BOOK REVIEW: Suharto’s Cold War: Indonesia, Southeast Asia, and the World

Abstract

Mattias Fibiger’s latest book, Suharto’s Cold War: Indonesia, Southeast Asia, and the World, offers a novel account for the international political economy of Indonesia’s New Order1 period (1966-1998) and a thought-provoking overview of a set of domestic, regional, and global interactions during the Cold War, drawing on a historical analysis of rich archival material. The author ambitiously departs from the conventional structuralist explanations of the political economy of the Suharto regime in Indonesia, which portray the New Order as the “mechanistic reflection of capitalist power relations” (p. 7). Instead, his analysis revolves centrally around Indonesian agency, deeply intertwined with the international capital, against the backdrop of Cold War politics. Suharto’s anticommunist campaign aligned with the political priorities of Western powers, which in turn financed authoritarianism in Indonesia, according to this argument. In so doing, a main contribution of the book is that it does not treat Indonesia as a passive client of the Cold War politics but instead describes Suharto’s New Order as “a dynamic agent capable of driving historical change” (p. 7) due to its ambitious role in containing communism in Southeast Asia. The book examines Indonesia’s role in maintaining and reproducing the Cold War from the perspectives of national, regional, and global levels. While Suharto fought against the local communist forces such as the Indonesian Communist Party (Partai Komunis Indonesia, PKI) at the national level, as the author details, he also played an active role regionally by eagerly promoting anticommunism and exporting its authoritarian development model, particularly via the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN). In Fibiger’s account, Indonesia served as a champion of anticommunism/ authoritarian developmentalism in the region, both ideologically and materially. Suharto also effectively manipulated the Cold War anxieties of Western creditors to finance Indonesia’s anticommunist authoritarianism.

Keywords

Indonesia, Cold War

Citation

Didem Kizir, "Mattias Fibiger, Suharto’s Cold War: Indonesia, Southeast Asia, and the World (New York, Oxford University Press, 2023 )" Uluslararası İlişkiler, Advanced Online Publication, 21 November 2025, pp. 1-4. DOI: 10.33458/uidergisi.1820655

Affiliations

Didem KİZİR Research Assistant, Department of Political Science and International Relations, TED University, Ankara E-Mail: [email protected] Orcid: 0000-0003-010