ABSTRACT
Indonesia, with its 256 million inhabitants, presents different challenges in its quest for economic and political development compared to its less-populated neighbors. As an equatorial archipelago stretching as wide as the United States, Indonesia is the fourth-most-populous country in the world. Over one-third of all Southeast Asians live in Indonesia. Eleven major ethnic groups and hundreds of minor ones inhabit 6,000 of the country’s 17,000 islands. 1 Amazingly, more than half of all Indonesians live on the island of Java, one of the most densely populated areas of the world. Although 85 percent of the country’s population is nominally Muslim, the variety of religious beliefs within this Islamic ambience suggests diversity more than unity. Thus, even as the world’s largest Muslim country, Indonesia is continually shaped by geographic, linguistic, ethnic, and social heterogeneity. The population has overcome almost insuperable obstacles in achieving nationhood.
