This is an excellent summary of a sad development: how the Prabowo government is undermining Indonesia’s economic future

Nice article on Indonesia’s increasingly state-controlled economic ‘development’ under Prabowo.

NEW 🇹🇭 Thailand's February 2026 election was a disaster for reformist politics in Thailand, and Jirapreeya Saeboo argues that the People's Party's ideological and strategic shortcomings have to share in the blame.

NEW 🇲🇲 The socialist economy envisioned by the military regime that ruled from 1962 to 1988 existed only in propaganda. The real economy, meanwhile, ran on Johnnie Walker, jeans, and officials’ willingness to look the other way.

NEW 🇵🇭 Rodrigo Duterte can no longer perform the strongman persona that generated his appeal, yet the political loyalty towards him has only intensified. John Lee Candelaria argues that the moral economy of "utang na loob"—"debt[s] of honour"—sustains the populist bond between Duterte and supporters.

NEW 🇮🇩 Indonesia’s new ‘war on waste’ revives familiar community mobilisation strategies focused on downstream remediation while leaving the structural causes of pollution largely untouched, writes Lukas Fort.

NEW 🇮🇩 President Prabowo's drive to reassert state control addresses a genuine postcolonial grievance—but with a strategy that destroys the broader institutional conditions for the prosperity it claims to pursue, argues Rayhan Prabu Kusumo.

NEW 🇮🇩 President Prabowo's drive to reassert state control addresses a genuine postcolonial grievance—but with a strategy that destroys the broader institutional conditions for the prosperity it claims to pursue, argues Rayhan Prabu Kusumo.

NEW 🇮🇩 Indonesia’s new ‘war on waste’ revives familiar community mobilisation strategies focused on downstream remediation while leaving the structural causes of pollution largely untouched, writes Lukas Fort.

NEW 🇵🇭 Rodrigo Duterte can no longer perform the strongman persona that generated his appeal, yet the political loyalty towards him has only intensified. John Lee Candelaria argues that the moral economy of "utang na loob"—"debt[s] of honour"—sustains the populist bond between Duterte and supporters.

NEW 🇲🇲 The socialist economy envisioned by the military regime that ruled from 1962 to 1988 existed only in propaganda. The real economy, meanwhile, ran on Johnnie Walker, jeans, and officials’ willingness to look the other way.

NEW 🇹🇭 Thailand's February 2026 election was a disaster for reformist politics in Thailand, and Jirapreeya Saeboo argues that the People's Party's ideological and strategic shortcomings have to share in the blame.

NEW 🇮🇩 As modernist Islamic education flourished in late colonial West Sumatra, girls' schools became dual sites of transformation, becoming training grounds for both anticolonial activism and a new generation of strong, devout Muslim women envisioned as shaping the future Indonesian nation-state.

this is so good. some of the writers mentioned who were shipped across the archipelago to Boven Digul could well have ended up in Cowra!

NEW 🇮🇩 As modernist Islamic education flourished in late colonial West Sumatra, girls' schools became dual sites of transformation, becoming training grounds for both anticolonial activism and a new generation of strong, devout Muslim women envisioned as shaping the future Indonesian nation-state.

NEW 🇮🇩 Elites are calling for the rollback of direct elections for local executives, on the pretext of curtailing money politics and fiscal efficiency. Yet they refuse to consider easy reforms that would achieve both these ends while preserving one of the key achievments of Reformasi.

NEW 🇮🇩 Elites are calling for the rollback of direct elections for local executives, on the pretext of curtailing money politics and fiscal efficiency. Yet they refuse to consider easy reforms that would achieve both these ends while preserving one of the key achievments of Reformasi.

NEW 🇹🇭 For decades, governments have sought to dam and divert rivers in the Salween River Basin—and for decades, communities have resisted under often deeply repressive political conditions. @zalifung.bsky.social explores their repertoire of "slow resistance" in this essay drawing on her PhD research

NEW 🇹🇭 Police are in many ways the ultimate “street-level bureaucrats”—those who do the difficult on-the-ground work of connecting policy with ordinary people. As such, they play a key role in shaping the real-world nature of citizenship in contemporary Thailand, as Bavo Stevens' research explores.

NEW 🇮🇩 Prabowo Subianto says Indonesia was drained of US$31 trillion worth of its national wealth by Dutch colonisers. But conceptualising the nature of wealth transfer from colony to metropole—let alone accurately measuring it—isn’t such a straightforward business, argues Pierre van der Eng.

NEW 🇮🇩 Too big to fail, and too big to succeed, Jokowi’s new capital city eventually came to be pushed forward by little more than the former president’s need to justify its existence, writes Anders Kirstein Moeller. www.newmandala.org/nusantara-th...

NEW: 🇹🇭 The battle over a historic Chinese temple slated to be lost to commercial development is putting property logic against moral geography in central Bangkok, writes Ying-kit Chan.

NEW 🇮🇩 The scale of 2025's flooding disaster is a direct consequence of extractive industries' degradation of local ecosystems. But many environmental groups are deterred from speaking out about these drivers of destruction by a government not averse to sanctioning NGOs that challenge its policies.

NEW 🇮🇩 Despite post-independence progress, the gap between Indonesia's per-capita GDP and that of the Netherlands' is as big as it was two centuries ago. Colonial extraction, policy choices, and post-independence development paths are all ingredients in this persistent economic disparity.

NEW 🇮🇩 "These floods are the cumulative result of long-term decisions regarding land use, infrastructure, and regulations. Extreme rainfall should be viewed not as the primary cause of disaster but as a trigger that highlights deeper failures in governance and accountability."

BOOK REVIEW 🇲🇾 "Anwar, like many politicians, excels as a political philosopher but falters in practice, guilty of preaching democracy while entrenching authoritarian tendencies, and universal Islam while tolerating repression of other faiths."

BOOK REVIEW 🇲🇾 "Anwar, like many politicians, excels as a political philosopher but falters in practice, guilty of preaching democracy while entrenching authoritarian tendencies, and universal Islam while tolerating repression of other faiths."

NEW 🇮🇩 Despite post-independence progress, the gap between Indonesia's per-capita GDP and that of the Netherlands' is as big as it was two centuries ago. Colonial extraction, policy choices, and post-independence development paths are all ingredients in this persistent economic disparity.

NEW 🇮🇩 "These floods are the cumulative result of long-term decisions regarding land use, infrastructure, and regulations. Extreme rainfall should be viewed not as the primary cause of disaster but as a trigger that highlights deeper failures in governance and accountability."

Excited to see some of my early findings from my research on policing in Thailand published in the @newmandala.bsky.social can01.safelinks.protection.outlook.com?url=https%3A...

NEW 🇮🇩 Using early-modern Javanese manuscripts, we can read new insights into the cultural significance of ancient temples in Islamic Indonesia—and go beyond colonial-era narratives of their “abandonment” and “discovery”.

NEW 🇻🇳 Nguyễn Thị Thu Huyền and Chen Yi Ting's ethnography of the relocation of Hmong graves for a tourist site near the Vietnam–China frontier explores how ethnic minorities internalise the state's developmentalist logic via spiritual practices—challenging usual narratives that emphasise resistance.

NEW 🇲🇾 "Reform of recruitment and work permit systems that reproduce de facto debt bondage and isolate workers from their families have costs for migrant workers and Malaysian society more broadly. But entrenched political economy factors give too many political actors a stake in the current system."

NEW 🇮🇩 Indonesian official homophobia is not monolithic. One homophobia aims to eradicate ‘deviant’ sexualities, but another casts queer people as victims. By negotiating the two, LGBT organisations can secure a measure of freedom and dignity for their communities. www.newmandala.org/lgbt-organis...

NEW 🇮🇩 The scale of 2025's flooding disaster is a direct consequence of extractive industries' degradation of local ecosystems. But many environmental groups are deterred from speaking out about these drivers of destruction by a government not averse to sanctioning NGOs that challenge its policies.

NEW 🇮🇩 Indonesian official homophobia is not monolithic. One homophobia aims to eradicate ‘deviant’ sexualities, but another casts queer people as victims. By negotiating the two, LGBT organisations can secure a measure of freedom and dignity for their communities. www.newmandala.org/lgbt-organis...

NEW 🇻🇳 Nguyễn Thị Thu Huyền and Chen Yi Ting's ethnography of the relocation of Hmong graves for a tourist site near the Vietnam–China frontier explores how ethnic minorities internalise the state's developmentalist logic via spiritual practices—challenging usual narratives that emphasise resistance.

NEW 🇲🇾 "Reform of recruitment and work permit systems that reproduce de facto debt bondage and isolate workers from their families have costs for migrant workers and Malaysian society more broadly. But entrenched political economy factors give too many political actors a stake in the current system."

NEW 🇹🇭 For decades, governments have sought to dam and divert rivers in the Salween River Basin—and for decades, communities have resisted under often deeply repressive political conditions. @zalifung.bsky.social explores their repertoire of "slow resistance" in this essay drawing on her PhD research

My essay on “slow resistance” to long-proposed hydropower dams & diversions in the Salween River Basin is out with @newmandala.bsky.social ! It’s based on my PhD research & an article co-authored with @drvanessalamb.bsky.social in Antipode. www.newmandala.org/slow-resista...

NEW 🇹🇭 Police are in many ways the ultimate “street-level bureaucrats”—those who do the difficult on-the-ground work of connecting policy with ordinary people. As such, they play a key role in shaping the real-world nature of citizenship in contemporary Thailand, as Bavo Stevens' research explores.

NEW 🇮🇩 Using early-modern Javanese manuscripts, we can read new insights into the cultural significance of ancient temples in Islamic Indonesia—and go beyond colonial-era narratives of their “abandonment” and “discovery”.

NEW 🇮🇩 Prabowo Subianto says Indonesia was drained of US$31 trillion worth of its national wealth by Dutch colonisers. But conceptualising the nature of wealth transfer from colony to metropole—let alone accurately measuring it—isn’t such a straightforward business, argues Pierre van der Eng.

NEW 🇮🇩 What can we learn about the distribution and grassroots political influence of Indonesia's pesantren from government data?

NEW 🇵🇭 The political economy of kickbacks is central to why the Philippine government's strategy for coping with climate change is still too fixated on physical infrastructure, write Joseph Alegado and Cleo Calimbahin. www.newmandala.org/corruption-c...

NEW 🇮🇩 The legacies of Jokowi’s demobilisation of Islamist civil society, combined with Prabowo’s own credibility with hardliners, have given the president extensive leeway to embrace a more even-handed approach to the Israel–Palestine conflict. www.newmandala.org/why-islamist...

NEW 🇱🇦 The Lao state treats its public health workforce as a driver of socialist modernisation—but do those workers feel the same way? www.newmandala.org/laos-nurses-...

NEW 🇱🇦 The Lao state treats its public health workforce as a driver of socialist modernisation—but do those workers feel the same way? www.newmandala.org/laos-nurses-...

NEW 🇮🇩 The legacies of Jokowi’s demobilisation of Islamist civil society, combined with Prabowo’s own credibility with hardliners, have given the president extensive leeway to embrace a more even-handed approach to the Israel–Palestine conflict. www.newmandala.org/why-islamist...

NEW 🇵🇭 The political economy of kickbacks is central to why the Philippine government's strategy for coping with climate change is still too fixated on physical infrastructure, write Joseph Alegado and Cleo Calimbahin. www.newmandala.org/corruption-c...