ABSTRACT
This chapter presents the themes for understanding complex politics of preman and violent entrepreneurs in post-New Order Jakarta: first, changing forms of social and political powers; second, processes of urbanisation, exclusion and operating in an informal society; and third, the necessity within a decentralised and democratised environment for establishing new forms of rulemaking legitimacy for rackets. It identifies a loose typology of preman organisations and the modes of legitimation for rackets in terms of vigilantism and 'morality racketeering', as forms of social welfare, self-organisation and representation for social and economic underclasses. The chapter focuses upon the extent to which the government has provided the opportunity for a new quasi-legitimacy to relations of resource distribution. Articulations of ethnicity and localism have been explicitly linked to notions of territory and sets of attendant 'rights' to a monopoly over resources, rents and space.
