Indonesia

Indonesian Foreign Minister Retno Marsudi highlighted the importance of developing what she called “strategic trust” in Australia-Indonesia relations, just ahead of the visit to Canberra this week by President Joko Widodo (“Jokowi”). Retno declared a more trusting Australia-Indonesia

On 10 February, Indonesian President Joko Widodo (“Jokowi”) will address Australia’s parliament. Indonesia is often referred to as the democratic success story of Southeast Asia and a model of Muslim democracy, yet it has been responsible for significant backsliding on human rights in recent

Indonesia’s booming economy has been growing between 5% and 6% for years and its GDP (PPP) is well ahead of Australia’s. A G20 member, it is proud of its new status as an emerging middle-class country, with PricewaterhouseCoopers predicting it will be among the world’s top five economies by

Sadly, for both Australia and Indonesia the New Year has wrought death and destruction with the worst flooding in Jakarta in a decade and an Australian bushfire crisis unprecedented in its scale and intensity. Given such calamities, regional maritime disputes are not at the forefront of most minds

After winning a second and final term, Indonesian President Joko Widodo announced, “I have no burden now. I’m not thinking about next elections… so I will do whatever it takes for the country’s sake.” Just a month later, Jokowi, as Widodo is known, declared that Indonesia’s capital city

Indonesian President Joko “Jokowi” Widodo this week announced his new cabinet – most notably appointing his rival at both the 2014 and 2019 elections and former military general Prabowo Subianto as Defence Minister. This is despite the fact that Prabowo has been implicated in human rights

The stabbing attack last Thursday by an ISIS supporter on Wiranto, Indonesia’s top security minister, was a shock for several reasons. Attacks on senior officials in Indonesia are very rare, though terrorist attacks on police are common. Protection proved to be disturbingly lax – the stabber got

Book review: Common enemies: crime, policy and politics in Australia–Indonesia relations, by Michael McKenzie (Oxford University Press, 2018) Next month marks the 17th anniversary of the Bali Bombing, which on 12 October 2002 claimed the lives of 202 people and injured 209 others. The attack

Bacharuddin Jusuf “BJ” Habibie, third president of the Republic of Indonesia, passed away on 11 September in Jakarta. After serving as vice president under Suharto, Habibie succeeded him when political and economic crisis forced the president of three decades to resign in May 1998. Although it

A rare image on social media of Indonesian paratroopers dropping into the troubled West Papua province this month was a stark reminder that, even in the age of 24/7 news, governments are good at keeping the cameras, and the world’s attention, away from persecuted communities. West Papua – the

Terrorist attacks inevitably generate frenetic global media coverage, with pundits examining motives, ascertaining network links, and theorising new developments or political repercussions. Numbers of deceased and injured are central to initial reports, but eventually victims are reduced largely to

It has been a rough few months for Indonesia’s already beleaguered legal system: two cases, alike yet different, highlighting how minority groups continue to be disenfranchised across the archipelago nation.  In May, Meliana, a Chinese-Indonesian Buddhist was released on parole, having

It has been an unusually intense time for elections across Southeast Asia in the past year with both a stunning upset and more predictable returns of incumbents. But the striking thing from a quick tour of some of the main battlefields is how the general absence of clear policy reform debate in

When I was a correspondent for the Financial Times in Jakarta, I often commiserated with my Australian media peers. While they worked hard to carve out time to shed light on the complexities, depth and wonder of Indonesia, they would inevitably be sucked into covering the latest high-pitched row

The re-election of India’s Narendra Modi and Indonesia’s Joko “Jokowi” Widodo saw India-Indonesia relations take another step forward after both leaders congratulated each other on social media. The results put both leaders in a strong position to advance a comprehensive strategic

Opposition foreign affairs spokeswoman Penny Wong’s efforts to set out a vision for Australia’s foreign policy on Asia, embodied in Labor’s “FutureAsia” plans, are admirable. The specific focus of fostering knowledge of and engagement with Southeast Asia is welcome. A key part of

Indonesia’s national leaders and politicians have mostly paid more attention to domestic issues for the country’s upcoming general elections compared to regional and global challenges. Yet after the voters cast their ballots on Wednesday, whomever is elected president, vice president and the

In January, during Indonesia’s first presidential debate in the lead up to the Indonesian election next week on 17 April, Indonesian president, Joko “Jokowi” Widodo proclaimed that he and his running mate, Ma’ruf Amin “do not have a track record of human rights violations.” Jokowi’s

How do you organise free and fair elections in a sprawling developing country beset by political corruption, bureaucratic incompetence and organisational inefficiency? For Indonesia – and its 193 million voters – the answer lies in the vast number of polling stations, the use of a metal nail (

A murderous terrorist attack by an Australian white supremacist on two mosques in New Zealand does not, at first sight, look like a bilateral issue for Jakarta and Canberra. But Retno Marsudi, Indonesia’s Foreign Minister, called in Gary Quinlan, the Australian ambassador in Jakarta, on Monday

At the very time Indonesian women are lauded for their campaign skills (look at Eva Bande and the Kendeng farmers, who just won the Yap Thiem Hien Award for organising protests to protect the environment), it remains a lamentable shame that the role women in Indonesian politics doesn’t show any

Indonesia, for a country of 260 million people covering a vast archipelago, is often remarked to have a small global profile. This wasn’t always the case. In the early years after gaining independence, for example, Indonesia’s Sukarno was a leader of the non-aligned movement during the Cold War

The Philippine government’s premature declaration that Indonesians were the perpetrators of the Jolo cathedral bombing has set back the prospects for regional cooperation on terrorism and reinforced a perception among Indonesian counterparts of the Philippines as an unreliable and unprofessional

After Jim Yong Kim resigned last month, President Donald Trump indicated he intends to nominate senior US Treasury official David Malpass to lead the World Bank. Under an unofficial agreement, the World Bank President always comes from the United States. Although the multilateral development