| This research project examines democracy and donors in Indonesia. It relies heavily on the regime transitions literature, and yet makes two departures from earlier literature. The first departure is to adopt a conceptualization of democracy that focuses neither on the formal institutional components nor on the behavioral aspects of a functioning democracy, but on the interaction between state institutions and the expression of societal interests. The second departure is to explain democratization in late democratizers by examining the international dimension rather than limiting the study to the domestic level. The global context, however, is not homogenous. Instead, it varies, and therefore different international factors have different effects on democratization. To capture this variation, this study disaggregates the global context into different donor strategies: the Dutch, Japanese and American donor strategies. They vary from one another in the degree to which nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) are incorporated into them. It then examines their respective impacts on state-society interaction in Indonesia in three episodes during Indonesia's economic and political crises in the late 1990s: the emergency structural adjustment and food assistance, technical assistance for the June parliamentary elections, and the East Timorese conflict. |
