The Politics of Protection Rackets in Post-New Order Indonesia

Coercive Capital, Authority and Street Politics

Ian Douglas Wilson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781138302525
• eBook ISBN: 9781135042080
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Gangs and militias have been a persistent feature of social and political life in Indonesia. During the authoritarian New Order regime they constituted part of a vast network of sub-contracted coercion and social control on behalf of the state. Indonesia's subsequent democratisation has seen gangs adapt to and take advantage of the changed political context. New types of populist street based organisations have emerged that combine predatory rent-seeking with claims of representing marginalised social and economic groups.

Based on extensive fieldwork in Jakarta this book provides a comprehensive analysis of the changing relationship between gangs, militias and political power and authority in post-New Order Indonesia. It argues that gangs and militias have manufactured various types of legitimacy in consolidating localised territorial monopolies and protection economies. As mediators between the informal politics of the street and the world of formal politics they have become often influential brokers in Indonesia's decentralised electoral democracy. More than mere criminal extortion, it is argued that the protection racket as a social relation of coercion and domination remains a salient feature of Indonesia's post-authoritarian political landscape.

This ground-breaking study will be of interest to students and scholars of Indonesian and Southeast Asian politics, political violence, gangs and urban politics.

1 Protection, violence and the state

DOI: 10.4324/9780203799192-1

Over and over again, effective nongovernmental specialists in violence have made alliances with governments, become parts of governments, taken over existing governments, or become governments of their own.

(Tilly 1985, 38)

In Indonesia the nongovernmental ‘specialists in violence’ described by Tilly have been a ubiquitous and conspicuous figure throughout both recent and more distant history, albeit in a variety of regional variations and manifestations: vigilantes, militias, gangs, racketeers, hit men, petty criminals, political thugs, private security and mercenaries.¹ The qualities of each of these types vary and have transformed over time, as has their relationship to state and society, but nonetheless they have remained persistent and often central actors in both the maintenance and transformation of power and different forms of political authority. Drawing on case studies from the nation’s capital, Jakarta, this book takes as its specific focus preman, a colloquial term for a thug or gangster, and other ‘entrepreneurs in violence’ in post-New Order Indonesia, charting shifts in patterns of practice, organisation and relations with informal and formal political power and authority.²

The fact that these individuals and organisations have survived and flourished despite the ending of 32 years of authoritarian rule under Suharto and the introduction of democratic reforms raises important questions: how has democratic reform and decentralisation influenced the nature of preman gangs, organisations and the kinds of politics, power and authority they represent? What are the implications of predatory coalitions between gangsters and political elites for political regime directions? To what extent have these groups been associated with the consolidation of specific social interests? What are the social, political and economic repercussions of the trading of violence and protection as a political and market resource? Is this a marked departure from the forms of political gangsterism of the Suharto era and what does it imply for the types of social and political orders that have emerged? This book will consider these questions through its examination of the changing nature of preman groups, mass organisations and violent entrepreneurs in Jakarta in the context of larger changes in the political and social life of post-New Order Indonesia.

In contrast to the New Order regime, a nominal consent-based legitimacy has been conferred upon the post-Suharto state through the implementation of multi-party electoral democracy and direct election of the president and national and local legislatures, decentralisation reforms, and a reduced role of the military in the nation’s political and economic life. Challenges to this have been many. These include endemic political corruption, the persistence of entrenched oligarchies, the fragmentation of pro-reform forces and relative absence of mass popular representation, and patchy and erratic progress in addressing key problems such as poverty, unemployment and the provision of basic services such as education and health for the majority of the population. The presence of groups using coercive strategies in the pursuit of particularistic interests has both added to and been a product of these challenges. There has been a shift in the political economy of coercion away from what could broadly be referred to as state-related violence, although it is often difficult to see where the state begins and ends, with an increase in violence and coercion as a central strategy used by a variety of different social, economic and political interests. A politically fragmented landscape is filled with a multiplicity of social and political forces employing and laying claim to legitimacy in the use of coercion. This book considers some of the reasons behind this and contends that there are historical legacies of previous configurations of formal and informal power established during the New Order. Most important, they represent the opportunities presented by the particular way in which decentralised democracy has been implemented, experienced and practised in Indonesia’s post-authoritarian society.

Indonesia fits a well-documented pattern in which gangs and gangsters often emerge as major beneficiaries of democratic electoral politics as candidates, revenue raisers and powerbrokers able to mobilise support, intimidate rivals and perform other services on behalf of clients (Trocki 1998). As Masaaki and Rozaki have pointed out, non-state violence in Indonesia continues to occur not because the state necessarily condones it, but due to the fact that political and economic elites rely upon it to consolidate their own power and interests (Masaaki and Rozaki 2006, xi).

Violence, power and legitimacy

Any discussion of nongovernmental specialists in violence is predicated upon the existence and maintenance of a particular set of relationships and conceptual boundaries determining ‘state’ and ‘society’. In order to understand the contours of this relationship in contemporary Indonesia we must first consider some of the broader theoretical issues that emerge from an examination of the relationship between informal violence and different configurations of state and elite power. My intention here is not to give a comprehensive overview or analysis of the diverse range of theories or a nuanced critique of them, which would be beyond the scope of this book and the capacities of the author. Rather, the intention is to develop a general framework to think with, or against, in relation to the empirical cases, engaging theoretical frameworks provided by Weber, Tilly, Migdal and Schulte-Bockholt. In particular I will argue that the concept of the protection racket and its extension in the protection racket regime are useful for understanding the dynamics of informal violence and coercive authority in New Order and post-New Order Indonesia.

The theoretical tradition derived from the work of Max Weber which has until relatively recently dominated Western scholarship on the modern state has identified a ‘territorial monopoly over the legitimate use of physical force’ as its defining characteristic (Weber 1964, 154). Taken at face value, the Weberian notion logically entails that a state would endeavour to eliminate or pacify any internal or external rivals to its monopoly, its legitimacy contingent upon successful control over both the means and use of violence within its territory. However, in many states, including twentieth-century Indonesia, the state and its agencies have not only failed to monopolise fully the use and means of force, but have sponsored both covertly and overtly and otherwise actively encouraged various forms of subcontracted non-state violence, including in ways that appear to act against its interests. Alongside this it has faced an array of internal challengers in the form of separatist movements, insurgencies, terrorism and organised crime. What does this tell us about the nature of the state and the state-society dynamic in relation to the use of violence? How useful is the Weberian definition as a conceptual tool for understanding nature of violent entrepreneurs and their position and role in contemporary Indonesia? In order to make some ground in answering these questions it is necessary to deconstruct further the logic of Weber’s definition of state.

According to Weber it is ‘legitimacy’ that sets the state apart in its use of violence from other violence-wielding groups and individuals. What is it that makes state violence legitimate, and legitimate to whom? Weber considered the state as the product of struggles for domination in which legitimacy emerged as the product of the capacity of one group first to limit violence from competing groups through the development of a superior coercive force, the maintenance of territorial boundaries, followed by the transformation of the coercive apparatus into bureaucratic and legal institutions for the enforcement of laws and rights (Weber 1978, 78). Other ideal-type ‘legitimations’ for domination highlighted by Weber include ‘tradition’, ‘mores sanctified through the unimaginably ancient recognition and habitual orientation to conform’, and charisma, the devotion and obedience to a leader based upon belief in the values, virtues and powers ascribed to them (Weber 1978, 904). In this respect, the ‘criminal’, ‘subversive’ or ‘illegitimate’ is defined as such only in reference to the rules, laws and whims of a prevailing authority, the ‘winner’ of Weber’s struggle for domination. In practice the ability to define and enforce notions of ‘justice’ often has little to do with codified law. Frequently violence has been judged by various states based more upon its relative effectiveness than by adherence to established rules or abstract principles of justice. As Spinoza identified, the paradox of the state has been that while it establishes the law, there is nothing that makes it inherently bound to it (Spinoza 1951). Racketeer or security guard, gangster or entrepreneur, subversive or patriot are all labels applied by the dominant power and dependent upon the nature of the relationship of a group or individuals to this dominant power.

Perhaps then it is not surprising that viewed in an historical and comparative perspective the oscillating line between ‘legitimate’ state violence and ‘illegitimate’ non-state violence has been one fraught with conceptual ambiguities.³ This is especially so in the context of Southeast Asian states where power was consolidated primarily via domination and ideological hegemony rather than any notion of consent of the governed or a Hobbesian-style social contract. As the history of the regions testifies, internal pacification of populations was also at best partial. Volkov points out in his study of post-Soviet Russia, that organised crime and by extension ‘illegitimate’ non-state violence can only be identified when the state and the particular system of order it enforces are functional and in place. In the absence of this there is ‘little more than a number of competing protection agencies with weak legitimacy’ (Volkov 2002, 22). While it may be true that legitimacy is ultimately ‘in the eye of the beholder’, a matter of normative judgement, this fails to explain the ways in which it can be ‘manufactured’ as the product of a relationship of exchange involving coercive force, and the outcome of particular structural arrangements between violence-wielding groups.

Taylor has argued that in practice states never fully possess an actual monopoly over force even if they may claim it. According to Taylor, what a nominally functional state does constitute is ‘a concentration of force and the attempt by those in whose hands it is (incompletely) concentrated to determine who else shall be permitted to employ force and on what occasions’ (Taylor 1982, 5). Tilly also avoids any mention of legitimacy or monopolisation in the use of force in his definition of the state, identifying it simply as an entity ‘controlling the principle means of coercion within a given territory’ (Tilly 1975, 62). What both authors suggest is that once the principal means of force has been brought under effective control, which in the case of most nation-states involves the military and police, other violence-wielding groups can potentially be managed or contained through a combination of negotiation, subcontracting, incorporation, suppression or elimination.⁴ In this context ‘legitimacy’ emerges as a product of the outcome of struggles for domination in which the state emerges as the agent that exercises violence, or the management of it, more effectively than rival groups in the achievement of a particular form of social and political ‘order’.

In his analysis of Weber’s definition, Migdal argues that it is necessary to separate the Weberian model into two distinct realms.⁵ Migdal contends that the ideal-type state as a unified and legitimate monopoliser of force exists at the ideological level (or as an ‘image’), and hence is of little analytical value when attempting to understand the interaction between state and society at the ‘mundane’ level of quotidian social space (Migdal 2001, 16). In other words, states commonly portray themselves as possessing a legitimate monopoly, projecting supremacy and uniformity, but more commonly the social reality is that this monopoly is partial and the aggregation of a multitude of ongoing contests and struggles at the local level. Thus Migdal proposes a less rigid definition of the state as a ‘field of power marked by the use and threat of violence’ (Migdal 2001, 15). This field is shaped by the ‘image of a coherent, controlling organization’, Weber’s legitimate monopoliser, along with the ‘actual practices of its multiple parts’ which can both reinforce and undermine this image (Migdal 2001, 16). Such a definition allows us to sidestep comparisons with the ideal-type state, and the attendant questions of why or why not a monopoly is in place, in effect reproducing the state’s own ideology, and instead focus attention upon the largely empirical question of identifying the dynamics and contradictions of the practices and strategies of the parts making up this ‘field of power’ (Migdal 2001, 16).⁶ If the state represents the organising principle of a particular social order, informal violence and coercion can also be used in the formal sphere both to enforce the social order and to resist it.

The political economy of protection

If we employ Migdal’s conceptualisation of the state as a field of power in which coercive force and violence are exercised, what are the intended outcomes of this violence? Violence of course has many causes and motivations, but as a strategy foundational to forms of political power it is generally considered a ‘resource’, not an end in itself. The economic historian Frederic Lane has described governments as violence-controlling enterprises that produce and sell the commodity of ‘protection’ (Lane 1979, 22). Drawing from Lane’s work, Tilly has extended this point, suggesting that states should be understood primarily as providers of protection, a characteristic they share with gangs, racketeers and organised crime. For both, violence’s ‘function’ is the production of the commodity of protection which is, due to the very means by which it is produced, a ‘double-edged sword’: Tilly contends that a functional state can emerge over time when an arrangement is met in which protection is provided by the state to its constituents in return for access to resources, usually obtained via taxation and rent extraction. As Volkov has identified, taken in isolation the relationship between a protector and a citizen/client/victim appears like straight out extortion or domination when there is an absence of consent or if there is no offer of real or imaginary service in return for tribute (Volkov 2002, 35). As a long-term political and economic arrangement, however, this is unsustainable. It is only in the context of the existence of an array of internal or external actors using or threatening violence that protection can appear real or even legitimate: ‘the concept of protection implies a multiplicity of interacting wielders of force, each of whom can simultaneously act as a threat and as protection’ (Volkov 2002, 35). Therefore the function of protection can only emerge from an apparent absence of a monopoly of force, when there is an identifiable ‘other’ to protect against. What this suggests is that if no identifiable threat exists, one needs to be created.

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 company, or a sturdy roof....

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half-Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Preface
• Structure of the book
• Methodology
• 1 Protection, violence and the state
• 2 Reconfigured rackets: Continuity, change and consolidation
• 3 A New Order of crime: Suharto’s racket regime
• 4 The changing of the preman guard
• 5 The rise of the Betawi
• 6 Jakarta’s political economy of rackets
• 7 Coercive capital, political entrepreneurship and electoral democracy
• 8 Conclusion: The politics of protection rackets
• Glossary
• Bibliography
• Index