When the non-governmental organization Jakarta Legal Aid sought a legal avenue to confront the Indonesian state over its use of summary eviction as a tool of urban planning, it focused on a Cold War‑era law, Law 51/1960. Commonly used to justify evictions of settlements for urban infrastructure and real-estate development, the law asserts the state’s right to summarily evict and criminally prosecute those who occupy land without the owner’s consent. In a 2016–2017 case before the Constitutional Court, Jakarta Legal Aid argued that this law, drafted in support of military counter-insurgency efforts, was not relevant to the current context of Indonesia (Constitutional Court of the Republic of Indonesia 2017). It was, they argued, rendered almost instantly redundant by the Basic Agrarian Law of 1960, passed the same year, which provided legal recognition for non-title-based customary land claims that were frequently the subject of eviction pushes (Fitzpatrick 2007; Reerink 2011). It was only following the rise of President Suharto’s authoritarian New Order regime in 1965 that the state began to use Law 51/1960 as a tool to achieve massive land acquisition for real-estate and infrastructure megaprojects, a process of dispossession that led to severe inequities in land and property ownership (Shatkin and Soemarwi 2020). In sum, Jakarta Legal Aid sought in this court case to draw a link between contemporary urban dispossession and a Cold War struggle for the very soul of the Indonesian state, between an early postcolonial vision of a society rooted in equity, rights, democracy, and the elevation of communal mechanisms of governance, and the state’s subsequent embrace of authoritarianism, imperious bureaucratic prerogative, and the threat of violence to realize state objectives. [1]
This essay argues that scholars theorizing Southeast Asia’s urban transition can learn much from urban movement organizations like Jakarta Legal Aid. Indeed, it argues that if urban theory is to meaningfully impact urban praxis, then it must be in dialogue with emergent movements for urban political change. In societies that have endured the Cold War imposition of authoritarian rule, urban movements often focus on legacies of authoritarianism, paternalism, oligarchy, and state violence and disregard of the rule of law, rather than on the contemporary power of global corporate and international rule regimes that occupy much of the attention of urban scholars outside the region. Invoking early postcolonial projects of popular agency and national sovereignty that were interrupted by authoritarian imposition, movements have often sought to revive suppressed historical visions of more democratic, equitable, and inclusive social orders (Ileto 1993; Missingham 2003; Lee 2016).
The court case launched by Jakarta Legal Aid, for example, was built on decades of anti-eviction and land rights organizing by Ciliwung Merdeka, which was founded by an anti-authoritarian activist, and the Urban Poor Consortium, which has been organizing communities of the urban poor since the late New Order period of President Suharto. Both organizations center a critique of the legacies of authoritarianism, oligarchy, and clientelism, and seek to model community self-governance and democracy in their organizing (Padawandi and Douglass 2015; Savirani and Aspinall 2017). To cite another example, the Red Shirt protesters who occupied portions of central Bangkok in 2010 focused much of their critique of Thai politics and society on the nexus between the monarchy and the military, which had emerged as the central fulcrum of political power from the 1950s to the 1970s under a series of military authoritarian rulers who parlayed Cold War anti-communist anxieties into economic and geopolitical support from the United States. The symbolism of their movement—their choice to build their encampment adjacent to swank malls and hotels located on land owned by the royal-controlled Crown Property Bureau, and their denigration of royal-sponsored state ideologies that they argued devalued the rural and urban working classes—implicitly critiqued the Cold War legacies encoded in Bangkok’s spatial hierarchies (Unaldi 2016; Sopranzetti 2018).
A focus on the Cold War represents a shift from much recent scholarship on Southeast Asian urbanization, which has centered the period of intensified globalization from the 1980s on, when an influx in foreign direct investment and speculative financial capital led to a spike in land values in the capitalist societies of the region (Douglass 2000). Such scholarship has focused on the political economy of land development, and the sociospatial implications of the formation of elite enclaves, that emerged as state actors and their developer allies sought to capitalize on the opportunities for windfall profits from land monetization through real-estate and infrastructure development. I have referred to this in previous work as the “real-estate turn” in urban politics in the region, tracing its beginning to the late 1980s (Shatkin 2017). I argue here that if we want to understand the particular ways that the real-estate turn unfolded in Southeast Asia—often through the imperious use of land law, and bureaucratic coercion to realize state-sponsored land grabs on behalf of political cronies and ruling elites—we need to understand the path dependencies in institutional behavior, ideology, and structures of power that took form during Southeast Asia’s “hot Cold War.” It was this period that saw the rise of military-backed authoritarian regimes across the region, in each case instigated in no small part by US military and intelligence interventions and material support in favor of aspiring autocrats.
Particularly from 1965 to 1975, when the US was engaged in its war in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia, Southeast Asia witnessed extremes of state violence (again, often actively supported by the US military and intelligence agencies) that transformed societies and served to radically repress independent political forces. The massacre of approximately a million alleged communists in Indonesia in 1965–1966 was the most egregious example, but instances of state-sponsored terror occurred elsewhere in the region as well (Heryanto 2006; Haberkorn 2013). Most notably in Indonesia, the Philippines, and Thailand, military-backed governments aligned closely with economic elites deployed violence and repression in the name of anti-communism as a guise for the imposition of regimes that subsequently sought to enact new agendas of capital accumulation through integration into the US-led global order. While initially focused on capital accumulation through resource extraction and the production of agricultural commodities, these regimes were to turn their attention to urban land-based accumulation in the late 1980s. The legacies of these Cold War regimes were to shape the political economy of the “real-estate turn” in three main ways.
First, this period saw the formation and consolidation of regimes of what Chaloermtiarana (2007) has referred to in the Thai case as “despotic paternalism.” Such regimes—Suharto’s New Order regime, Marcos’s Bagong Lipunan or New Society regime, and the regime centered on the military–royal family nexus in Thailand—were marked by aspirations to patrimonial and absolute rule, the formation of a powerful military–state–elite nexus, and the espousal of conservative ideologies that sought to forestall any social change that might upset steeply hierarchical structures of power. Each of these regimes consolidated their political dominance through the centralization of planning within state bureaucracies that often subverted or disregarded any legal constraints on state action. They further sought to dominate the production and circulation of knowledge about the economy, society, politics, and the urban, through state-sponsored research, state control of higher education, and censorship and repression of ideas that too directly confronted state ideologies (Hadiz and Dhakidae 2005; Winichakul 2020).
During the 1960s and 1970s, US intervention played a significant role in the formation of state ideologies of development, as assistance in training state bureaucrats and academics, the formulation and implementation of development plans, and support for counter-insurgency propaganda were deployed to mold state strategies to US ideals of nationalism, anti-communism, and allegiance to the US-led global order (Glassman 2004; Cumings 2014). This ideology of bureaucratic prerogative rooted in the state’s presumption of a monopoly on the definition of social progress retains considerable power to date, passed down through path dependencies in bureaucratic interest, as well as the continued (though increasingly contested) sublimation of law and the courts to state interests.
Second, the authoritarian regimes that emerged during the Cold War have left Indonesia, the Philippines, and Thailand with legacies of oligarchic politics. Authoritarian regimes in each country responded early on to their lack of capacity to mobilize resources for economic development by using licensing and concessions to cultivate groups of family-based corporations through which the state could organize an economic development agenda oriented towards state empowerment and the enrichment of the ruling class (Winters 2012). In each case, wealth came to be concentrated during the authoritarian interlude in a small group of family conglomerates with direct connections to ruling elites—the Salim group in Indonesia and the Cojuangcos of the Philippines are two paradigmatic examples. Oligarchy was to have a profound impact on the way the “real-estate turn” took shape. In Indonesia, for example, it unfolded through the handing-out of development permits that provided monopsony rights to acquire vast areas of land claimed by state agencies or customary claimholders. Most permits went to a handful of family-owned conglomerates. The political influence of hyper-wealthy families and their dominance of landownership continue to shape debates over the urban politics of land monetization today.
Third, the Cold War authoritarian interlude saw legal and institutional changes that empowered the state in the areas of property rights and land management, and that were to prove essential to the state’s capacity to manufacture and exploit rent gaps. The subversion of the rule of law, through the sublimation of the courts to the bureaucracy, and the entrenchment of bureaucratic discourses and practices that systematically illegalized and informalized the property claims of poor people were central to the state’s capacity to realize the commodification of urban land.
Southeast Asia is not the only region to have experienced formative upheavals and ideological impositions during the Cold War, although the particular context of America’s war in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia, and its concerted effort to coerce and connive the region into its camp in a context of anti-communist mania, has arguably lent the postcolonial transition in the region a particular ideological flavor. In many other contexts in Central and South America, the Middle East, and parts of Sub‑Saharan Africa, urban questions also center to a significant extent on the legacies of Cold War interludes of US-backed authoritarian anti-communism, which gave rise to lingering questions about who has the right to construct knowledge about the urban and to propose alternative imaginations of social change and progress. Urban theory needs to move beyond its preoccupation with the neoliberal era, and to incorporate insights from the movements that are at the center of these debates. To do so is to recognize the resilience of the movements that have persevered in their efforts to shape knowledge about the urban in the face of persistent repression.
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