Ward Berenschot
Biographic Data
| ID | 263178 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Ward Berenschot |
| GIVEN NAMES | Ward |
| FAMILY NAME | Berenschot |
| SIGNATURE | BERENSCHOT W |
| AFFILIATIONS | Royal Netherlands Institute of Southeast Asian and Caribbean Studies |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-5459-0785 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 49 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 373 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 50 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2009 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 12 |
States and corporate land acquisition
How do processes of land dispossession vary across countries and sectors, and how could these differences be studied comparatively? In this introductory essay to the special issue Comparing Regimes of Dispossession, we address these questions by analysing a range of cases of corporate land dispossession from Brazil, East Timor, Thailand, India, Indonesia, and Cambodia. We compare these cases by analysing five aspects of dispossessionary processes…
Towards the Comparative Study of Domestic Influence Operations
Participation without accountability
This article explores the character of public deliberation in Indonesia by studying village meetings. In policies such as the 2014 Village Law, these village consultative meetings are envisioned as an important avenue for fostering citizen participation and accountability. In this article, we evaluate to what extent village meetings indeed strengthen village-level democratization in Indonesia. Using both ethnographic field research in eighteen vi…
Analysing and explaining variation in village governance regimes across Indonesia
This article analyses variation in patterns of village governance across Indonesia, drawing on qualitative fieldwork conducted in eighteen villages in nine provinces. The research focused on the performance and behaviour of village authorities as well as the character and quality of participation by residents in village affairs. We use this material to analyse variation in ‘village governance regimes’ in terms of twenty comparative dimensions, in…
Comparing village politics across time and space
This special issue examines whether and how village politics in Indonesia have changed after the passage of a new Village Law in 2014. Written by researchers who participated in a collaborative study of eighteen villages across Indonesia carried out at the start of 2022, the special issue takes stock of the nature of village politics and explores its variation across Indonesia. In this introduction to the special issue, we outline the research pr…
Dispossession by archive
Business-Politics Relations in Indonesia
This article employs official company profiles to study the nature and frequency of linkages between politicians and private business in contemporary Indonesia. We find that 45 percent of Indonesia’s parliamentarians and 65 percent of cabinet members (both 2019-2024) have direct ties to companies, thus providing further evidence of the oligarchization of Indonesia’s democracy. On the basis of this data we argue that democratic reforms have shifte…
KPK and Taliban
This article examines how public opinion manipulation translates into real-world impact by analyzing the organization, nature and effects of an influence operation aimed at weakening Indonesia's Corruption Eradication Commission (KPK). Using a combination of interviews with cyber troopers and journalists, social network analysis of online debates, and content analysis of the coverage of the mainstream media, we demonstrate how cyber troops succes…
The Perils of Legal Formalism
On the Need to Study Weak State Institutions
The Infrastructure of Domestic Influence Operations
Coordinated influence campaigns on social media have become an increasingly important tool for political and economic elites to sway public opinion in their favor. As the study of this phenomenon has so far largely focused on traces of such campaigns on social media itself, we know relatively little about the people and networks implementing them. Furthermore, existing literature offers limited analytical handles to delineate and analyze differen…
The shifting identity of the Dayak in Indonesia
This study discusses the shift in ethnic identity politics during local elections in Indonesia, considering the prevalence of ethnicity and its several variants in the local political experience. The findings show that the changing power dynamics in Indonesia prompted the Dayak ethnic group to change their identity-based political features from sporadic, without a sovereign (primordialism) to structurally organized. The reason was to ensure its e…
Corporate contentious politics
The intensification of corporate acquisition of land in particularly the Global South has generated widespread resistance from rural communities who are being forced off their land with little or no compensation. Yet, while community protests have received ample scholarly attention, the strategies that companies adopt to deal with land conflicts are rarely studied. In contrast with studies that misleadingly describe these strategies in terms of ‘…
Discourses of Land Conflicts in Indonesia
This article analyses how rural Indonesians involved in land conflicts articulate their claims vis-à-vis palm oil companies and government. Addressing a long-standing debate about the relative importance of laws and rights in the contentious politics of marginalized citizens in the Global South, the authors examine statements of community spokespersons as published in regional newspapers from four Indonesian provinces. They find that this discour…
Local brokerage and international leverage
The rapid expansion of oil palm plantations in Indonesia has generated a large and growing number of conflicts between rural communities and palm oil companies over, mainly, access to land. Employing a detailed documentation of 150 such conflicts in four Indonesian provinces, this paper assesses and evaluates how local, national and international NGOs help communities address their grievances. We find that rights‐based activism characterises only…
Polite Watchdog”
Many studies have argued that watchdog journalism cannot flourish under authoritarianism. However, the effect of the democratization of previously authoritarian regimes on watchdog journalism is still poorly understood. This article aims to fill this knowledge gap by using Kompas , Indonesia’s oldest daily newspaper, as a case study. Drawing on four years of ethnographic fieldwork (2013–2017) within Kompas ’s newsroom and one year of archival rev…
The production of rightlessness
Addressing the comparative study of global land grabbing, this article seeks to explain the relative ease with which palm oil companies dispossess rural Indonesians of their land. Employing detailed documentation of 150 conflicts between rural communities and palm oil companies, we analyse both the actual processes through which companies acquire land as well as the legal provisions that facilitate these processes. We argue that palm oil companie…
Agents of order? Brokerage and empowerment in development and conflict
Over the last two decades, development studies research has shown a renewed interest in the role of brokers (Bierschenk et al., 2002; Fechter & Schwittay, 2019; Lewis & Mosse, 2006). The importance of these brokers is observed for a range of development challenges, including political decentralisation and democratisation (Anwar, 2014; Wood, 2003), managing growing social and cultural diversity (Bilecen & Faist, 2015; Crafter et al., 2015; de Jong…
Varieties of Clientelism
Land-Use Change Conflicts and Anti-Corporate Activism in Indonesia
While processes of land-use change have triggered conflicts across Asia, our knowledge of the responses of affected communities is largely based on case-studies. This review essay addresses this challenge by reviewing and synthesizing 49 studies of conflicts between rural communities and companies in order to identify salient characteristics of anti-corporate activism in Indonesia. We find that, in contrast to the ‘rightful resistance’ observed e…
Unequal access to justice
In 2009 the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO) established a conflict resolution mechanism to help rural communities address their grievances against palm oil companies that are RSPO members. This article presents the broadest ever comprehensive assessment of the use and effectiveness of the RSPO conflict resolution mechanism, providing both overviews and in-depth analysis. Our central question is: to what extent does the RSPO conflict res…
Anti-Corporate Activism and Collusion
The rapid expansion of oil palm plantations in Indonesia has generated a large and growing number of protests against palm oil companies over, mainly, access to land. So far, these protests have been mainly studied through scattered case studies, which precludes an understanding and analysis of general patterns. Addressing this challenge, this paper presents the results of the first-ever large-scale collaborative effort to document 150 conflicts …
Parties as pay-off seekers
In Search of Middle Indonesia
Democracy for Sale
The Political Economy of Clientelism
What kind of economic development curtails clientelistic politics? Most of the literature addressing this relationship focuses narrowly on vote buying, resulting in theories that emphasize the importance of declining poverty rates and a growing middle class. This article employs a combination of ethnographic fieldwork and an expert survey to engage in a first-ever, more comprehensive comparative study of within-country variation of clientelistic …
How clientelism varies
Clientelistic vote mobilization is a prominent electoral strategy in many of the world’s \ndemocracies and electoral authoritarian regimes. Yet the comparative study of this \npractice, which involves exchanging personal favours for electoral support, remains \nstrikingly underdeveloped. This special issue makes the case that clientelistic politics \ntakes different forms in different countries, and that this variation matters for \nunderstanding…
Informality and citizenship
For many citizens in postcolonial states like Indonesia, the reality and experience of citizenship depend not just on the content of laws and regulations but also on the strength of their personal social networks. In this introduction to the special issue, we argue that instead of being antithetical to citizenship, this reliance on personal connections to deal with state institutions should be seen as a constitutive dimension of citizenship. Draw…
Everyday Mediation
This article follows a municipal councillor in Ahmedabad (Gujarat, India) on his daily routine in order to explore the various ways in which politicians in India operate as mediators between state institutions and citizens. Political mediation is deeply entrenched in the procedures, policies and habits that guide the daily functioning of Gujarat's state institutions. This article argues that this institutionalization of political mediation is the…
The Spatial Distribution of Riots
Anti-Corporate Activism and Collusion
The rapid expansion of oil palm plantations in Indonesia has generated a large and growing number of protests against palm oil companies over, mainly, access to land. So far, these protests have been mainly studied through scattered case studies, which precludes an understanding and analysis of general patterns. Addressing this challenge, this paper presents the results of the first-ever large-scale collaborative effort to document 150 conflicts …
Informal democratization
This article compares the role of brokers in mediating access to public services in India and Indonesia. Brokered state-citizen interaction is generally considered to be detrimental to democratic accountability and governance. Yet recent studies are emphasizing that brokers can also be empowering. Reconciling these contrasting assessments, I argue in this paper that the character of brokerage networks shapes the capacity of citizens to hold their…
Political Fixers and the Rise of Hindu Nationalism in Gujarat, India
Political fixers are intermediaries who use political contacts and knowledge of official procedures to facilitate the interaction between citizens and state institutions. Fixers have become a prominent feature of India's democracy as facilitators of clientelistic exchanges between voters and politicians. Through a discussion of the functioning of political fixers in Gujarat's main city, Ahmedabad, this article argues that changes in voting behavi…
In Search of Middle Indonesia
and Van Klinken 2007b; Van Klinken and Barker 2009; Aspinall and Van Klinken 2011). People in intermediate social and geographical locations influenced outcomes just by being able to pass on information and resources to others.Why had so little research been done on the middle classes in provincial towns who did much of this mediating work?we asked ourselves.We decided to put 'Middle Indonesia' on the research agenda
Patterned pogroms
The regular occurrence of election-related violence between ethnic or religious communities has generated a burgeoning literature on 'the dark side' of democracy. This literature provides convincing accounts of how political competition incentivizes politicians to foment violence. Yet such elite-oriented approaches are less convincing in explaining why and how political elites succeed in mobilizing people who do not share their concern for electo…
On the Usefulness of Goonda s in Indian Politics
This article discusses the cooperation between small-time criminals (or goondas) and politicians in a locality in Ahmedabad, Gujarat (India). Based on an ethnographic study of local political networks, this article argues that the regular co-operation between politicians and goondas is a product of the inaccessibility of the Indian state to its poorer citizens. The ‘criminalisation of politics’ is not a sign of moral decay, but a product of the d…
Rioting as Maintaining Relations
This article discusses the role that local politicians played during the 2002 Hindu-Muslim violence in Gujarat, India. I argue that the capacity and interests of political actors to instigate and organise communal rioting is closely related to their capacity to provide access to state resources. The cooperation during the riots between politicians and various types of rioters - from local criminals, Hindu-nationalist activists, neighbourhood lead…
Brokers and citizenship
Faced with unresponsive and intimidating bureaucracies, citizens across particularly the global south regularly rely on intermediaries to gain access to public services. Focusing on how such brokers arrange access to health care in Indonesia, this essay discusses the impact of brokered state–citizen interaction on the character and experience of citizenship. On the basis of extensive fieldwork in both urban and rural Java we argue that brokers no…
The production of rightlessness
Addressing the comparative study of global land grabbing, this article seeks to explain the relative ease with which palm oil companies dispossess rural Indonesians of their land. Employing detailed documentation of 150 conflicts between rural communities and palm oil companies, we analyse both the actual processes through which companies acquire land as well as the legal provisions that facilitate these processes. We argue that palm oil companie…
Explaining regional variation in local governance
Clientelism, Trust Networks, and India's Identity Politics
With an election campaign for a seat in Gujarat's state parliament as its backdrop, this article relates India's persistent forms of identity politics to the evolution of trust networks. Political scientists and anthropologists have adopted highly divergent approaches to account for the ways in which India's politicians use social identities to mobilize support. A point of convergence, this article argues, lies in the social networks through whic…
Parties as pay-off seekers
Comparing Brokers in India
Faced with unresponsive and intimidating state institutions, citizens often need to rely on brokers to obtain state benefits. This article compares the ways in which brokers help people gain access to public services in two Indian states. Using ethnographic fieldwork in both states, we compare Bihar and Gujarat to argue that the evolution of the informal networks through which citizens gain access to public services constitutes an important dimen…
Agents of order? Brokerage and empowerment in development and conflict
Over the last two decades, development studies research has shown a renewed interest in the role of brokers (Bierschenk et al., 2002; Fechter & Schwittay, 2019; Lewis & Mosse, 2006). The importance of these brokers is observed for a range of development challenges, including political decentralisation and democratisation (Anwar, 2014; Wood, 2003), managing growing social and cultural diversity (Bilecen & Faist, 2015; Crafter et al., 2015; de Jong…
Resolving Land Conflicts in Indonesia
Land and Development in Indonesia
The Perils of Legal Formalism
Participation without accountability
This article explores the character of public deliberation in Indonesia by studying village meetings. In policies such as the 2014 Village Law, these village consultative meetings are envisioned as an important avenue for fostering citizen participation and accountability. In this article, we evaluate to what extent village meetings indeed strengthen village-level democratization in Indonesia. Using both ethnographic field research in eighteen vi…
Analysing and explaining variation in village governance regimes across Indonesia
This article analyses variation in patterns of village governance across Indonesia, drawing on qualitative fieldwork conducted in eighteen villages in nine provinces. The research focused on the performance and behaviour of village authorities as well as the character and quality of participation by residents in village affairs. We use this material to analyse variation in ‘village governance regimes’ in terms of twenty comparative dimensions, in…
Comparing village politics across time and space
This special issue examines whether and how village politics in Indonesia have changed after the passage of a new Village Law in 2014. Written by researchers who participated in a collaborative study of eighteen villages across Indonesia carried out at the start of 2022, the special issue takes stock of the nature of village politics and explores its variation across Indonesia. In this introduction to the special issue, we outline the research pr…
Rioting as Maintaining Relations
This article discusses the role that local politicians played during the 2002 Hindu-Muslim violence in Gujarat, India. I argue that the capacity and interests of political actors to instigate and organise communal rioting is closely related to their capacity to provide access to state resources. The cooperation during the riots between politicians and various types of rioters - from local criminals, Hindu-nationalist activists, neighbourhood lead…
The Spatial Distribution of Riots
Everyday Mediation
This article follows a municipal councillor in Ahmedabad (Gujarat, India) on his daily routine in order to explore the various ways in which politicians in India operate as mediators between state institutions and citizens. Political mediation is deeply entrenched in the procedures, policies and habits that guide the daily functioning of Gujarat's state institutions. This article argues that this institutionalization of political mediation is the…
On the Usefulness of Goonda s in Indian Politics
This article discusses the cooperation between small-time criminals (or goondas) and politicians in a locality in Ahmedabad, Gujarat (India). Based on an ethnographic study of local political networks, this article argues that the regular co-operation between politicians and goondas is a product of the inaccessibility of the Indian state to its poorer citizens. The ‘criminalisation of politics’ is not a sign of moral decay, but a product of the d…
Political Fixers and the Rise of Hindu Nationalism in Gujarat, India
Political fixers are intermediaries who use political contacts and knowledge of official procedures to facilitate the interaction between citizens and state institutions. Fixers have become a prominent feature of India's democracy as facilitators of clientelistic exchanges between voters and politicians. Through a discussion of the functioning of political fixers in Gujarat's main city, Ahmedabad, this article argues that changes in voting behavi…
Preliminary Material
Index
In Search of Middle Indonesia
The middle classes of Indonesia’s provincial towns are not particularly rich yet nationally influential. This book examines them ethnographically. Rather than a market-friendly, liberal middle class, it finds a conservative petty bourgeoisie just out of poverty and skilled at politics. Please note that Sylvia Tidey's article (pp. 89-110) will only be available in the print edition of this book (9789004263000)
In Search of Middle Indonesia
and Van Klinken 2007b; Van Klinken and Barker 2009; Aspinall and Van Klinken 2011). People in intermediate social and geographical locations influenced outcomes just by being able to pass on information and resources to others.Why had so little research been done on the middle classes in provincial towns who did much of this mediating work?we asked ourselves.We decided to put 'Middle Indonesia' on the research agenda
Clientelism, Trust Networks, and India's Identity Politics
With an election campaign for a seat in Gujarat's state parliament as its backdrop, this article relates India's persistent forms of identity politics to the evolution of trust networks. Political scientists and anthropologists have adopted highly divergent approaches to account for the ways in which India's politicians use social identities to mobilize support. A point of convergence, this article argues, lies in the social networks through whic…
Political Parties and Clientelism in Southeast Asia
Citizenship and Democratization in Southeast Asia
By providing various fascinating first-hand accounts of how citizens negotiate their rights in the context of weak state institutions, Citizenship and Democratization in Southeast Asia offers a unique bottom-up perspective on the evolving character of public life in democratizing Southeast Asia. Readership: All interested in politics and governance in Southeast Asia, as well as scholars concerned with citizenship in postcolonial states
Citizenship and Democratization in Southeast Asia
Land and Development in Indonesia
The Political Economy of Clientelism
What kind of economic development curtails clientelistic politics? Most of the literature addressing this relationship focuses narrowly on vote buying, resulting in theories that emphasize the importance of declining poverty rates and a growing middle class. This article employs a combination of ethnographic fieldwork and an expert survey to engage in a first-ever, more comprehensive comparative study of within-country variation of clientelistic …
Informality and citizenship
For many citizens in postcolonial states like Indonesia, the reality and experience of citizenship depend not just on the content of laws and regulations but also on the strength of their personal social networks. In this introduction to the special issue, we argue that instead of being antithetical to citizenship, this reliance on personal connections to deal with state institutions should be seen as a constitutive dimension of citizenship. Draw…
Brokers and citizenship
Faced with unresponsive and intimidating bureaucracies, citizens across particularly the global south regularly rely on intermediaries to gain access to public services. Focusing on how such brokers arrange access to health care in Indonesia, this essay discusses the impact of brokered state–citizen interaction on the character and experience of citizenship. On the basis of extensive fieldwork in both urban and rural Java we argue that brokers no…
Democracy for Sale
Democracy for Sale is an on-the-ground account of Indonesian democracy, analyzing its election campaigns and behind-the-scenes machinations. Edward Aspinall and Ward Berenschot assess the informal networks and political strategies that shape access to power and privilege in the messy political environment of contemporary Indonesia.In post-Suharto Indonesian politics the exchange of patronage for political support is commonplace. Clientelism, argu…
Explaining regional variation in local governance
Democracy for Sale
Informal democratization
This article compares the role of brokers in mediating access to public services in India and Indonesia. Brokered state-citizen interaction is generally considered to be detrimental to democratic accountability and governance. Yet recent studies are emphasizing that brokers can also be empowering. Reconciling these contrasting assessments, I argue in this paper that the character of brokerage networks shapes the capacity of citizens to hold their…
How clientelism varies
Clientelistic vote mobilization is a prominent electoral strategy in many of the world’s \ndemocracies and electoral authoritarian regimes. Yet the comparative study of this \npractice, which involves exchanging personal favours for electoral support, remains \nstrikingly underdeveloped. This special issue makes the case that clientelistic politics \ntakes different forms in different countries, and that this variation matters for \nunderstanding…
Comparing Brokers in India
Faced with unresponsive and intimidating state institutions, citizens often need to rely on brokers to obtain state benefits. This article compares the ways in which brokers help people gain access to public services in two Indian states. Using ethnographic fieldwork in both states, we compare Bihar and Gujarat to argue that the evolution of the informal networks through which citizens gain access to public services constitutes an important dimen…
Patterned pogroms
The regular occurrence of election-related violence between ethnic or religious communities has generated a burgeoning literature on 'the dark side' of democracy. This literature provides convincing accounts of how political competition incentivizes politicians to foment violence. Yet such elite-oriented approaches are less convincing in explaining why and how political elites succeed in mobilizing people who do not share their concern for electo…
Resolving Land Conflicts in Indonesia
Political science (37 works) · Law (33 works) · Politics (27 works) · Asian Studies and History (22 works) · Law (22 works) · Political economy (21 works) · Sociology (21 works) · Economics (19 works) · Democracy (17 works) · Southeast Asian Sociopolitical Studies (17 works)