Reconsiderations

Google's Language Tools

2005-08-05T19:50:00.000-04:00

A special Google search page has an innocent enough title: Language Tools. But what it can do for researchers is actually quite sensational.

Referring to it directly may be easier than following the brief discussion in this message:

http://www.google.com/language_tools

Basically, on this single page, Google lets you search pages written in many languages, including some very important in Indonesian studies, such as Dutch, French, German, Japanese, Malay, Portuguese, and, of course, Indonesian. Plus the Scandinavian languages and Arabic.

Right below this option, Google then offers searches of Web sites located on servers in the Netherlands, France, Germany, Japan, Portugal, Indonesia, Norway, Sweden, Finland and Denmark (a country variation on the first option).

Next Google offers to machine-translate snippets of text from German, French, Italian, Spanish and Portuguese into English. It also works in the reverse direction, English into these languages. Output quality is best for words and phrases and is good for getting gists of meaning as one advances into copy-and-pasted paragraphs.

If you want a whole Web page translated into English from German, French, Italian, Spanish or Portuguese, Google then offers a box in which you key in (or copy-and-paste) the page's address (URL). A machine-translation is returned quite quickly.

Then if you prefer to use a non-English interface for Google Web, Image, Discussion Groups, or the human-made Directory, Google's offerings just keep expanding. As of this writing, besides all the languages mentioned so far, there are also interfaces in Javanese, Sundanese, Malay and Arabic.

Finally, Google presents a set of countries in which it has established full Google sites, including places like the UK, Australia, New Zealand and Singapore. These sites have a button you can click on which lets you search only sites in these countries, all of of which produce significant scholarship on Indonesia.

So, if you have just been using Google's standard English user interface, you have missing quite a lot.

Summarizing, using the Language Tools page, you can retrieve pages and articles in non-English languages and even get some of your search results translated into English.

While there are many ways to find public online scholarly papers using Google, one method I've tried which works fairly well is to type in Google's search box

(author's name, with or without quotes) (pdf or doc)

pdf returns Acrobat files and doc returns Word files. Most papers put up on the net appear to be in these two formats.

So one can start with Google English and type something like

"martin van bruinessen" pdf
or
martin van bruinessen doc

and get back a treasure trove of very high quality scholarship.

Then you can repeat the procedure in non-English Google interfaces, which one(s) depending on the nationality of the author or the country in which the author's works often appear.

Foreign Foundations in Indonesia

2005-08-05T16:51:00.000-04:00

Philanthropy through private foundations to strengthen civil society has long flourished fairly efficiently, effectively, and usually quietly in Indonesia, even as local Indonesian philanthropies still remain marginal in comparison.

Global and Local

Worldwide philanthropic effort of this sort is well-documented
(http://www.google.com/Top/Society/Philanthropy, http://dir.yahoo.com/Society_and_Culture/Issues_and_Causes/Philanthropy,
and http://dmoz.org/Society/Philanthropy) but study of Indonesian philanthropy lags (http://www.synergos.org/globalphilanthropy/02/indonesiacsrodirectory.pdf).

A sobering recent book, Social Science and Power in Indonesia (edited by Vedi Hadiz and Daniel Dhakidae) cogently analyzes the historical constraints on foreign and local donors in developing just the social science sector (http://www.equinoxpublishing.com/social/default.htm). As a partial remedy, two Yahoo! academic lists, LISI (Lingkar Ilmuwan Sosial Indonesia, http://groups.yahoo.com/group/LISI) and LIKEPP (Lingkar Indonesia untuk Kajian Ekonomi Pertanian dan Pedesaan (http://groups.yahoo.com/group/LIKEPP) include very extensive self-help resources in their Files and Links areas. You are asked to join these groups to see and appreciate the exceptional organization and careful thought evident there.

A spell-binding recent book principally authored by Goenawan Mohamad (aided by other Indonesians), Celebrating Indonesia: Fifty Years with the Ford Foundation 1953-2003 ( full-text free at http://www.fordfound.org/elibrary/documents/5002/toc.cfm), stresses in a nicely personified way selective achievements in many fields through prolonged effort under difficult circumstances. Indeed, Ford , probably the largest private foreign foundation working in Indonesia, maintains a current vast searchable site and e-library of its work (http://www.fordfound.org/ideas). Just tap 'Search Ford Foundation' in the left panel, type 'indonesia,' and the relevant results page immediately appears.

Many Nations

One reason for such maneuver room may be the substantial multi-national character of private foreign philanthropies in Indonesia. Even if Indonesia's government developed an interest in controlling them, as it once tried (ultimately unsuccessfully) to do with local organizations classified as foundations (yayasan), there are just too many foreign donors now, often implicitly carrying difficult to ignore national flags, interests, and priorities.

Such an effort would also be very hard to separate from the sometimes intertwined extensive philanthropic work of bilateral official development assistance organizations such as
AusAID http://www.ausaid.gov.au/country/country.cfm?CountryId=30,
USAID http://www.usaid.gov/locations/asia_near_east/countries/indonesia,
JICA http://www.jica.go.jp/english, type 'indonesia' in its search box,
CIDA http://www.acdi-cida.gc.ca/CIDAWEB/webcountry.nsf/VLUDocEn/Indonesia-Overview
DFID
http://www.dfid.gov.uk/countries/asia/indonesia.asp and comparable agencies in many other states, not to mention innumerable multilateral organizations.

Which countries have the largest private foundation programs in Indonesia? There is no public or private master list. What follows is a somewhat capricious illustrative tour of a few better known programs with a net presence.

The Asia Foundation, in Indonesia just two years less than Ford, maintains special pages focused on its recent and current priorities (including full-text of several major studies)
(http://www.asiafoundation.org/Locations/indonesia.html). Oxfam International's Dutch affiliate NOVIB
(http://www.novib.nl/en) has long worked in Indonesia. Type indonesia' in its 'free text' search box
(http://www.novib.nl/en/content/?type=search) to find stories on recent projects.

Wellcome Trust, the large U.K. medical research funder, has ongoing projects in Indonesia (http://www.wellcome.ac.uk), type 'indonesia' in its search box). Toyota Foundation (http://www.toyotafound.or.jp/etop.htm) allows you to search its grants database.

German foundations, despite longstanding important work, get perhaps the least publicity. Most of their main websites are in German, but some lesser Indonesian and English alternative sites or pages are usually available.

Friedrich Ebert Stiftung publishes online in both languages (http://www.fes.or.id/eng/index_eng.html and http://www.fes.or.id/index.html). Try using the search box (look for the magnifying glass) on the Friedrich Naumann Stiftung site or go to its German-language Southeast Asia page
(http://www.fnst.org/webcom/show_article.php/_c-749/_lkm-1057/i.html).

Heinrich Boll Stiftung (http://www.boell.de/en/nav/275.html) runs a complex trilingual German-English-Spanish site with downloadable reports. Hanns Seidel Stiftung maintains a special English site on Indonesia (http://www.hss.de/homepage-e.shtml). Use Google text and webpage language translation tools (http://www.google.com/language_tools?hl=en) if you get lost on these sites.

Follow-up

In a unique bottom-up effort, Indonesians themselves do a quite respectable job in monitoring all these sources of grant opportunities. The highly active beasiswa (scholarship) list on Yahoo! currently has a staggering 28,000 members
(http://groups.yahoo.com/group/beasiswa).

For finding work after studies are completed, the vacancy list with over 26,000 members appears to be the largest parallel participatory Indonesian operation (http://groups.yahoo.com/group/vacancy). There are also over one thousand smaller specialized sector and location job lists on Yahoo! with lowongan (vacancy) in their names.

If you haven't yet figured it out, Yahoo! Groups (http://groups.yahoo.com) is by far the principal hangout for Indonesian list makers and list readers on the net. Over 5,700 lists on almost every subject appear just under the country category Indonesia (http://dir.groups.yahoo.com/dir/Regional/Countries), a total surpassed only by India (16,000) and the Philippines (7,000). There is even a list on Indonesian philanthropy (http://groups.yahoo.com/group/filantropi_indonesia).

Rectification of Names

2005-07-09T14:31:00.000-04:00

Here we go again, this time an effort to depose Philippines' President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo. She herself initially rose to the presidency through 'people power' in 2001, ousting then President Joseph Estrada. Back in 1986 the first 'people power' movement ousted the dictator Ferdinand Marcos, and Corazon Aquino assumed the presidency. Arroyo (GMA in the Philippine press), whatever her flaws, is no dictator. Both Aquino and Arroyo won direct presidential elections on their own steam.

In Indonesia, two recent presidential successions similarly occurred in the name of 'reformasi' (reformation), accompanied by waves of huge street protests as in the Philippines. Soeharto's dictatorship ended in this mode in 1998, Abdurrahman Wahid's ('Gus Dur') legislative mandate in 2001. Neither's successor was directly elected -- B.J. Habibie and Megawati Soekarnoputri, respectively. Indonesia did not get its first directly elected President, Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono ('SBY' in the Indonesian press), until 2004 through an overwhelming popular mandate. He trounced, among others, Megawati.

Except for SBY's victory, the other presidential successions mentioned, while much reported and studied, have most often been characterized and justified as stemming from genuine popular revolts which were in fact complex, often disguised elite coups of one type or another. Especially when dictators fall, ordinary people lack the means to bring such a change. Instead, they are mobilized by some configuration of elite factions. Even if these elites do not directly control the demonstration process, it is they who are the decisive powers bringing down presidents and determining successors. And it is they who sustain the succession myths -- 'people power' and 'reformasi,' in the present cases -- as tools to popularize and legitimate their rule.

Seldom do the 'new' elite power configurations, almost always a close photograph of alliances and antagonists dominant pre-succession, establish 'democracies' where none existed before. Rather, they claim they advance 'democratization.' In this sense, the people power and reformation movements in the Philippines and Indonesia fundamentally failed, even when a shinier facade of democratic institutions was put in place. What initially happened in these successions was only a change of government, not a change of regime -- the pre-existing power structure in the country. If new institutions do eventually begin to function as they ought in a liberal democracy, it takes a good while for this to happen, they remain fragile and conflict-ridden, and reversions to old orders can yet occur.

Due to this long-lingering instability, the Philippines and Indonesia still record high scores in measures of 'failed states.' True, they do not get ranked at the very top with the likes of Ivory Coast, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Sudan, Iraq, Somalia, and Sierra Leone. And in Southeast Asia, they are rated more stable than places like Burma and Laos (and would almost surely come out ahead of Timor Leste and Papua New Guinea, not often included in such ratings). But they do not come close to places like Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore, and Brunei. In a recent published study conducted by the Fund for Peace and Foreign Policy magazine, the Philippines and Indonesia are about on par with Vietnam.

Why? This study, at least, identified the main causes of state failure as uneven development (by a large margin, the most important factor), demographic pressures, delegitimation of state institutions, and security apparatus interventions. Such broad problems never get solved, or even much improved, in short time frames. Concrete tales of these abstract concepts comprise the daily fare of the Philippine and Indonesian press. Consequently, these factors are easily exploited by vocal old and emerging elites.

If democratic-oriented governments do surface temporarily in states prone to failure, they need to be nurtured and protected from blind ambitions and political ravishing of powerful elites angling for re-circulation. Especially elites purporting to speak in the name of the 'people' will retain the capacity to undermine the governments of Indonesia and the Philippines.

The Image Thing

2005-06-28T19:15:00.000-04:00

The Bush administration, still obsessed with improving the U.S. 'image' abroad, probably didn't get much solace from the results released June 23 of The Pew Global Attitudes Project newest 16-country survey. 'Anti-Americanism,' the study authors wrote, showed only modest signs of abating. The U.S. remained 'broadly disliked in most countries surveyed.' America's image problem is such that 'even popular U.S. policies have done little to repair it.' Attitudes toward the U.S. remain 'quite negative in the Muslim world.' A similar study in the July-August 2005 issue of the increasingly conservative Foreign Policy magazine by Anne Applebaum could do no better than ferret out pockets of 'pro-Americanism' buried in the unpublished cross-tabs of a related somewhat simplistic but even-handed survey effort.

Why this lust for a good 'image,' however measured? It might make some sense if 'image' determined specific assessments of U.S. policy. But Applebaum successfully argues that causation goes the other way. Policies, events, multi-faceted good relations over long eras create 'image.' Older Poles, who lived through Reagan's support of the anti-communist Solidarity movement, display much more friendly attitudes toward the U.S. than younger Poles who experienced none of this. Britons and Italians over 60, those who still remember the World War II alliance, similarly think much better of the U.S. than younger age cohorts in these countries. Such 'exceptions' abound.

There has been similar crowing over the slight rise in the Pew surveys of favorable views of the U.S. in Indonesia, up to 38% in May 2005 from 15% in May 2003, despite persistent decisive majority negative views of 57% and 83% in those two time periods, respectively. The Pew results do contain internal evidence that the upward bump in Indonesia was due in some measure to American tsunami aid. But the results also show that views of 'Americans' decreased over the same time frame. Some Indonesians apparently were impressed by the quick U.S. military humanitarian intervention in the Aceh post-tsunami emergency period. But more seem oblivious to the fact that relief contributions by 'Americans' reached as high as 30% of the American people, an almost incredibly generous outpouring of sympathy, the monetary value of which exceeded official pledged U.S. government aid.

Now the Indonesian press is inundated with accounts of the slowness of the Aceh reconstruction phase. Almost everyone concerned admits this will be a much longer, more uncertain, and more expensive operation. Will the modestly improved Indonesian 'image' of the U.S. maintain itself amid the pathos of the many, many Acehnese who have yet to be helped in permanent ways? The reconstruction effort will likely fall short. And emergency aid did not span 'eras' like those experienced by the Poles, British and Italians. In historical terms, the emergency period was very short. Its impact is self-limiting.

Widely unpopular U.S. policies like the Iraq war will also keep negatives high. Who knows, there may yet be long-lasting spillover effects. The May 2005 Pew results show that an astonishing 80% of Indonesians polled believe America could become a military threat to their country. Only 13% trust the U.S. to stop an instance of genocide. And a meager 2% feel able to recommend the U.S. as a destination for young Indonesians wishing to leave their country.

Even perceptibly improved bilateral links among topmost Indonesian and American political elites have not stemmed these deeper tides, nor are they likely to do so, even if they linger for the terms of current administrations in the two countries. Absent changed U.S. projection of force policies, or another spate of tsunamis -- and who would wish that -- America's still poor overall 'image' in Indonesia will stay little changed. And deservedly so.

What You May Find Here

2005-06-25T16:40:00.000-04:00

Sometimes sweet, sometimes outrageous looks at diverse events and writings I follow, especially about Southeast Asia, the Islamic world, American society, and curious happenings on the net.