Monday 16 September 2024‍

Indonesia is in the countdown to the October presidential transition from Joko Widodo (Jokowi) to Prabowo Subianto, who won a decisive victory in the April presidential election. Hugely ambitious and popular, Jokowi leaves a complex legacy, including strained democratic institutions, the politicisation of the police and military, and an at times transactional foreign policy that benefited China’s standing.

The panel drew on perspectives presented at the 2024 Australian National University Indonesia Update conference to explore the legacy of Jokowi’s presidency and the direction that Prabowo may now seek to steer Indonesia.

Eve Warburton is a senior lecturer at the Department of Political and Social Change in the Coral Bell School of Asia Pacific Affairs, and Director of ANU's Indonesia Institute at the College of Asia and the Pacific. Her research is concerned broadly with problems of representation, governance, and business-state relations, in young and developing democracies, with a regional focus on Southeast Asia and Indonesia in particular. She has published in leading disciplinary and area studies journals on these topics, and her first book manuscript, Resource Nationalism in Indonesia: Booms, Big Business and the State, was published by Cornell University Press in late 2023.

Sidney Jones is Senior Adviser to the Institute for Policy Analysis of Conflict (IPAC) in Jakarta, a non-governmental research organization she founded in 2013. She served as director from 2013 to 2021, when she returned to New York. From 2002 to 2013, Jones worked with the International Crisis Group in Jakarta, first as Southeast Asia project director, then from 2007 as senior adviser to the Asia program. Before joining Crisis Group, she worked for the Ford Foundation in Jakarta and New York (1977-84); Amnesty International in London as the Indonesia-Philippines-Pacific researcher (1985-88); and Human Rights Watch in New York as the Asia director (1989-2002). She took a leave from the latter position in 2000 to serve as chief of the human rights office of the United Nations Transitional Administration in East Timor (UNTAET). Jones holds a B.A. and M.A. from the University of Pennsylvania.

Marcus Mietzner is Associate Professor at the Department of Political and Social Change, Coral Bell School of Asia Pacific Affairs at the Australian National University in Canberra. He has published extensively on Indonesian politics, including in peer-reviewed international journals such as Democratization, International Political Science Review, Governance, Journal of Democracy, Contemporary Politics, Australian Journal of International Affairs, Journal of Contemporary Asia and Critical Asian Studies. His latest book is "The Coalitions Presidents Make: Presidential Power and its Limits in Democratic Indonesia" (Cornell University Press, 2023). He is currently writing a book on the Jokowi presidency, based on a series of interviews with the outgoing president and other key actors.

Rizal Sukma is a Senior Fellow at the Centre for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) Indonesia. Previously, he was Indonesia’s Ambassador to the United Kingdom, Ireland and the International Maritime Organization (IMO), London, from 2016 to 2020. He joined CSIS in 1990 as a researcher and assumed the role of Executive Director in 2009 until 2015. Dr Sukma also served as Chairman of International Relations, Muhammadiyah Central Executive Board (2005-2015). Since receiving a PhD in International Relations from the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) in 1997, he has worked extensively on such issues as Southeast Asian security, ASEAN, Indonesia’s defense and foreign policy, military reform, Islam and politics, and domestic political changes in Indonesia.

The panel was moderated by Susannah Patton, Director of the Southeast Asia Program at the Lowy Institute.

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