Geography Archives: Indonesia

With the passing of the anti-worker Omnibus Law, President Jokowi’s administration follows the path of Indonesia’s dark past.

A major protest movement is underway in Indonesia against the neoliberal, authoritarian-populist regime of Joko Widodo and his collaborators in the House of Representatives. Frans Ari Prasetyo explains the so-called ‘Omnibus Law’ that sparked the protest, and reports on the clashes now unfolding in Bandung and many other cities.

Indonesia’s trade unions and social movements are taking to the streets against anti-worker legislation.

An alliance of trade unions, environmental groups and students’ movements have launched an indefinite protest across against the sweeping changes to labor and environmental laws.

Hundreds of thousands of workers and students in Indonesia have taken to the streets in a powerful wave of strikes and demonstrations opposing the enactment of a new set of laws that would dramatically weaken the rights of the working class and environmental protections.

Cities across the world are facing a double-barreled existential problem: how to adapt to climate change and how to pay for it.

While the stark reality of the global climate emergency struck home in Australia with its worst bushfire season, its neighbour Indonesia faced catastrophic floods and islands disappearing below the rising sea. Green Left’s Peter Boyle interviewed Yuyun Harmono, the climate change campaigner of Friends of the Earth Indonesia (Wahana Lingkungan Hidup Indonesia – WAHLI).

Attorney General Muhammad Prasetyo is proposing that massive raids be carried out to hunt down books which contain communist teachings and banned ideologies. The proposal was made after the seizure of hundreds of books around the country allegedly containing “banned ideas”. — Taufiq Siddiq, Jakarta “I’m proposing that if possible, yes massive raids be carried […]

It stinks, it is the most polluted city on earth, but that is not the most terrible thing about it.

As Indonesia commemorates 20 years since the fall of the New Order military dictatorship, the foundation myth of the regime (and, indeed, the post-New Order state as well) remains stubbornly in place.

In this in-depth interview conducted in Dakar, Samir Amin speaks on a wide range of topics: globalisation; generalised monopoly capital; the alarming growth of inequality; the role of the state in the neoliberal era; globalisation and delinking; capitalism and modernity; the return of fascism in the contemporary capitalist world, and more.

“Standing by,” however, is not what the United States did during the Indonesian genocide of 1965–66; rather, it actively supported the massacres, which were applauded at the time by the New York Times.

Since March 13, 2017, over 50 local indigenous peasants known as Sedulur Kendeng, from Central Java, Indonesia, have been sitting with their feet in cement boxes in protest before the Presidential Palace. This is their second such protest in eleven months.

The accelerating rate of land and resource dispossession in post-authoritarian Indonesia has led to a number of confrontations between state and corporate authorities on one side and peasant communities on the other. Many of these conflicts, though garnering much attention from sympathetic activists, remain localised. However, there are moments when peasants and their activist allies decide to scale up their direct action.

Today’s post discusses the way that neoliberal policies embraced by the Democratic Party resulted in job loss in key states.  Bear with me: there are facts and figures here that make the case.  Tomorrow, I will continue to discuss these issues in the context of “domestic” job displacement.  The third post will discuss a progressive […]

In one hurrying day, eighty years ago, in Albacete, a center of Spain’s La Mancha region, a few officers somehow created quarters for five hundred men arriving the following day, then five hundred more, and more.  Soon three or four thousand, somehow organized in units despite a mad variety of languages, were issued a motley […]

Gerald Horne.  The Counter-Revolution of 1776: Slave Resistance and the Origins of the United States of America.  NYU Press, 2014. In the conventional, celebratory liberal historical narrative about the Founding Fathers, the post-revolutionary persistence of slavery in the United States, along with women’s lack of essential political and legal rights, has long been regarded as […]

If you have ever read Edgar Allen Poe‘s gruesome stories you may recall feelings of horror like those which made me, still a youngster, cringe and shudder.  I have similar feelings when I hear of bloodthirsty, barely-hidden “concerts” by German Neo-Nazis, which too often lead to violence against subjects of their hatred: hippy-type leftist youngsters […]

Two famous heads got lost in Berlin.  Neither loss, I hasten to add, was connected with brutality.  From the past or near future, they caused melancholy or rejoicing, depending on your viewpoint. One loss really occurred twenty-two years ago, when the 62-foot red granite statue of Lenin on East Berlin’s Lenin Square and Lenin Allee […]

Consumers are ultimately the ones responsible for dangerous conditions in garment assembly plants in the Global South, Hong Kong-based business executive Bruce Rockowitz told the New York Times recently.  The problem is that improved safety would raise the price of clothing, according to Rockowitz, who heads Li & Fung Limited, a sourcing company that hooks […]