How critical can critical be? Contesting security in Indonesia

ABSTRACT

This paper examines discourses and practices of security in Indonesia. It does so in order to explore tensions between ethnographically generated accounts of security spaces and the broader security focus of international relations scholars. Looking at securitisation theory in relation to Indonesian security dynamics, it suggests that a model of security contestation better explains the ways in which political communities are constituted through the politicisation of security in Indonesia. The paper argues that there is a need to engage with and understand complex security dynamics on their own terms. It outlines a possible approach to achieving this aim by aggregating the reflexive inclinations of both the practice of ethnography in anthropology and critical security approaches to securitisation in international relations. It then shows how this approach can be utilised to engage critically with processes of contestation implicit to Indonesian security dynamics. In conclusion, it proposes ethnographic engagement as the basis for political critique central to securitisation as an interventionist project.

KEYWORDS:

• Security
• Securitisation
• Anthropology of Security
• Security Studies
• Indonesia
• civilmilitia

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Anthropologists have increasingly ventured into the study for security precisely because of its contemporary salience in the lives of people globally (Goldstein 2010). While this has led some to suggest that the study of security in anthropology constitutes an emergent subfield in its own right (Diphoorn and Grassiani 2015), others have proposed that while not explicitly stated, anthropology has in some sense always been concerned with the study of (in)security (Pedersen and Holbraad 2013, 4). I am less concerned with the provenance of fields of study, and more concerned with facilitating the interaction and flow of ideas about security, and the ways in which it is conceptualised and enacted, across disciplinary boundaries and domains of knowledge.

2. This definition draws on McDonald (2012, 10–26) and is elsewhere explored in relation to security in Bali (McDonald and Wilson 2017).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Nederlandse Organisatie voor Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek [Grant Number: 463-08-003] and University of Queensland [postdoctoral fellowship award].

Notes on contributors

Lee Wilson

Lee Wilson is a lecturer at the Global Change Institute at the University ofQueensland. His research interests include security and conflict in Indonesia and the Pacific.He is the author of Martial Arts and the Body Politic in Indonesia (Brill 2015), and co-editedSoutheast Asian Perspectives on Power (Routledge 2012) with Liana Chua, Joanna Cook,Nicholas Long.