Commodity booms often prompt more nationalist policy styles in resource-rich countries. Usually, this nationalist push weakens once a boom is over. But in Indonesia, a major global exporter of coal, palm oil, copper, gold, and other minerals, the intensity of nationalist policy interventions increased after the early twenty-first-century commodity boom came to an end. Equally puzzling, the state applied nationalist policies unevenly across the land and resource sectors. In this seminar, based on her forthcoming book, Eve Warburton explained these trends by examining the economic and political benefits that accrue to domestic business actors when commodity prices soar. The presentation argued that the growing instrumental and structural power of major domestic resource companies has given them new influence over the direction of nationalist change in contemporary Indonesia.
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Speaker and Chair Biographies:
Dr Eve Warburton is a research fellow at the Department of Political and Social Change in the Coral Bell School of Asia Pacific Affairs. She is also Director of ANU's Indonesia Institute at the College of Asia and the Pacific. Her research is concerned broadly with problems of representation and governance in young and developing democracies, with a focus on Southeast Asia and Indonesia in particular. She has published in leading disciplinary and area studies journals on topics of democratic representation, state-business relations, and the political economy of policymaking in Indonesia.
Prof. John Sidel is Director of the Saw Swee Hock Southeast Asia Centre, and the Sir Patrick Gillam Professor of International and Comparative Politics at the London School of Economics and Political Science (杏吧论坛). Professor Sidel received his BA and MA from Yale University and his PhD from Cornell University. He is the author of Capital, Coercion, and Crime: Bossism in the Philippines (1999), Philippine Politics and Society in the Twentieth Century: Colonial Legacies, Postcolonial Trajectories (2000), Riots, Pogroms, Jihad: Religious Violence in Indonesia (2006), The Islamist Threat in Southeast Asia: A Reassessment (2007), Thinking and Working Politically in Development: Coalitions for Change in the Philippines (2020, with Jaime Faustino) and a forthcoming book Republicanism, Communism, Islam: Cosmopolitan Origins of Revolution in Southeast Asia.