Year: 2002
Type: article
Abstract: The paper seeks to explain three episodes of political violence in post-war Burma, Indonesia and the Philippines.It argues that in the tense and pointed post-war competition between state actors and social challengers, a strategic calculus governed relationships among different political authorities, and between different authorities and social forces.The state and its challengers examine the particular currency of power and advance to assess who poses threats, and in what ways, to their various plans for political advance.To validate this argument, the paper examines the social foundations of colonial rule and nationalism, the different modes of transition to independence, and the various engines of upward political mobility after independence.Three of the more durable postcolonial dictatorships in Southeast Asia share one significant trait: they were led, not by the social or political coalition that achieved independence, but by forces that had been secondary players in that struggle.Suharto, Ne Win, and Ferdinand Marcos all stood at some remove from those who initially held stewardship of independent Indonesia, Burma and the Philippines.Nor were any of these men merely young versions of those in power-in each case, they differed from independence-era presidents both sociologically and in their institutional connections.Suharto and Ne Win were each, at some point, postal clerks, while Marcos was either the legitimate son of a marginal man, or the illegitimate son of shadowy smuggler: inauspicious beginnings, all around.At the same time, at least Suharto and Ne Win in their person (and even Marcos in his social type) had played a role in the independence coalition-and so their political rises came at the expense of some reversals within that coalition, fueled by creeping social mobility or institutional growth.Even in the largely socially immobile Philippine independence transition-and more so in socially-volatile Burma and Indonesia-these men represent rising political forces that emerged after independence, and pushed aside earlier helmsmen.These new authoritarian regimes, that is, arose in consequence both of power relationships inscribed by colonialism and the transitions to independence, and of later processes of political change and social mobility.Joel Migdal has written extensively about one dynamic suggested by these observations: that in the particular politics of post-colonial state building, some of the greatest -------------
Author: Vincent G. Boudreau
Institution: City College of New York
Language: English
Subfield: Sociology and Political Science
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: bronze
OpenAlex ID: W2186360870