Postgraduate Lunchtime Seminar: Glory be to the Catholics: Minority Overrepresentation and Disproportionate Influence in Suharto’s Indonesia

During the first two decades of Suharto’s New Order, a network of political operatives belonging to the Catholic minority achieved sustained overrepresentation in key positions and wielded disproportionate influence in policymaking.

These successes, it is argued, were the result of a path-dependent process consisting of three sequences.

Firstly, the removal of hostile rivals by Suharto’s regime created opportunities for the Catholic network to join the ruling coalition. This paved the way for the intensification of elite-minority cooperation. During this second sequence, Suharto’s close assistants and Catholic operatives worked together to tackle urgent problems faced by the regime. In 1971, their collaboration led to the third sequence, the institution of elite-minority partnerships.

With the refashioning of Golkar into the regime’s political party and the establishment of CSIS, a positive feedback mechanism was “locked in”, allowing the Catholic network to secure sustained overrepresentation and disproportionate influence.

Their success peaked with the appointment of General Murdani as Commander of the Armed Forces between 1983 and 1988.

In this presentation, speaker Angga Indraswara sheds light on the mechanisms through which religious minorities can achieve degrees of success in ways that seem to defy their numerical inferiority.

This seminar was chaired by Dr Ken M.P. Setiawan, Senior Lecturer in Indonesian Studies and Convenor of the Indonesian Studies Program at the Asia Institute, The University of Melbourne.

• Event details

  Date: Wednesday, 20 March, 2024

  Time: 11:30-12:30 AEDT

  Venue: Room 321, Floor 3, Sidney Myer Asia Centre

About the author

Angga Indraswara is a PhD Candidate in the Department of Government at the London School of Economics and Political Science. He holds an MRes in Political Science and an MSc in Comparative Politics from the LSE, an MA in Theology from Sanata Dharma University, and a BA (Hons) from the University of Melbourne. He works in the field of comparative politics, with a focus on the intersection between religion and politics.

In his ongoing PhD research, he investigates the temporal and denominational variations in the political representation and influence of Catholic and Protestant minorities in Indonesia from 1965 until the present.