Tom Pepinsky

Category: Politics

  • Decentralization, Accountability, Food Security, and Papua

    Yesterday Cornell SEAP series welcomed a visiting scholar from the State University of Papua who presented on food insecurity in Papua on our weekly Brown Bag. The talk was grimly fascinating. Papua and West Papua, the two provinces at the eastern end of Indonesia which occupy Indonesia’s portion of New Guinea, has always been a (literal) outlier for Indonesian studies. The presentation showed clearly that amid abundant natural resources, relatively strong economic growth, nearly every district in these two provinces suffers from dangerously high rates of food insecurity.

    Food Insecurity in Indonesia (source: http://www.foodsecurityatlas.org)

    This is not starvation (although this does happen), but something more like systemic malnutrition or high variance in food availability. There was one image of four Papuan boys suffering from stunting which will stay with me for a long time.

    Since at least Bates 1981, we have known that famines and food insecurity have political rather than environmental or agricultural causes. Just so in Papua. I asked the presenter about how political decentralization in Indonesia has affected the ability of local governments in Papua and West Papua to adopt good developmental policies. I will not post her response here, but suffice it to say that it was not a positive one. Moreover, there was a sense in her remarks that district-level governments in Indonesia (the district being the tier of government most empowered by decentralization, as opposed to the village or province) really aren’t where the main problems lie. Local governments aren’t the one’s responsible for plans to clear huge swaths of land in Papua in order to plant rice for export to the rest of Indonesia, or non-food crops for the rest of the world. After all, Papuans traditionally do not eat rice (although this is changing) and rice does not really grow well there anyway (which is why Papuans traditionally do not eat it).

    All of this dovetails very well with a paper that I recently finished on accountability and Indonesian development in contemporary era. I’ll be presenting it in a workshop on oligarchy and accountability at the University of Sydney this December. I conclude the paper by writing that “We simply do not know enough about the relationship between local policymaking and national politics even to describe the interaction between institutional innovations, the national oligarchy, and informal political power in the regions.” Yesterday’s presentation on food insecurity in Papua tells me one thing: that’s where I ought to go to look.

  • The Sinosphere and Southeast Asia

    On Language Log, an interesting discussion about what the term “Sinosphere” means. Southeast Asia figures prominently here, of course, but not in a way which conveys any confidence that the contributors know anything at all about the region. For example, silly snippets like “I was Singapore there was widespread evidence of Chinese characters on store fronts (I presume it’s the same in the Philippines and Indonesia).” Right, good luck with that. I was recently in Freiburg and heard a lot of English (I presume it’s the same in Albania).

    But what really catches my attention is the comment attributed to Matt Anderson: “I refer to the Chinese and Indian areas of linguistic / cultural influence in Southeast Asia as the ‘Sinosphere’ and the ‘Indosphere’.” A bunch of related discussion follows.

    This view is common. It is of course true that the languages in the region took their syllabaries from Indic or Chinese origins, and that religions and state forms and things came through such channels too. But Sinosphere and Indosphere are commonly used to mean something much more than that. Among Western scholars, it reflects the belief that Southeast Asia is somehow a diminished or reduced thing, which can only be understood in relation to the Great Nations of China and India that have High Cultures and Important Traditions. Among Chinese and Indians, it reflects something of a global ambition for a modern sphere of influence which is somehow rooted in historical fact.

    Bah, I say. I will talk about Southeast Asia as part of the Sinosphere or the Indosphere as soon as we start talking about China and India as part of the Mongolsphere, and I am being absolutely serious.