ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the ways in which the urban structures of the city, as a major institutional form of the nation-state, shape the national imagination. It presents a treatment of how and why modernity takes its particular form in the social and political context of postcolonial Indonesia, rather than aiming at an analysis of modernity in its various aspects. The chapter examines the politics of city building under the first President, Sukarno, soon after decolonization, and end with a "journey" through the urban structures built under Suharto's New Order. In the course of the "pacification" of East Timor, annexed in 1976, this military apparatus developed all kinds of techniques of violence. This technique of violence was soon integrated into the national pedagogy. The case of Indonesia shows that both the spectacle of punishment and the bio-power of surveillance could coexist in styling the "behavior" of the state and its subject.
