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Unfinished Business:
Reform of the Security Sector in Democratic Indonesia
Author: Donald Greenlees
Volume 7, Number 3 (Spring 2011), pp. 2-22.
Abstract
Conservative members of Indonesia’s military establishment are breaking a self-imposed silence to critique the country’s thirteen-year-old democracy and call for a restitution of a direct military role in the machinery of government. It underscores two realities of present Indonesian politics more than a decade into the new democratic era: the fragility of the political system and the failure to complete the goal of security sector reform to assert civilian prerogatives. The unfinished agenda is substantial, and the political opportunity exists to push it through if executive government, the legislature and civil society have the will. Such an agenda could include further institutional reform of the military and police, stronger parliamentary and legal oversight of the security services and a resolution of the political status of Papua. Yet with presidential and parliamentary elections looming in 2014, there are doubts Indonesian leaders are willing to finish the reform task.
About the Author
Donald Greenlees is a PhD candidate at the Strategic and Defence Studies Centre, Australian National University, focusing on Indonesian strategic and foreign policy. He has worked for the past 15 years in Asia as a staff correspondent for publications including The International Herald Tribune, The New York Times, The Far Eastern Economic Review, The Wall Street Journal and The Australian. donald.greenlees@anu.edu.au.
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