50 Years of CSIS: Ideas and Policy in Indonesia, by Peter McCawley.

• Date: 01 August 2022
• Author: Grenville, Steve

50 Years of CSIS: Ideas and Policy in Indonesia, by Peter McCawley. Jakarta: Centre for Strategic and International Studies, 2021. Pp. 342.

To celebrate its first fifty years, Indonesia's Centre for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) has published a history authored by the Australian National University's Peter McCawley, a lifetime scholar of Indonesia.

CSIS describes itself as "a policy-oriented research institution that focuses primarily on strategic thinking in international relations, domestic politics and economic issues", but its remit and operations have stretched way beyond those of a conventional think-tank. It has been a direct and influential force in the policymaking process, close to President Suharto for the first two vital decades of his three-decade era and an important policy voice for over fifty years.

Thus, this narrative provides an account of Indonesia's transformation from the economic and political chaos of President Sukarno's Guided Democracy, which had risked turning the country into a failed state and regional pariah, to the Indonesia of today--an economically successful democracy.

In the 1960s, Indonesia transitioned via a...