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Security,
Democracy, and
Society in Bali
Trouble with
Protection
Edited by
a n dr e w va n de n be rg
n a z r i n a z u rya n i
Security, Democracy, and Society in Bali
Andrew Vandenberg · Nazrina Zuryani
Editors
Security, Democracy,
and Society in Bali
Trouble with Protection
Editors
Andrew Vandenberg Nazrina Zuryani
Faculty of Arts and Education Faculty of Social and Political Science
Deakin University Udayana University
Geelong, VIC, Australia Denpasar, Indonesia
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer
Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2021
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Foreword
v
vi FOREWORD
Different authors reflect on: the current security groups’ historical fore-
bears; the way their operations resemble ‘twilight policing’ by security
groups in other developing countries; the political sociology of oligarchy
and money politics; the discursive construction of citizenship and civil–
militia membership; the gendered politics of magico-realist protection of
the community; the groups’ relationship to orientalism about the ‘island
of the gods’; their standing in opinion polls and a democratic public
sphere; the way social media works within them and similar groups; the
peculiar phenomenon of their public relations campaigning; their relations
with the police and the regulation of criminality; their relationship to the
political parties’ claims to represent voters and the national interest; and
their relationship to illiberal politicians and populist tendencies in national
politics.
The research that went into these chapters derives in large part from
collaboration between researchers from Udayana University in Bali and
Deakin University in Australia. Permission to interview security group
leaders, prominent journalists, senior police, and party leaders came from
both the Faculty of Social and Political Science at Udayana and the
Deakin University Human Research Ethics Committee. Deakin funded
transcription of the interviews and Udayana provided the transcription
personnel. For chapters drafted in Indonesian, language students and
tutors at Deakin have translated them into English in collaboration with
the editors and the authors.
This is an unusual edited collection of chapters. The collection has
the usual mix of senior and junior researchers, and a problem orienta-
tion rather than a discipline orientation is not so unusual. However, the
collaboration between Indonesian and Australian researchers conducting
joint interviews is unusual for an edited collection. Initially, prison riots
between security-group inmates and a dramatic assassination in a small
village generated considerable apprehension about approaching leaders
of the security organisations. I understand the presence of an interna-
tional researcher in a group interview helped allay anxieties and the joint
process became very productive for all involved. I warmly recommend this
FOREWORD vii
ix
x CONTENTS
Glossary 333
Index 337
List of Contributors
xi
xii LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS
xiii
xiv LIST OF FIGURES
xv
CHAPTER 1
Andrew Vandenberg
A. Vandenberg (B)
Arts and Education, Deakin University, Geelong, VIC, Australia
e-mail: andrew.vandenberg@deakin.edu.au
around a string of gay and transgender bars. The Seminyak bars cater
to a small but lucrative niche in the Western tourist market that can
obviously attract trouble from all manner of homophobes or violent reli-
gious extremists. However, matters are less clear when it comes to the
big three security organisations—Laskar Bali, LB (“Soldiers of Bali”), Bali
Baladikan, BB (“Balinese Army”), and Pemuda Bali Bersatu, PBB (“Bali
Youth Union”).
These much larger groups garner community support through offering
“social services”, such as makeshift housing for internal migrant workers
from north and eastern Bali and around Indonesia, blood donation
centres, help with ceremony costs, help with the cost of their chil-
dren’s school clothes and books, and conducting searches of greater
Indonesia immigrant neighbourhoods to check for Bali residency permits.
For newcomers looking for work in the tourist areas, they offer a sense
of community—keluarga besar, literally a “big family”, according to
their motto—in the form of work contacts, associates, and friends (see
Erviantono Chapter 7). Obviously, this sense of community is a weak,
modern, and urban substitute for the strong community “at home”
among the extended family and childhood friends of village life, but it
is still valued. They also offer low-paid work for marginal members of
Balinese communities (Santikarma 2007). The big security organisations
do wield their power responsibly. A senior informant1 from one of the big
three organisations told us about authorities complaining that his organi-
sation had taken work as security guards for a newly opened prayer room
run by a militant Islamist. The informant accepted the criticism, ended the
contract, and saw to it that the other organisations would not do the work
either. Given the obvious risk to public safety and the Western tourist
industry, everyone agreed that the Muslims should look after themselves.
Without local guards, the prayer room could not attract adherents and
closed. On an island of three million residents, and presently almost six
million tourists annually, LB has around 40,000 members, BB around
30,000 and PBB around 10,000. A dozen or so smaller local security
organisations have between a couple of hundred and a few thousand
members. All up, these are small membership numbers compared to
the much bigger comparable groups in Java and Sumatra but they are
certainly much bigger than the political parties and large enough to be
significant actors in the community and in local politics.
The protection offered by the larger groups is not always obvious
or entirely genuine because they allegedly also run protection rackets
around their guards maintaining order in large bars, restaurants, and
dance clubs. In the same vein, it is said that the security organisations
take a cut from the gambling around cockfights, buffalo racing, and
card games (see Azhar Chapter 7). In another form of gangsterism,
they have allegedly threatened violence when they assist local property
owners in dispute with international investors (Bachelard 2014) and visit
news rooms in person to intimidate journalists reporting their activities
in ways they dislike. Further cause for concern is the extensive engage-
ment of the large security groups in politics. Particular security-group
leaders support particular politicians who give them bekking —from the
English “backing”—in the form of public-sector jobs, junkets, and secu-
rity contracts (Barker 2001: 52; Hadiz 2010: 141). In return, the groups
ensure big crowds at their campaign rallies, ensure people turn out to
vote for their backer, and allegedly harass voters supporting their backer’s
rivals (Lipson 2019). More controversially, several of their members and
some of their leaders have been convicted of smuggling and trafficking
street drugs. The groups’ leaders insist that only particular individuals
have committed crimes and their organisations on the whole are not
organised-crime gangs. Nonetheless, the leaders of LB and BB were
called into help their members among the prison guards and end rioting
between their young members (and former members) serving sentences
in the heavily over-crowded Kerobokan prison in 2012 and again in
2015–2016 (Harvey 2015; Topsfield and Rosa 2015). LB and BB are
alleged to control the trafficking of drugs in the prison but they have
fulfilled a promise to ensure no more rioting among the inmates because
bad media reports about violence in Bali harms the tourism industry.
4 A. VANDENBERG
2 Visitors to Bali will recognise Ngurah from the airport, which is named after the
independence war hero and Ksatria (warrior) caste leader I Gusti Ngurah Rai.
6 A. VANDENBERG
deploying violence against rivals and evil spirits (Geertz 1980: 131).
This emphasis upon interpretation rather than explanation and prediction
applauded analysing how states are embedded in a society and a culture
(Geertz 2004: 580). Aside from the change in epistemology, the quest
for modernity among the citizens of new states in old societies remained
an abiding interest in Geertz’s anthropology.
In American political science, another widely influential author, Joel
Migdal (2001) followed a comparable path from the modernisation theo-
ries of Talcott Parsons, Edward Shils, Gabriel Almond, David Eastman,
and Samuel Huntington through neo-Weberian arguments about the
relative autonomy of the state vis à vis the dominant social class (Evans
et al. 1985) to what he termed a state-in-society approach (Migdal 2001:
3–15). This approach understands domination and collective violence in
the classical Weberian sense of one actor causing another actor to do
something they otherwise would not do. It also notes that Weber’s formal
definition of the state was only ever meant to be an ideal type against
which to criticise actual states. Migdal argues for a focus on how state
and social structures interact, conflict, and constitute each other. There
is considerable overlap between Migdal’s approach and later versions
of the next school of thought but critics (Sidel 2004: 52–54) insist
that Migdal’s approach remains embedded in the modernisation school’s
founding assumptions about the primordiality of violence in old societies
with new states.
the war of independence (1945–1949) and the first fifteen years of the
Indonesian republic (1950–1965), a series of weak regimes struggled
to control guerrillas, local vigilantes, party youth wings, civil militia,
and finally death squads during the massacre of communists in 1965–
1966. Between 1967 and 1998, the stronger Suharto regime abolished
the communist and socialist parties’ youth wings, unions, and any other
groups allied with them, reined in the Muslim organisations of civil
society, and allowed some pro-regime civil militias to continue. The
Suharto regime was also strengthened by US military aid, oil revenue, and
the return of tourists. In the Asian financial crisis of 1996–1997, however,
that strength evaporated during a sudden decline in the value of the
currency, which saw the middle-class sympathise with student protestors
demanding Suharto’s resignation. The armed forces declined to clamp
down violently on the protestors and democratisation began to unfold.
In all of these episodes, the inverse correlation between the strength
of a regime and the strength of gangsterism held. In the twenty years
since Robinson’s (1988, 1998) work, reformasi has instituted a demo-
cratically legitimate and arguably stronger regime but at the same time
the decentralisation of administration offered local security organisations
many opportunities to work with local politicians. In recent decades, as
both the regime and the gangsters have garnered power it is not entirely
clear how weak or strong the post-reformasi regime is relative to how
strong or weak the gangsters are.
Henk Schulte Nordholt (1996, 2002, 2004, 2015) has also analysed
the history of collective violence in Indonesia and Bali in particular,
focussing on the material relations and social forces in which rela-
tively autonomous state apparatuses and security organisations have been
embedded, from the colonial era through to post-Suharto reformasi.
Nordholt (2007) has reflected on the way local elites, the local media,
and the security organisations have deployed cultural tropes around quazi
Hindu notions of virtue and Balinese uprightness, or ajeg, both to
defend the Balinese culture against globalisation and consumerism and
to sell the culture to ever increasing numbers of tourists flocking to their
resorts, hotels, restaurants, and so forth. This contradictory ambition is
well captured in an image of the island as an “open fortress”. There
is appealing subtlety in this illumination of the contradictions around
the ajeg Bali campaign, but the way it strengthens both the state and
gangsterism poses some doubt about a negative correlation between the
two.
1 THE TROUBLE WITH PROTECTION 9
act like states. As the gangsters move from local robbery and thuggery
to predatory racketeering and on to symbiotic integration with corrupt
police and money politics around political parties, they need to garner
the local community’s consent to their rule. In his work on the “street
politics” of gangs in Jakarta, Ian Wilson (2006, 2011, 2015) argues
that the local protection rackets have not only organised networks of
opportunity among the poor but also suppressed unions, radical groups,
and any challengers to their backers or their revenues, thus constituting
a “protection-racket regime” (Wilson 2015: 170). Similarly, Nordholt
(2015) argues that:
He goes on to make three points, which we can use to organise this review
of constructivist approaches to collective violence in Indonesia.
One, “the imagined order is deeply embedded in the material world”
(Harari 2011: 127). A pertinent example here is the nation. In his
well-known book, Imagined Communities, Benedict Anderson (1991)
notes that where liberals install statues commemorating particular civic
leaders and great individual men, nationalists build tombs to the unknown
soldier, who is no particular person but also any person who died fighting
for their country. In each country, everyone assumes that the unknown
soldier hails from their nation, whether that is French, British, German,
and so forth. From this starting point, Anderson argues that print capi-
talism was central to the construction of imagined nations among very
large numbers of people who never meet each other. Reading about
current affairs concerning the national government welded diverse local
dialects together around common concerns expressed in a common
language. In the Dutch East Indies, the decision by communist, socialist,
and nationalist opposition parties in the 1920s to use Malay as the
language of “Indonesia” fed into the way print capitalism would construct
the future nation state. Nationalism had a particularly powerful effect
upon young men, pemuda, in the 1940s during the Japanese occupa-
tion and the war of independence (Anderson 1972). It inspired violent
rebellion against the Japanese, extensive guerrilla warfare against the
Dutch when they returned, and the mass killing of communists in 1965–
1966 (Anderson 2001). In a later essay, Anderson (1990) argued that
as a constructed community the “nation” offered pertinent complica-
tions around the long-standing issues of old societies and new states in
a changing world order of nation states. Such complications could inter-
pret exactly how the Suharto regime attracted US aid, relied upon US
military support rather than a properly financed domestic army, bene-
fitted from OPEC oil revenue, encouraged multinational investment in
resources, and made itself stronger than the Sukarno regime or the
Japanese regime had ever been. Nationalism remains a powerful ratio-
nale for the deployment of violence by the military, aided by civil militias,
in areas of uprising against Indonesia (Aceh, Ambon, East Timor, West
Papua). As an imagined community, the nation certainly has powerful
effects and is embedded deep in reality.
Second, “the imagined order shapes our desires” (Harari 2011: 128).
Travelling abroad to experience the “real” Bali is a pertinent example. A
desire to travel arose in the 1700s among young English aristocrats going
12 A. VANDENBERG
and the Indonesian body politic. Many other authors look at comparable
constructions among security organisations in other parts of the world
(Diphoorn 2015, 2016; Lund 2006; Rodgers 2006; Tilly 2017 [2003]).
Focussing on the power of martial arts offers a clearer alternative to the
debates about the state and society, modernisation and political economy.
Constructions of the nation and of the state have powerful effects on
regimes and citizens (Vandenberg 2000, 2009; see Hatherell Chapter 12),
but pencak silat more obviously embodies discipline in individuals, organ-
isations, and the body politic (see Erviantono Chapter 8). Adherents
learn about the mystical prowess of ancient masters at the same time as
they attend gyms and regularly practice techniques to compete in the
modern, international sport. Many soldiers and police attend the pencak
silat gyms and since 2004, Prabowo Subianto has been the president
of the Indonesian Pencak Silat Association, which develops athletes and
organises local, national, and international competitions. Wilson reports
that many pencak silat adherents and former special forces soldiers work
for Prabowo, who resembles a charismatic jago at the head of his own
personal militia. Prabowo’s political history shows how the discipline of
pencak silat shapes the body politic. As a Major General in the Armed
Forces he was intimately involved and allegedly responsible for human
rights abuses in both East Timor and West Papua and allegedly involved
in provoking violence during the student protests that led to the resig-
nation of Suharto in May 1998. His rival, General Wiranto who was the
Minister of Defence, refused to order troops to restore law and order and
Prabowo was dishonourably discharged from the army for misinterpreting
orders. He has since run unsuccessfully for direct election as president
twice in 2014 and 2019, and at the end of 2019 the re-elected President
Jokowi appointed him Minister of Defence. In most countries a history
of alleged crimes against humanity and dishonourable discharge from the
army would not lead to appointment as Minister of Defence. Clearly,
Prabowo’s deep popularity among his followers inspired his presidential
campaigns and remains a political asset.
In Bali, we met adherents of pencak silat in both the three largest secu-
rity organisations and in the small local groups. These groups generally
embody an assertive, patriarchal masculinity, especially among the well-
built leaders in tight t-shirts on the publicity billboards during 2015 (see
Pascarini Chapter 3) but pencak silat also embodies a transgressive femi-
ninity in the transgender leader of a group in the north of the island.
1 THE TROUBLE WITH PROTECTION 15
Her father was a pencak silat instructor and she had been teenage cham-
pion fighter herself, so she is fully capable of standing up for herself and
her community’s rights (see Zuryani and Erviantono Chapter 10). The
various security organisations also had extensive contacts with popular
campaigns against the extensive development around Benoa Bay (see
Suwana Chapter 11). Let us now wrap up this review of schools of
thought about security organisations in Bali, Indonesia, and around the
world with some reflections on what to call them.