Tom Pepinsky

Category: Politics

  • Law and Order and Drugs in Southeast Asia

    The Jokowi administration’s handling of drug offenses in Indonesia has taken a worrying turn in recent days. I am referring to a recent report about Jokowi, the police, and drug traffickers. As we all know and as Jokowi has repeatedly emphasized throughout his presidency, drugs are bad. But Jokowi is now discussing just what the appropriate legal framework ought to be for handling drug traffickers, including whether or not the police may shoot them on sight (a concept that appears in that article as “shot on site” [= tembak di tempat]).

    These developments may change my current conclusions about Jokowi’s approach to handling “social ills” such as drugs, conclusions which appear in a new essay on democracy and disorder in Southeast Asia. That essay argues that the Philippines’ new president Rodrigo “The Punisher” Duterte represents just the latest example of a new kind of politics in Southeast Asia that combines democratic legitimation with a focus on “order above the law.” In the Philippines, as in Indonesia and also Thailand, drug traffickers are a common target for extrajudicial killing and a great illustration of this concept of order above the law. The argument is that drugs are such a scourge on Filipino (or Thai, or Indonesian) society that police must take whatever actions necessary to contain them.

    In the current version of that essay, I note that unlike Duterte, former politicians like Thaksin Shinawatra, and aspiring national leaders like Prabowo Subianto, Jokowi does not undermine the rule of law in order to clamp down on perceived threats to social order (of which drug traffickers are just one example). However, the language that Jokowi uses is rather menacing; as Dave McRae recently tweeted,

    To be clear, Jokowi does continue to hold that the rule of law determines what police can and cannot do. But head of the National Narcotics Board Budi Waseso is quoted as saying that the police are not shy about using lethal force when drug criminals resist arrest. Even raising for discussion whether or not Indonesian law allows the police to shoot drug traffickers on sight is a worrying sign about the current administration’s commitment to the rule of law.

  • Bureaucrats, Services, Citizens

    Together with Jan Pierskalla and Audrey Sacks, I have recent completed a new review essay on bureaucracy and service delivery, a copy of which is available here. Here is the abstract:

    This essay reviews the literature on the politics of bureaucracy in the developing world, with a focus on service delivery and bureaucratic performance. We survey classic topics and themes such as the developmental state, principal-agent relations, and the efficient grease hypothesis, and link them to new research findings in political science, sociology, and economics. We identify the concept of embeddedness as an important yet still underexplored framework that cuts across disciplines and which may be used to understand bureaucratic performance and service delivery. Looking forward, we outline a framework for conceptualizing bureaucratic action by exploiting variation across time, space, task, and client, and identify promising areas for further research on the bureaucrat-citizen encounter in developing countries.

    In working through the literature here (and without speaking for my co-authors), the most striking conclusion for me is how little cumulative knowledge we have about how bureaucracies and frontline service providers affect the political lives of citizens outside of the advanced industrial economies. As we note, channelling Charles Goodsell from way back in 1981, “most politics is not electoral politics, and the vast majority of experiences that citizens have with the state are not electoral in nature. The face of politics for most citizens, instead, is a bureaucrat.” While reading the literature, I found myself hearkening back to our demoralizing experiences renewing our visas in the South Jakarta immigration office in December 2004. But even that experience is not a good parallel for public school teachers and frontline health workers as the “face of the state” for the average person.

    Given the growth of social protection, decentralized service delivery, and related programs in the global development agenda in recent years, political scientists have a lot to learn, and ought to have a lot to contribute.