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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
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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.