This article examines Ne Win’s attempt to construct a party-state in Burma. Previous studies have argued that Ne Win built the Burma Socialist Programme Party (BSPP) in 1962 as a political organization to camouflage his dictatorship and military rule. In this article I suggest that Ne Win tried to construct a partystate in the 1970s by changing the rules governing appointment to top state positions, but failed.
 From 1962 to 1970, the Revolutionary Council consisted of military officers favored by Ne Win, directors of the Ministry of Defense, and regional commanders of the Army. It began to change in 1971, when Ne Win formed the Central Executive Committee (CEC) within the BSPP for top decisionmaking. In 1972, he compelled most CEC members to retire from the military and did so himself. Many CEC members who concurrently held ministerial posts resigned in 1973, effectively separating the CEC from the military and the government. At the third Party Conference in February 1977, Ne Win began to change the type of people appointed to the CEC. Five new members of the third CEC were retired officers who had transferred from the military to the party in the 1960s and rose in the party. They were not former directors of the Ministry of Defense or former regional commanders, but party leaders. This means Ne Win began to shift his power base from the military to the BSPP.
 But in an attempt that came to light later, some party leaders tried to unseat Ne Win in the election of the Central Committee at the third Party Conference. Ne Win then purged 113 party members including new CEC members and appointed the fourth Central Committee in November 1977. Ne Win never again appointed people to the CEC who had risen through the party. Subsequently, until 1988, the BSPP functioned primarily to camouflage his military dictatorship.

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Indonesia’s 2004 elections have encouraged the view among the international community that the post-Suharto democratic transition is now being consolidated. This assessment is supported by the fact that both general and presidential elections, which embraced more than 150 million voters, were conducted peacefully. Moreover, the victory of Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, a popular presidential candidate challenging the incumbent Megawati Sukarnoputri, is widely recognized as a victory for ‘public opinion’, which has been disappointed by Megawati and her political party, the PDI-P. The disenchanted public thus voted against them, resulting in the birth of the Yudhoyono administration. This may reflect the growing importance of ‘people power’ in Indonesia’s national politics.
However, the impact of the 2004 elections on local politics illustrates different dynamics. This article — based on extensive fieldwork by the author — argues that the elections significantly contributed to the strengthening of the local power elite who had governed everyday politico-economic life, and this in turn effectively shrank the space for civil society in promoting democratic change in local politics. How and why this development occurred constitutes the focus of this article.
A close look at the local electoral process shows how the elite use democratic institutions, such as elections, to preserve their politico-economic benefits. To clarify this, we first attempt to elucidate the way in which local political power has been restructured after the fall of Suharto. The removal of Suharto caused the elite ‘iron triangle’, comprising the Golkar (the ruling party of Suharto), local bureaucrats and business circles, to largely collapse, and opened up space for a new power elite involving PDI-P politicians, local informal bosses, military commands, hoodlums (preman) and religious leaders, as commonly seen in West, Central and East Java. The growing competition for local power has radically facilitated money politics and political mobilization of preman. The use of preman for organizing ‘mass’ movement became an important device by which the elite gained access to local government resources, which effectively emasculated civil society in its effort to empower the ‘mass’ based on class/vocational identities. Assessing these changes is the key to understanding the impact of the 2004 elections in West, Central and East Java. Our comparative analysis demonstrates how elite practice has remained largely unchanged, how its power structure has even been fortified, and how there is now a grave risk that the sophisticated power elite will skilfully hijack the still-fragile democracy at the local level.

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This paper examines the relationship between President Gloria M. Arroyo and officers of the Armed Forces of the Philippines (AFP) in order to consider the connection between the military and politics. During the Arroyo administration, some officers of the AFP staged several coup attempts. However, those attempts all failed to topple the administration, and no coup occurred in its final two and half years. On the contrary, in a last phase of the administration, there was speculation that President Arroyo was conspiring to declare martial law to extend her grip on power in collusion with AFP’s high-ranking officers.
 Assuming that, despite the existence of discontent among officers, President Arroyo could win the support of generals and could build a relatively favorable relationship with the AFP, this paper examines what kind of and how the president build a relationship with the AFP. To examine these, this paper looks into the president’s manipulation of personnel affairs (appointments and promotions of AFP officers) and several factors which influenced her manipulation.
 This paper demonstrates that by appointing AFP officers who were personally close to her and who were loyal to her, President Arroyo strengthened relationship with the AFP. Additionally, it will be pointed out that this kind of relationship which is based on personal closeness and loyalty is a general characteristic of civil-military relations in the Philippines.

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This article examines the state ideology formation of the Ne Win regime (1962-1988) in Burma. Drawing on military documents and interviews with key figures, it depicts the interaction between the faction fighting within the military in the 1950s and early 1960s and the development of the future state ideology. I argue that understanding the military institution and the dynamics of military politics is essential to understanding the process and nature of the regime fromation.
After March 2nd coup d'état in 1962, the Revolutionary Council announced the organization of the Burma Socialist Programme Party (BSPP) as the only political party for guiding the revolution. BSPP's official ideology was The System of Correlation of Man and His Environment (SCME). SCME had been the state ideology until the fall of Ne Win's regime in 1988.
SCME was written by U Chit Hlaing who belonged to the Directorate of Psychological Warfare, the Ministry of Defence. He received the order from General Ne Win in November 1962 and wrote the draft based on his articles, a series of “namà rupà wadà”, published in Myawaddy Magazin in 1957 and 1958. Chit Hlaing wrote those articles as anti-communism and pro-constitutionalism propaganda under the intra-military leadership of Brigadier Aung Gyi and Colonel Maung Maung. They launched a number of initiatives to reform the military in the 1950s. One of them was to forge the military doctrine to ensure anti-communism and pro-constitutionalism.
However, the political structure of the military changed in the early 1960s. Colonel Maung Maung was removed in 1961 and Lt-General Aung Gyi lost his leadership in the military. General Ne Win formed an alliance with the hard-liners. It enabled the military took over the state on March 2nd, 1962. General Ne Win rejected pro-constitutionalism. But they were unclear as to the guiding ideology which would be taken to achieve “Burmese Way to Socialism”. Therefore General Ne Win ordered Chit Hlaing to make out a draft of the BSPP's offical ideology. It is ironic that the articles written under the principle of anti-communism and pro-constitutionalism became the document to legitimate one-party rule and political intervention by the military for 26 years.

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  Indonesia is widely regarded as a hotbed of transnational violent crime in Southeast Asia. Terrorists and criminal rings have developed cross-border networks rooted in Indonesia. These ‘non-state actors’ quickly emerged as major concerns for post-Suharto governments, posing serious threats to the national security and economy. In response, various ‘wars on crimes’ have been initiated in the name of combating these threats. This article aims to elucidate the politics behind the making of these ‘wars’ by examining the ‘war on drugs’ led by the police (and the national narcotics agency) and the ‘war on terrorism’ orchestrated by the army.
  I argue that the threat is undoubtedly real, but war campaigns are designed to promote a political strategy of instrumentalizing the threat of transnational violent crime. With this strategy, both the police and the army were able to deflect criticism, reclaim ground lost during the democratization movement, and articulate this revanchism in the legitimizing vernacular of ‘global wars.’ In this sense these security actors are hijacking the ‘violence of non-state actors’ as a Trojan horse to regain power, build budgets, strengthen institutions and undermine reform pressures.

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The Myanmar military seized power in a coup in February 2021. Senior General Min Aung Hlaing justified the takeover by alleging extensive voter fraud in the 2020 general election. The coup soon provoked an immense popular protest in Myanmar comparable to the 8888 and the 2007 Safran uprisings. The revival of military regime is now a serious worry after having a civilian rule since 2011. This article attempts to evaluate the meaning of this ten years.

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This article examines the transformation of bureaucracy under the Ne Win regime (1962-1988) in Burma, in an attempt to demonstrate the process of the military intervention into the civilian bureaucracy.

The modern bureaucracy in Burma was constructed under the British Empire, and the Indian Civil Service (or Burma Civil Service) was the powerful cadre of the colonial bureaucracy. The commanding position of the ICS or BCS did not change significantly with the coming of independence in 1948, since the centralized colonial hierarchy and promotion system were retained. However, General Ne Win tried to “destroy” the cadre and its network of civilian bureaucracy when the military took over the state in 1962. He believed that the bureaucracy was a by-product of colonial rule and it must be destroyed to realize “the Burmese Way to Socialism.” Ne Win transformed the civilian bureaucracy by the administrative reformation in the mid-1970s under the name of “Socialistic Democracy.” Consequently the transfer of military officers to the bureaucracy through “election” was institutionalized. This enabled the military to intervene deeply in the civilian bureaucracy and contributed to the maintenance of Ne Win’s dictatorship. This change of the relationship between the civilian bureaucracy and the military deffered greatly from the developmental states which appeared in (South) East Asia in the 1950s and the 1960s.

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Russia, perceiving the U.S. political actions in Eastern Europe as threats to its vital interests there, developed the concept of ‘Strategic Deterrence.’ According to Russia’s ‘Military Doctrine’ of 2014, this concept means countering non-military and military threats to Russia’s interests by non-military, conventional, and nuclear means. Nuclear weapons can serve three purposes within this concept: ultimate means, conflict localization means, and narrative offensive means. Russia officially shows its readiness to use strategic nuclear forces as ultimate means to counter conventional threats to the existence of the state, and to develop conventional forces for local conflicts. When Russian officials mention the use of nuclear weapons, it serves as a narrative offensive means, which they expect will incite fear among the adversaries’ populations and weaken their united will to confront Russia, and thus fulfill the role of a non-military means of the ‘Strategic Deterrence’ framework. Russian military might think of what I call ‘conflict localization means’ in this paper, popularly known as an ‘escalate to de-escalate’ doctrine, a posture of using nuclear weapons to persuade adversaries to cease further military actions in a local conflict. ‘Military Doctrine’ of 2014 and other factors show little evidence of the existence of such a posture, but do not necessarily exclude the possibility. Partly to enhance a nuclear ‘narrative offensive,’ the possibility of use of nuclear weapons as a conflict localization means is made deliberately ambiguous. The Russian military did officially seek to realize the conflict localization means in the 2003 reform document, and debates on this matter continue. The ‘Grom-2019’ military exercise in October 2019 showed a possibility of forming a unified command and control not only of strategic nuclear forces but also of local-level weapons such as Kalibr and Iskander cruise missile systems with nuclear warheads. The issues of the nuclear threshold and strategic stability will depend on further development of forces and doctrines of Russia and the United States.

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