its willingness to use its might unilaterally to get its way in the South China Sea—and potentially other parts of the region as well. Hiebert punctures several myths about the China-Southeast Asia relationship. For one, although media reports often portray mainland Southeast Asian states as close to China, or even as satellite states of Beijing, Hiebert offers a different view. He suggests, with considerably detailed country case studies, that mainland Southeast Asian states are not so easy to pigeonhole. China has constructed innumerable dams upstream on the Mekong, choking off much-needed water as countries down river face droughts as a result of climate change. At the same time, Chinese companies—in joint ventures with Southeast Asian corporations in Laos, Myanmar, and Cambodia—are building massive hydropower projects on the lower Mekong, leading to increased salt water flooding and environmental degradation. These dams have badly damaged the Mekong’s flow and often stopped the seasonal flow of rich nutrients essential to the cultivation of rice and other crops, and the fish which feed the populations of Southeast Asia. In so doing, they have angered many residents of mainland Southeast Asian states, even though governments like Cambodia and Laos and Myanmar remain highly dependent on Chinese aid, investment, and diplomatic support. Hiebert also gives ample coverage to the depth of nationalism within modern Myanmar, and how it is facile to say that Myanmar also has become some kind of satellite state of China. There is enormous resistance within Myanmar toward China’s proposed Myitsone Dam in Kachin State, which the previous government of President Thein Sein suspended in 2011 due to popular pressures. At the same time, China has covertly supported ethnic insurgents on Myanmar’s northern periphery, sometimes providing arms and munitions, a reality that has not gone unnoticed by Myanmar’s military, which views dependency on China as a “national emergency.” In addition, Hiebert shows that Southeast Asian hedging strategies, playing for time and keeping their options open, provides some grounds for believing that the region will not be totally dominated by Beijing. The ambiguity of Southeast Asian loyalties means that Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) states have not made up their minds to side with Beijing. Hiebert argues that many of these states—even Cambodia and Laos, which seem to have less leverage to resist China’s influence and cash—will continue to avoid making stark choices. Malaysia also likely will continue to hedge. It has generally failed to respond to China’s provocations in the South China Sea or has done so quietly, believing that its “special relationship” would protect it from the bullying tactics to which China has subjected Vietnam and the Philippines. However, Hiebert notes Kuala Lumpur’s missile tests in July 2019, after China deployed a Coast Guard vessel near Luconia Shoal on Malaysia’s continental shelf. Later that year, Kuala Lumpur submitted claims to an extended continental shelf in that area to the UN Commission on the Limits of the Continental Shelf. In fact, Hiebert’s account leaves open the possibility that Malaysia is standing up to China more often than it appears to outsiders. Indonesian President Joko Widodo, or Jokowi, visited China four times during his first five years in office and has solicited major Chinese investment, even as Jakarta has pushed back against Beijing’s increased assertiveness in the North Natuna Sea. Indonesia’s economic dependence on China imposes limits to Jokowi’s willingness to stand up to China, but even he has often pursued a hedging strategy. The book also provides an even-keeled examination of Washington’s regional treaty allies Thailand and the Philippines, frequently described as tilting toward Beijing. Hiebert makes a compelling case that Thailand is still hedging against China, despite prevailing counterarguments regarding Thai foreign policy. Of the Philippines, he notes, “It is far from certain that Duterte’s sharp pivot toward China marks a long-term Philippine trend.” Interestingly, Hiebert predicts that Manila will swing back to an anti-China foreign policy after Duterte’s term ends in 2022 and a future administration in Manila seeks to rebalance relations with the regional powers. Second, Hiebert makes a compelling case that ASEAN should stop competing amongst itself and enhance cooperation, especially by strengthening dialogue on how to deal with China. As Hiebert points out, the main obstacle to deeper cooperation is the fact that Southeast Asian states often have varying levels of threat perceptions toward China and also often have different needs from the United States, the other major regional power along with Japan. Vietnam, for instance, has in recent years deepened its security cooperation with the United States, allowing a U.S. aircraft carrier, the USS Carl Vinson, to dock at Danang for a week in 2018, for the first time since the end of the Vietnam War. There also has been speculation that Hanoi may file legal arbitration against Beijing’s maritime claims, and Hanoi has fostered military-to-military cooperation with Washington in other ways as well. Cambodia, on the other hand, has been all too willing to support Beijing’s interests. Under the increasingly authoritarian leadership of Prime Minister Hun Sen, Beijing has often facilitated China’s goals in Southeast Asia, dividing ASEAN. As Hiebert makes clear, Beijing knows how to cater its aid to Phnom Penh’s needs based on Western actions such as sanctions in response to unfair elections. Still, many Cambodians remain wary of China’s expanding influence in their country. Numerous Cambodians resent Hun Sen’s reliance on Chinese investment, which has transformed Sihanoukville into a Chinese outpost and may grant Beijing a naval base in the country. Sophal Ear, a political scientist at Occidental College, also warns about the risks of taking on unsustainable levels of Chinese debt: in 2018 roughly 48 percent of Cambodia’s $7.6 billion foreign debt was owed to China. Finally, Hiebert turns to the question of what all this regional complexity means for Washington, which has displayed a mixture of heavy-handed demands for regional fealty and ambivalence toward Southeast Asia. The Trump administration’s reduced interaction with the region has fed a perception in Southeast Asia of Washington’s declining influence. Hiebert provides a strong case for why and how the United States should restore its attention to the region and refocus its strategy toward Southeast Asia., including by regularly attending regional summits and increasing funding for much-needed physical infrastructure, including in the Mekong basin countries.

After initiating large scale social restrictions in early April, in some parts of the country, areas of Indonesia are slowly reopening. Throughout June, authorities will gradually loosen restrictions on establishments like restaurants and shopping areas in parts of Indonesia where the reproduction rate of COVID-19—the average number of infections stemming from a single case—is judged to be less than one. But Indonesia is opening up without a clear handle on the scope of its COVID-19 crisis, which is the worst in Southeast Asia, with nearly 30,000 confirmed cases and 1,770 deaths as of this writing. Government efforts to ramp up testing have been hampered by persistent delays, and parts of the country are still seeing spikes in new infections. But even if the reopening goes smoothly, the pandemic has already done significant damage to the reputation of President Joko Widodo, who has been widely criticized for an ineffectual response. Instead of learning from his mistakes and making a course correction, Jokowi, as he is widely known in Indonesia, has stifled criticism of his government and empowered the military, threatening Indonesia’s democracy. The country’s economy and its people, meanwhile, are bearing the costs. For more on Indonesia’s struggles, see my new World Politics Review article.