Scrutinising Nusantara: the making of an authoritarian city

Sulfikar Amir

LSE Research Online Documents on Economics from London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library

Abstract: In August 2019, Indonesian President Joko Widodo unexpectedly announced the plan to build a new capital called Nusantara. It will relocate the capital from Jakarta to East Kalimantan by 2024. This paper critically examines Indonesia’s ambition to build Nusantara within a short time. In this paper, a narrative policy framework is applied to unpack the core reasons and assumptions that underpin Widodo’s adamant decision to carry out a large-scale urban project of the new capital despite social and financial constraints. By interrogating two fundamental fallacies underlying the Nusantara project, in the rationales and the construction process, I show how the new capital project is deeply problematic. The notion of techno-nationalist urbanism is proposed to underline the contradiction in the logic and rationality of Nusantara’s urban system as a result of authoritarian symptoms. Further, the paper links Nusantara to the nature of power embodied in Widodo’s strong desire for a legacy and its impact on Indonesian democracy in the future.

Keywords: capital relocation; Nusantara; techno-nationalist urbanism; authoritarianism; Indonesia (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: Q15 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 28 pages
Date: 2023-05-01
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-sea
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ehl:lserod:119201

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