"Warring Words": Students and the state in New Order Indonesia, 1966-1998

Abstract

This thesis is a study of the politics of identity of Indonesian university students (mahasiswa) under Suharto’s New Order. It focuses on the period between 1973 and 1988 and on the period between 1989, when Indonesia entered a limited period of openness (keterbukaan), and the fall of Suharto in 1998. The study is grounded in theories about the relationship between language and power and in a method of textual analysis based on critical discourse analysis. Through the application of critical discourse analysis to a number of key state and student texts, the study provides an insight into the linguistic techniques the New Order employed in producing particular ways of thinking and speaking (discourses) about students’ roles and identities. These discourses aimed to regulate how students were able to act in their capacity as students. It is also concerned with the ways in which students challenged the discourses of the New Order state by producing their own, alternative ways of thinking and speaking about their roles and identities. Two state texts form the basis for the analysis in chapters three and five. These are the New Order’s ‘official’ national history, the Sejarah Nasional Indonesia, and a magazine published by the Department of Education and Culture from the late 1970s to the 1980s. The student texts analysed in chapters four and six comprise influential student newspapers and magazines published on campuses in Yogyakarta, Jakarta and Bandung during the mid to late 1970s and the 1990s. As this study shows, the state employed strategies and techniques which aimed to incorporate students into the state itself by modifying their behaviour in ways which were consistent with its needs and interests. And while students’ resistance was to some extent constrained by the limits set by the state, they also retained a significant capacity to exercise power on their own account. Indeed, students were only able to resist the state and its practices because they did so from within the parameters the state had defined for dissent.