Tom Pepinsky

Category: Research

  • Historical Legacies or Comparable Incentives?

    It’s common to note that history matters for understanding contemporary politics. But does it? Here’s an interesting problem in the context of regional autonomy in Indonesia that raises some questions about whether history matters and how we would know if it did.

    Regional autonomy is a big issue in Indonesia: in a phenomenally diverse country with a volatile and violent political history, it’s reasonable to worry that too much autonomy to particular regions might prompt secessionism (or at least intensify center-periphery tensions). Indeed, today Indonesia is a unitary state, with constant worries about the potentially fissiparous consequences of excessive regionalism. But Indonesia has also undertaken a massive decentralization exercise in the past 15 years. How does that work?

    The answer is that it has decentralized most policymaking authority “two levels down,” to the district level rather than to the provincial level. Smart, no? Districts are too small to mount secessionist claims, but if they have most of the devolved powers under decentralization, then local politicians’ incentives will dominate those of provincial politicians, keeping any potential regional movements divided across multiple jurisdictions. At least, that’s the idea.

    Now when go back into independent Indonesia’s political history, you can find some discussion about whether provincial autonomy was a good idea for Indonesia. In fact, Indonesia’s post-1949 constitution did contain provisions for provincial autonomy, and these were progressively rolled back by Sukarno and then Soeharto. And one alternative account of the reasons why this was done is that there was no historical precedent in the pre-colonial polities of what is today Indonesia for anything like provincial autonomy. Here’s a quote by Gabriele Ferrazzi in the colorfully-titled essay “Using the “F” Word: Federalism in Indonesia’s Decentralization Discourse.”

    One argument in the public arena justified the abolition of provincial autonomy by reference to history, holding that provinces were created by the Dutch, with no real roots in Indonesian tradition; the Mataram and Majapahit kingdoms only recognized district (kabupaten) and village (desa) autonomy

    Mataram and Majapahit are two great Java-centered empires, and the latter covered much of what is today Indonesia. Majapahit serves at times as the pre-colonial “justification” for why Indonesia is a coherent nation. The reasoning goes that if they didn’t have provincial autonomy, then there’s no history of provincial autonomy upon which contemporary Indonesia can draw. It’s not Indonesian to have provincial autonomy.

    Now this argument, as Ferrazzi notes, was clearly for public consumption, but it does get us to the heart of the matter of how history matters and the difference between historical legacies and comparable incentives. Why didn’t Majapahit recognize provincial autonomy? Because it—like Indonesia—was worried about empowering its regions. Even though neither Mataram nor Majapahit were states in the Westphalian or Weberian sense, Majapahit especially faced the same general problem of ruing over a sprawling archipelago that Indonesia faces today.

    So it could be that it’s true that Indonesia avoids provincial autonomy because there is no historical legacy of provincial autonomy. Or it could be that Indonesia avoids provincial autonomy because provincial autonomy is threatening, and that’s the same reason that Majapahit avoided provincial autonomy. One is an argument for historical state forms determining contemporary policies, and the other is an argument that historical and contemporary state forms face the same structural problems, and any historical connection is just epiphenomenal on those common incentives.

  • A Tale of Two Disciplines

    Hypothetical Disciplines

    Think of a venerable academic discipline which focuses on the study of people. Scholars working within that discipline study individuals, societies, movements, nations, international forces, past and present. The discipline does not have a dominant methodological orientation or epistemological foundation. Some working within the discipline produce work that is primarily descriptive, others focus on theory, and still others on normative argument. This discipline is diverse. It is also big: its professional association in the United States boasts 15,000 members, and has a big annual meeting in which thousands of people try to network and feel professional. Truth be told, it feels like something of a fiction to believe that all of these people have something in common.

    The other thing that you need to know about this discipline is that it came into being in its modern form through the study of Western societies. As a result, the concerns of Western societies have long shaped its conventions, practices, and strucures. The U.S., and to a somewhat lesser extent Western Europe, have always dominated its main journals. A common critique is that scholars adopt a Euro-centric or US-centric perspective on all questions of global import. Its “international studies” sub-field is really “U.S. and European foreign concerns, viewed through American or European conceptual lenses, and reifying U.S. and European stereotypes, even when it tries to be critical.”

    Indeed, it used to be that everyone had to learn multiple languages during graduate study in that discipline, but those languages were normally German and French, to read the academic literature produced in those countries. Now you can be a perfectly serviceable scholar at a top department knowing only English, and focusing on the United States or its affairs abroad.

    Undergrads have always found this discipline to be a nice major for law school.

    A Place for Southeast Asia

    Now given all of this, where is the space for Southeast Asian studies? The structural biases are pretty big: it is far from the North Atlantic core, the languages are non-Indo-European and rarely taught, student demand is low, the jobs are few (and tend to be clustered at big research universities, which are a small portion of all jobs). Geopolitically it was once important, but that just encouraged the “U.S. diplomatic affairs”-type of scholarship described above. Disciplinary training is weak within these countries as well. Southeast Asian studies within the discipline is bound to be small relative to the rest of the discipline. How could it be any other way?

    Let’s go ahead and give our hypothetical discipline two actual names: political science and history. See what I did there? We have a lot more in common than we thought.

    However, several conversations with historians over the past week have convinced me that the state of Southeast Asian studies within each discipline has diverged dramatically, and in ways that few would have expected 20 years ago. Here is a great example of the method of difference: under broadly similar institutional configurations and structural constraints, Southeast Asian studies is working out very differently in two disciplines.

    In political science, Southeast Asia is thriving. I’ve written about this before, so I might seem like a broken record. Still, it’s an amazing state of affairs, with more good news every day. Just last week, Meredith Weiss and Allen Hicken announced that they had secured recognition for a Southeast Asian politics “section” within APSA. This is at least a little costly on APSA’s part: we get our own panel in our annual meeting. There is more good news to come soon from SEAREG (watch this space!).

    In history, well, just read Kevin Fogg‘s description of Southeast Asia’s place at the American Historical Association. Kevin’s post intrigued me, and I’ve had a couple of email and facebook conversations with historians working on Southeast Asia as well as outside of Southeast Asia. Abstracting away from personal concerns to hit general themes, I’ve heard versions of the following:

    1. (From non-SE Asianists) To be frank, we don’t care about Southeast Asia. That’s not what AHA is for.
    2. (From SE Asianists) History is too broad a discipline. There’s no “center” for what historians do, at least not one represented at AHA.
    3. (From SE Asianists) Why would I care to go to AHA? It’s a big anonymous conference full of people who can’t give me good comments on my work because they don’t know anything about what I study.
    4. (From both) Southeast Asia does not exist, not really, so of course it shouldn’t be well-represented at AHA.
    5. (From both) Southeast Asia occupies too marginal a position within the discipline of history to warrant attention.

    What I am unable to convey to my correspondents, though, is that all of these problems describe the place of Southeast Asia in political science too! The difference seems to be that political scientists who work on Southeast Asia have demanded recognition from the discipline, and just as importantly, refused to believe either that Southeast Asia is irrelevant to others or that others are irrelevant to us. One illustration is that the vast majority of SEA-related papers at APSA are part of broader comparative panels that are motivated by thematic issues that cross regional borders. It will actually be a bit weird to have a SE Asia panel at the next APSA.

    Kevin’s post seems to be echoing a similar perspective, that it is bad news for both SE Asia and the discipline of history that SE Asia isn’t better represented. Perhaps an implication of the political science experience, then, is that SE Asian history will occupy a more central position in the discipline of history just as soon as historians of SE Asia demand that it take such a position. I’d like to see that.