Leading With Compassion: A Story of Women Grassroots Leadership Amidst COVID-19 and Coastal Flooding

This article elaborates on two important elements of women's leadership. First, it explores how leadership theory has abandoned its masculine perspective in favour of a "more feminine" one. The COVID-19 pandemic, a crisis that crippled the socio-political structure, has contributed to this shift. Second, the experiences of grassroots leaders who are active in the domestic sphere have begun to be considered, as has their increased activeness in the public sphere during the COVID-19 pandemic. However, studies of women's leadership are highly elitist; such a paradigm is problematic, as it prioritises formal power structures and ignores the grassroots leaders who play a central role in maintaining the social order. This research finds that the pandemic has provided a valuable impetus not only for studies of formal elites but also women at the grassroots. Women have become highly powerful agents in the domestic sphere during the pandemic, and even expanded their agency into the public sphere. Women leaders have facilitated the implementation of government and community crisis response measures at the grassroots level.

Leadership and City Waste Politics: A Case Study on the Waste Management in Depok City, West Java Province 2014 – 2017

This article aims to ascertain the role of a local leader in the transformation of waste management in Depok City, West Java, between 2014 and 2017. In 2005, Depok was identified as one of the dirtiest cities in Indonesia; by 2017, it had successfully transformed itself and received the Adipura Award for Indonesia's cleanest city. Based on qualitative fieldwork, we argue that Depok's waste management was transformed through a series of policies made by the mayor in conjunction with the Government of Depok City between 2006 and 2016. The example of Depok shows that formal leadership plays an important role in encouraging the emergence of innovative policies to address public problems. In this case, the vision of the leader was translated into policy and implemented by bureaucratic institutions, thereby driving important changes in the region. Further contributing factors included credibility, protection from opposition, and access to resources. We also emphasize the importance of leadership in giving direct examples to local communities on how we understand waste; how we reduce, reuse, recycle, and participate. The leader's ability to consolidate his ideas within the broader community, as well as his commitment to sustainable change, become the main driver of his policy performance.

The politics of civil society forms

Regardless of the debate on how and to what extent civil society contributes to enhance democratic practices, it is generally agreed that there is a reasonable link between civil society and democracy under certain conditions. The aim of this paper is to explore the politics of civil society forms and their contribution to maintain democratic practices in Jakarta. Building from the neo-Tocquevillean understanding of civil society, this article particularly analyses urban environmental activists’ strategy to adopt voluntary association and environmental spin off campaign as the forms of civic engagement to improve public policy in the province. Despite the lack of acknowledgement, this paper argues for the necessary inclusion and elaboration of spin off campaign and voluntary association in the Indonesian civil society literature because of their ability to facilitate diagonal accountability mechanism. Further analysis found that, however, the forms adopted by urban environmental activists suffer similar horizontal and vertical accountability problems frequently found in the more established civil society form (e.g. non-government organization). Nonetheless, the discussion in the paper provides an illustration about civil society’s ingenuity in pushing for democratic practices amidst the “democratic recession” in Indonesia.

A New Approach for Allocating a New Party's Budget during an Election Campaign

During pre-election campaigns, parties make great efforts to persuade constituents to vote for them. Usually, new parties have smaller budgets and fewer resources than veteran parties. Generally, the more heterogeneous the party’s electorate, the more critical the issue of resource allocation. This paper presents a method for new parties to efficiently allocate campaign advertising resources and maximise voters. The model developed uses the Pareto principle and multi-criteria approach, integrating the party’s confidential data together with official open-to-all data. We implemented the model on a specific new party during the intensive political period before the April 2019 elections in Israel, finding that the model produced clear and unbiased results, and this made it effective and user-friendly for strategy teams and campaign managers.

COVID-19: Cosmopolitanism's Criticism and Proposals

Covid-19 merits a scientific examination from cosmopolitanism, a widely acknowledged, global-nuanced thought. During the pandemic, strong stances of nationalism and xenophobia have been taken, leaving little room for global cooperation in countering the virus, and recognition of human rights has ebbed. Since this reality is opposed to its ideational and normative essence, cosmopolitanism offers its criticisms and proposals. By diving into a cosmopolitan way of thinking, this study criticises the rise of 'health nationalism' in state policies as well as the xenophobia manifested through the blaming of people of Asian—particularly Chinese—heritage for the viral outbreak. Regarding its proposals, cosmopolitanism offers two suggestions: 1) international society must opt to endorse global integration through multilateralism, and 2.) countries should avoid exclusionary health programmes and commit to solidarity-based countermeasures. The underlying arguments of this study are backed by the application of library research and qualitative methods.

Why have Anti-Offshore Tin Mining Movements Failed in Bangka but Succeeded in East Belitung? Political Opportunity Structures and Political Settlement in the Context of Indonesia's Democratic Future

Civil society movements have occupied an important position in Indonesia's democratisation. This article seeks to determine why anti-offshore tin mining movements in the post-authoritarian era failed in Bangka but succeeded in East Belitung, an area where tin mining has historically been important. By analysing the political opportunity structures and political settlement mechanisms involved, this article argues, first, that the movement's success in East Belitung can be attributed to open political access, fragmentation within elite circles, and alliances with influential elites; such political opportunities were not available in Bangka. Second, in Bangka, the local bourgeoisie and brokers used clientelistic approaches in their political settlement and prevented resistance by co-opting local communities within the extraction chain. In East Belitung, meanwhile, such efforts were stymied by the lack of local bourgeoisie, the strength of environmental awareness, and the availability of alternative economic resources. It may thus be concluded that, while a clientelistic approach to settlement may prevent conflict, it also limits the political participation of civil society movements—an important element of democracy.

Book Review

In Participation Without Democracy, Garry Rodan argues that as a response to the dynamics and contradiction inherent in the capitalist development, the regime—representing the dominant coalition of interest, the ruling/dominant political elites—‘invent’ ways to contain conflicts with societal entities (i.e., opposition parties, civil societies, labor unions) in a way so that such conflicts do not yield politically harmful impacts. This argument is based on two propositions. First, the development of capitalism has caused inequality to deepen. Both the ruling political-economy elites and the marginal groups found this inherent inequality and disruption in capitalism created political challenges, which, as a consequence, demand mitigation strategies. Second, the established coalition of interest's tactics handle political dissents towards the regimes move beyond the binary scenarios, not just merely opening political participation or applying coercion means such as crackdown and arrest. Instead, while the elites design the participation and representation institutions as a response to domesticating dissents and conflicts, the marginal groups also respond to those channels beyond being co-opted or merely refuse to join it. Opposition parties, radical NGOs, marginal groups seek to utilize the institutions for their transformative agenda. In short, both the ruling elites and the marginal groups have been engaged in the participating institutions with different goals in mind.

Shackled by Patriarchy and Poverty: Women's Experiences with Domestic Violence in North Central Timor and North Sumatra

This article discusses how patriarchal elements of society and culture, in conjunction with poverty, is necessary to comprehend the domestic violence experienced by women. This article departs from a qualitative case study of the experiences of women in Taekas Village, North Central Timor, East Nusa Tenggara, and Pondok Batu Village, Labuhanbatu, North Sumatra, and seeks to obtain a comprehensive and in-depth understanding of how patriarchy and poverty contribute to domestic violence. This article emphasizes that, although domestic violence knows no class, religious, or geographical boundaries, rural women who live in poverty are more vulnerable to domestic violence. This article is hoped to shed light on domestic violence in Indonesia, thereby increasing awareness and providing further impetus for eradicating said practice.

The Moluccas' Surviving Aristocracy in Indonesian Politics: Fragmentation and Land-based Political Support

The article demonstrates how the Sultanate of Ternate in the Moluccas has survived in post-authoritarian Indonesian politics by analysing the political performances of the Sultan of Ternate and his immediate family members. The success of Sultan Mudaffar Syah in the political arena has contextualised the literature on land-based political economy, something that has largely been neglected. Combining in-depth interviews, observations, and document study, I argue that the Sultan's political achievements were the result of his transforming Ternate's coastal aristocracy into a land-based one, sidestepping the Basic Agrarian Law (BAL) of 1960 by transferring land management and ownership to indigenous communities while still maintaining economic control. However, his wife and children have failed politically, not only because they are not part of the traditional aristocratic structure (and thus have no control over land) but also because of internal fragmentation.

Political Scandal and Public Figure

Indonesian society is familiar with the terms 'public figures' and 'celebrities', but the distinction is often not understood properly. The public's interest in content that focuses on entertainment, lifestyles, and gossip, as well as the presence of a media that facilitates such content, makes the process of 'celebrating' common. This process has resulted in the private space of public figures being transformed into objects of public consumption.Scandals are often quite popularly discussed among the public, especially when their subject is a public figure. However, studies of how scandals affect the public and its political behaviour have not been widely documented. In 2018, Indonesian news media began widely covering the divorce of well-known politician Basuki Tjahaja Purnama (BTP/Ahok) from his ex-wife Veronica Tan, and this brought questions of extramarital affairs to the surface in the midst of a heated local election atmosphere. This situation was divisive, and received various public responses. Previous studies have shown that scandals tend to negatively affect popular attitudes towards the politicians involved in them. In Indonesia, scandals have been common, widely recognised by the public, but their effects are never discussed in depth. Therefore, this study, which involved around 400 respondents, seeks to provide an overview of how the Indonesian public responds to politicians involved in scandals and how such scandals affect politicians' electability. The results of this study show that scandals do affect the public's political attitude, but not in the ways suggested by existing studies.