Popular Politics of Representation: New Lessons from the Pioneering Projects in Indonesia, Kerala, and the Philippines

Abstract

A lthough it is true that the world-renowned postcolonial attempts at popular representation in Indonesia, the Indian state of Kerala, and the Philippines suffered from the subordination of democratisation to the cold war, anti-imperialism, and top-down politics, 1 the setbacks and new contradictions generated democracy-oriented groups against stat-ism, violence, clientelism, and coercive accumulation of capital for civil rights and public action on concrete issues. 2 In Manila in 1986, a peaceful people-power movement removed Marcos in spite of Maoist predictions that nothing but armed revolution would do. Indonesia, a few years later, witnessed the growing movement against Suharto. In Kerala, partici-patory politics took a similar direction although in different form with social, environmental, and educational activists initiating campaigns for literacy, group-farming, and alternative development based on partici-patory mapping of local resources. 3 A common challenge in each case lay in how to build cooperation between the rights-bearing middle-class civil society activists and broader groups facing marginalisation, exclusion, and rights deprivation; how to build alliances uniting quite disparate groups across social and physical spaces; and how to give such alliances an organised political base in Stokke_Ch11.indd 197 Stokke_Ch11.indd 197