Fractured futures: Indonesian political reform and West Timorese manganese mining

OpenAlex İngilizce

This paper examines Indonesia's democratic state capacity-building in terms of transformations in West Timor, particularly around manganese mining. It is structured on the basis of three complementary sets of arguments. Firstly, democratic capacity-building is essentially a power-driven process as it seeks to re-arrange the way in which power is distributed. This process is shaped by the relative capabilities of a variety of societal interests struggling to dominate the control of state power at multiple sites of a highly competitive ‘field of power’. Secondly, Indonesia's democratic decentralisation experience has produced uneven results, both between and within provinces. This is largely because the dynamic of the reform process is determined by the relative capabilities of competing social forces to engage in the political landscape and influence revenue generation and resource management policies. Thirdly, manganese mining, which has recently emerged as a quick method of revenue generation in resource-poor West Timor, provides an important case study that reflects the structural dynamics of state (in)capacity.