Papers

• Peripheralizing Corruption? The sweet money politics and regional election in 1926 colonial Java, linking colonial and metropolitan corruption Uji Nugroho Winardi Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam

  The sugar scandal emerged as a hotbed of political contention in the colony and metropole amidst the fervent communist campaigns in 1926. The scandal erupted when a confidential document from the PEB (a colonial pro-business political party) and the Suikersyndicaat in East Java was creaked. The document revealed the convergence of business and politics, as sugar money was involved in influencing the regional election. Government officials, both Dutch and Javanese, were implicated. Despite vehement reactions from the Indonesian nationalists and the Dutch metropolitan leftists, all parties embroiled in the scandal managed to sanitize their guilts. My presentation designates the sugar scandal as competing claims of norm-setting to develop an alternative explanation of the link between colonial and metropolitan corruption. The way the historical actors gave meanings to the scandal implied that corruption was often not a breaching of law or formal regulation but a transgression of political ethics. However, as the inconclusive ending of the dispute demonstrated, political ethics was, in essence, an asymmetric contested claim in which the dominant power could easily determine the righteous standard by postulating the colony as a periphery in perils. Align with some studies that perceive the corrupt colony as a pretext for the continuation of colonialism, I further argue on the peripheralized corruption in which the colony served as an arena to perpetuate and condone conduct that had already been denounced as corruption in the metropole.

• Corporate misconduct and ambiguous constructions of public interest Otto Linde Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam

  Corruption as a crime is often closely associated with the notion of damaging the ‘public interest’ for ‘private benefit’. But what if the ‘public interest’ is constructed in such a way as to allow for all kinds of transgressions that serve ‘private’ goals? In this presentation I would like to propose that during the Liberal Era (c. 1870-1900) in the history of the Netherlands East Indies the ‘public interest’ was constructed in such a way, by the Dutch, as to allow for the concealment of all kinds of corporate excesses which would not have been acceptable, according to contemporary Dutch norms, if they would have happened in the Netherlands itself. I will discuss this by looking at two types of situations wherein the notion of ‘public interest’ was constructed in such a way as to make it possible to transgress basic human rights - according to contemporary norms - of Indonesian and Chinese colonial subjects in order to serve the ‘private interests’ of corporate agents. The first type of situation I will look at is the process of obtaining corporate concessions outside of Java. I will argue that corrupt transactions with Indonesian royalty were often framed as actions that would - in the long-term - serve to develop marginal regions, and thereby serve the ‘public interest’ of both the Indonesians and the colonizers. The second type of situation pertains to the legalization of private corporate violence. In many regions outside of Java corporate agents shared (informally) in the colonial state’s assumed monopoly on violence. I will demonstrate that - while this in itself would be unacceptable in the Netherlands - there existed a chorus of voices in the Dutch Empire that apologetically argued that corporate actors helped to establish ‘peace and order’ by ‘assisting’ local officials with law-enforcement. It goes without saying that both types of situations at the very least contain a ‘conflict of interest’. With these cases I aim to demonstrate that the colonial condition entailed a persistent ‘problem’ in relation to the definition of the ‘public interest’, and that in such a way, colonialism itself may be seen as a vector of corrupt behaviour and misconduct of all kinds.

• Bribery and Corruption: strengthened role of go-betweens in the oil palm frontier in Kalimantan Runavia Mulyasari Universitas Gadjah Mada

  Many natural resource-rich regions in Indonesia have transformed into so-called ‘new resource frontiers’. Within these new frontiers, often a kind of interstitial space emerges between the sphere of the government and the market where specific actors are playing a dual role as regulators and rent-seekers, the so-called go-betweens. The transformation of Indonesia’s resource-rich areas into new frontiers is partly triggered by the implementation of regional autonomy shortly after the fall of the Suharto regime in 1998. One of the largest and most prominent natural resource-rich regions in Indonesia is Kalimantan. The post-Suharto period provided an opportunity for the “periphery of peripheries” in Kalimantan to manifest themselves as active agricultural frontiers by seeking connections to the global market.

  The phenomenon of rent-seeking and local ‘warlords’ played an important role in paving the way for these plantation practices. This ‘new’ group of actors is often overlooked in analyses because many individuals and networks working as intermediaries do so in isolation from each other. Using their traditional position as important figures in the community, go-betweens try to strengthen their role in the new context of the oil palm frontier. In this case, they had to resort to bribery and corruption by utilising various national, regional and local funding streams. The practice of bribery and corruption by the go-betweens is also not entirely for personal gain but as an attempt to attach themselves to the new social relations and networks of the plantation. Bribery and corruption done by go-betweens do not mean without consequences, but it will determine their future roles. The premise of this paper is the isolation and lack of analysis of bribery and corruption practices that cannot be separated from the existence of go-betweens. Therefore, this paper aims to develop a better conceptual and practical understanding of go-betweens and a deeper understanding of the bribery and corruption practices used to strengthen the position of go-betweens in the palm oil context.

• Internal theft in Indonesian plantations, 1870s - 2000s Pujo Semedi Universitas Gadjah Mada

  Since their establishment in the 1870s, Indonesian plantations have been producing commodity crops that activate worldwide trading chains. Thanks to many forms of government subsidy, plantations have been capable of producing enormous amounts of commodities and give an impression of an efficient machine of production. Closer observation shows that plantations have been plagued by internal theft—corruption in current colloquial—at all levels of work. How to explain that an institution plagued by systemic and massive theft and suffer continuous losses, has not gone bankrupt? On the contrary, the number of plantations in Indonesia is increasing and the area is getting wider in Indonesia. At a glance, the thefts may look like a resistance, as the oppressed’ tool to fight against the oppressors (Scott, 1985). The thing is, theft in plantations involves everyone, not only the weak, from coolies who broke their backs toiling in the fields up to the top managers who ruin their health working from behind the desk. Meanwhile, political economic approach which focuses on institutional analysis and production activities, often end lead to a normative explanation—theft is theft is theft—and end up with conclusion that paint plantations as bad institutions, spring for many forms of law violation and plantation people as law violators (Li and Semedi, 2021). This perspective is untenable because of the capitalistic bias, as our laws are generally drafted to the interests of capital owners. Perceiving plantations not only as an arena for commodity production but also as a meeting arena of different social values might help us get out of this conundrum. At least there are two different values operates in plantation: capitalistic social values oriented towards creation of profits and wealth accumulation held by the planters and agrarian social values oriented towards sharing and anti-accumulation generally adhered by the workers (Soekarno, 1930; Widlok, 2018). Sylvia Tidey’s (2022) observations on the phenomena of the meeting of these two values in the realm of public administration shows: “what comes to count as corruption according to the expectations of the neoliberal state can be viewed as care within the dynamics of the giving city”. Different to city hall or any other public administration which manage wealth originate from state budget, plantation has the ability to generate its own wealth. It is widely accepted that public fund is not belong to those who are mandated to manage it, therefore taking the wealth against the mandate fall to the category of theft. Apart from it, state budget, in a given year, is fixed, and spending—within or without the mandate—is a zero sum game that consequently reduce the budget quantity. This situation is less clear in plantations, where everybody directly participate in the creation of the plantation wealth, therefore—following the agrarian ethic of labour create right—socially or morally they have right to lay a claim over the wealth (Fortmann, 1985). Things get more complicated since in some plantations—tea and oil palm for instance—the wealth production take place on daily basis. This discussion is to identify the implications of the clash of values within the setting of plantations’ ability to generate wealth. Perhaps, from that point, we can question further whether the view that perceive plantations as accumulative, capitalistic production institutions is tenable?

Abstract