The Technological State in Indonesia: The Co-Constitution of High Technology and Authoritarian Politics

Sulfikar Amir's recent book, The Technological State in Indonesia: The Co-constitution of High Technology and Authoritarian Politics, is a welcome addition to the growing body of literature on state-led technological development in Asia. This examination of Indonesia's “New Order” technological institutions and state politics uses a historical sociological approach and engages with books on similar topics, such as Chalmers Johnson's MITI and the Japanese Miracle (1982). Johnson, who coined the term developmental state in his book, argued that Japan rose to the position of the world's second-largest economy in the second half of the twentieth century because its bureaucratic institutions, most notably its Ministry of International Trade and Industry (MITI), were inclined toward development. Unlike the United States' “market-rational” planning, which leaves it to the market to decide the fate of industries, the developmental-state, “plan-rational” thinking concerns itself with what industry...