ABSTRACT
Following from the previous discussion, this chapter looks at the phenomenon of legal pluralism in Indonesia in the period subsequent to the New Order’s takeover in the second half of the 1960s. The main purpose of this chapter is therefore to discover how the emergence of a strong central state power impacted on adat and Islamic legal traditions and what stimuli drove the regime in its response to these two non-state, normative orderings. Reinvigorated state institutions might be expected to have had a say in whether existing non-state laws and legal traditions were maintained, incorporated into state law, or even abolished. Much depended on the regime’s own political calculations. In this chapter, the respective fates of adat law and Islamic law will be analyzed in their encounter with the state from the time when the National Law philosophy and the chosen legal pluralism theory were successfully developed by the New Order regime. Based on the laws and regulations promulgated during the last decades of the New Order and the short span of Habibie’s administration, the pattern of the state’s attitude towards both legal traditions will be analyzed in the hope of understanding the phenomenon of the Indonesian state’s behavior towards the fact of legal pluralism in the country.
