Navigating The Indonesia’s Military Reform, 1998-2014

This dissertation studies military’s withdrawal from politics. It examines military reform in Indonesia which aiming at withdrawing the Indonesian armed forces, currently known as Tentara Nasional Indonesia or TNI, from politics following the fall of Suharto in 1998. It seeks to explain the driving force of the progress of military reform in Indonesia and asks the question of: why has the reform been progressing differently from one agenda to another? It focuses on three agendas of reform, which are: the establishment of normative democratic control over TNI, the disbandment of TNI’s business activities, and the reorganization of TNI’s territorial command structure. It argues that variation in the progress of reform in those three agendas is closely related to military interests. The relatively successful establishment of normative democratic control over the armed forces has been mostly driven by the primacy of national interests within the brass, while the struggling disbandment of military’s business activities is rooted at factional/personal interests within TNI, and the complete failure in the abandonment of territorial command structure is related to strong organizational interests of TNI. This dissertation adopts a within-case comparison to answer the puzzle and focusing on Indonesia which represents the transplacement model of democratization in the third wave of democratization. Since transplacement involves coalition between reformers within the old and the new elites, it allows a process of negotiation in the transition. Hence, it creates a variation of the progress of the reform. Since this dissertation focuses on a single case studies, with three sub-cases, this dissertation is lacking of the power to generalization. However, it allows an in-depth analysis of the case using a process-tracing method. To conduct a proper process-tracing, this dissertation engages in various types of sources such as official documents, meetings’ notes, transcripts of in-depth interviews, personal communications, reports from non-governmental organizations (NGOs), and secondary sources from newspapers’ reports. This dissertation concludes that the progress of the reform, in the case of Indonesia, varies according to the interests of the armed forces, and interaction between those interests and other variables such as the interests of civilian groups. It suggests that the organizational interests of the armed forces are the most influential variable to define the progress. Strong organizational interests would lead to a stall in the reform. The case of territorial command structure as well as, to a lesser degree, the second phase of the normative democratic control over the armed forces suggests this claim. In the absence of organizational interests, the existence of strong factional/personal interests would lead to problems in the advancement of the reform. The case of disbandment of military informal business activities supports this claim. Finally, the progress of the reform would be relatively smooth in the absence of those two interests and in the guidance of national interests