ABSTRACT
This article develops the idea of “dirty money states” by defining and exploring the problem of illicit state financing in Southeast Asia. Most diagnoses of Southeast Asia's flourishing illicit economies focus on the prevalence of corruption and the “decay” of the state, but the authors of this essay develop a more nuanced explanation by exploring how states cultivate and sustain themselves through illicit extraction. Drawing from emerging literature on states and criminality, as well as fiscal sociology, they develop a novel theoretical framing for the six country case studies that comprise this thematic issue. Each study – on Indonesia, Cambodia, Vietnam, Myanmar, East Timor, and the Philippines – examines empirically how illicit state financing works. Whether revenues derive from gold, timber, opium, aid agencies, or business interests, the authors identify consistent patterns in the nature and behavior of the state vis-à-vis illegally generated funds. These patterns encompass territorial dynamics and practices; the everyday social worlds of state actors and their entrepreneurial allies; and the paradoxical interplay between formal and informal realms. Ultimately the authors argue that illicit monies are fundamental to contemporary state building in the region, extending even to the delivery of public goods and services. These findings are potentially uncomfortable for scholars, governments and development practitioners, particularly because they challenge conventional ideas about how the strength and/or weakness of states might be understood in Southeast Asia. But they demand attention, since they are the product of an ambitious and unconventional research endeavor.
Acknowledgments
We thank the contributors to this special issue and the EuroSEAS 2013 panel on Illicit State Financing who very generously and bravely shared their ideas and research. We are indebted to Peter McCawley, Pierre Van Eng, Craig Reynolds, Ross McLeod, and Bill Adams for sharing their thoughts and expertise leading to the central ideas of this article. This article has improved significantly thanks to the contributions of Matt Allen, Rebecca Monson, Sango Mahanty, John McCarthy, Keith Barney, Timothy Sharp, and Vedi Hadiz who all gave a close reading to our work. Thanks also to Long Sarou for translation assistance.
Funding
We are deeply grateful to the John Monash Foundation who supported our scholarship from the beginning. Without the Foundation's unstinting support and enthusiasm, this collaboration would never have taken place. Thank you to Peter Binks for his boundless energy, commitment to scholarship and interest in our work. No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Notes on contributors
Jacqui Baker is a Lecturer in Southeast Asian Politics at the School of Management and Governance and a Fellow at the Asia Research Centre, Murdoch University. She has worked and researched in Indonesia for over fifteen years and is currently writing a monograph based on her doctoral dissertation entitled “The Rise of Polri: The Political Economy of Security in Democratizing Indonesia.” In 2014, “Eat Pray Mourn” her documentary on extrajudicial executions by the Indonesian police, made in collaboration with producer Dr. Siobhan McHugh and ABC Radio National, won a bronze medal at the New York Festivals Awards.
Sarah Milne has been working on forest conservation issues in Cambodia since 2002, as a practitioner and a scholar. Her 2009 doctoral dissertation examined the political ecology of transnational biodiversity conservation in the Cardamom Mountains, southwest Cambodia. She has recently completed an edited volume on related material entitled Conservation and Development in Cambodia: Exploring Frontiers of Change in Nature, State and Society, published in 2015 by Routledge.
Notes on contributors
Jacqui Baker is a Lecturer in Southeast Asian Politics at the School of Management and Governance and a Fellow at the Asia Research Centre, Murdoch University. She has worked and researched in Indonesia for over fifteen years and is currently writing a monograph based on her doctoral dissertation entitled “The Rise of Polri: The Political Economy of Security in Democratizing Indonesia.” In 2014, “Eat Pray Mourn” her documentary on extrajudicial executions by the Indonesian police, made in collaboration with producer Dr. Siobhan McHugh and ABC Radio National, won a bronze medal at the New York Festivals Awards.
Sarah Milne has been working on forest conservation issues in Cambodia since 2002, as a practitioner and a scholar. Her 2009 doctoral dissertation examined the political ecology of transnational biodiversity conservation in the Cardamom Mountains, southwest Cambodia. She has recently completed an edited volume on related material entitled Conservation and Development in Cambodia: Exploring Frontiers of Change in Nature, State and Society, published in 2015 by Routledge.
Notes
5For early thinking on this type of approach, see Winer and Roule Citation2003.
6Hereafter without quotation marks.
14Ibid., 70. All dollar figures from here on are in US dollars.
55Peter McCawley, personal communication, 4 April 2014.
65Although East Timor is sometimes characterized as “Melanesian,” Scambary emphasizes how twenty-four years of occupation by Indonesia has produced a modern state that is distinctly “Southeast Asian” in its relationship to illegality.
80See Milne Citation2015 on the expression “taxing the law.”
84Taussig Citation1992, 111–140. Abrams in Sharma and Gupta 2006, 112–130.
92Xanana Gusmão served as independent East Timor's prime minister from 2007 until his resignation in February 2015.
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