Territorial change in post-authoritarian Indonesia

Amid Indonesia’s economic and political upheaval in the late 1990s also loomed the specter of its territorial collapse. The Soviet Union and Yugoslavia had each splintered earlier in the decade and observers at the time raised the prospect of Indonesia’s “balkanization” (Bolton 1999; Hadar 2000). Experts and pundits alike cautioned that transition and political reform could weaken the state, embolden the regions, and lead to a domino effect beginning with the breakaway of East Timor followed by a general fragmentation of the archipelago into a dozen or so states.