Since the fall of Suharto, the oligarchy thesis has figured prominently in studies of Indonesian politics. Best articulated in books by Richard Robison and Vedi Hadiz (Reorganizing power in Indonesia: The politics of oligarchy in an age of markets, 2004) as well as Jeffrey A. Winters (Oligarchy, 2011), the thesis contends that the small proportion of Indonesia's population that controls the vast majority of the country's capital is actively involved in shaping the political sphere. At the risk of oversimplifying, proponents of the oligarchy thesis argue that the extremely wealthy continue to dominate Indonesian politics despite democratisation. Michele Ford and Thomas Pepinsky gathered ten of the leading scholars of Indonesian politics to engage this premise, generating a lively debate between advocates and detractors. Beyond oligarchy is the result of their exchanges. Each of the volume's essays provides a unique theoretical perspective based on the contributor's own work, the combination of which yields an excellent overview of the state-of-the-art research conducted by political scientists across the spectrum on Indonesia. They also identify a variety of future research opportunities.
The first two contributions, after the introduction, offer a defence of the oligarchy thesis. Winters presents his broader theory about the political efforts of oligarchs to defend their wealth from the extractive powers of the state and then ties this to the challenges facing Indonesia. Through his articulate rejoinder against the criticisms posed by other contributors, he asserts that an appreciation of the role of oligarchs is essential for understanding the current Indonesian political system. Robison and Hadiz further delineate the oligarchy thesis, highlighting the fact that oligarchs who arose during the Suharto era have been able to survive and adapt to the new political system. They conclude that the transition to democracy was insufficiently revolutionary to uproot the oligarchic system and replace it with the rule of law and a strong civil society. In essence, both contributions leave us with a rather bleak perspective on Indonesian democracy. The Indonesian state is deeply flawed, incapable of asserting its influence over oligarchic challengers who use their wealth to dominate the political sphere.
The remaining contributions offer a number of criticisms to this view of Indonesian politics. These include observations that the oligarchy thesis overlooks alternative sources of political power (Liddle), lacks a focus on political outcomes (Pepinsky), omits empirical evidence that non-oligarchs are also strong political actors (Mietzner), ignores the response of elites to electoral incentives (Aspinall), discounts the mobilisation of labour (Caraway and Ford), and neglects the way that changes in the Indonesian state have shaped the actions of oligarchs (Buehler). Each criticism is paired with suggestions for an alternative means to theorising about Indonesian politics as well as some empirical evidence supporting their claims. While the empirical contributions are interesting, they are brief and generally revisit work that each of the authors has presented in other publications. Instead, the critiques and proposed alternative methods for studying Indonesian politics, combined with the defence offered by Winters and Robison and Hadiz, are the heart of the volume, and they offer important insights into the state of Indonesian political studies. These points of debate are the greatest strength of the book and serve as its major contribution.
At the same time, they also highlight a potential vulnerability of the piece. While each contribution offers innovative suggestions, taken together they provide relatively little in the way of establishing a unified direction for future studies of Indonesian politics. Pursuing some of the research trajectories presented in the volume would leave one hard-pressed to engage with the alternatives, thus opening oneself to similar criticisms. For instance, if a scholar were to adopt Liddle's suggested study of agency among Indonesia's democratic presidents, she or he might have a difficult time speaking to Aspinall's focus on popular forces in local governance or Carraway and Ford's emphasis on labour mobilisation. Unlike the oligarchy thesis, these suggested approaches offer no broad theory that would grant purchase on such disparate topics. The contributors engage oligarchy, but they largely do so within their own research sphere, leaving open the question of which technique grants the greatest theoretical and empirical leverage. The exception might be Pepinsky's appeal to critical pluralism as an alternate explanation for Indonesia's political outcomes. As such, a reader looking for an elegant and unified theory of Indonesian politics, if such a thing were even possible or desirable, would not find it in this volume. Thus, the process of moving Beyond oligarchy, much like Indonesia's democracy, has many facets and is a work-in-progress.
That said, the great value of this volume is in the questions it raises rather than its ability to resolve debates over the oligarchy thesis. Indeed, graduate students and junior scholars, or even senior scholars, seeking ambitious and exciting research projects will discover a multitude of suggestions in the work. From Winters' emphasis on the weakness of rule of law to Pepinsky's advocacy for applying critical pluralism on policy outcomes to Buehler's elite competition model, political scientists interested in Indonesia will find the volume a rich resource for identifying substantively important and theoretically engaging research questions. Many empirical puzzles await as Indonesia grapples its way through a second decade of democracy, and the authors in this volume highlight promising directions that will push forward the field of Indonesian political studies for years to come.
