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Jakarta Post
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Revenue losses in palm and coal: The price of weak control

President Prabowo Subianto's new plan to fight billion-dollar commodity fraud through a centralized state gatekeeper risks creating a monopoly far worse than the corruption it aims to cure.

3 months ago
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Security operations: A willful repeat of gross crimes against civilians

Driven by land and resource grabs masked as counterterrorism operations, the escalation of military operations in Poso and Papua are willfully exposing Indonesian citizens to a brutal campaign of violence and forced displacement. ...

3 months ago
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Promising ‘no new tax amnesty’ is not enough

The anxiety over Indonesia's tax amnesty is that the policy created a kind of legal catch-22: In its aim to close a past legal problem, it left the legal consequences open-ended, potentially creating a new legal past for the state. ...

3 months ago

The Latest

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G20 must remain central to global economic governance

From the crisis-driven boardrooms of the Global North to a historic shift in Global South leadership, discover how the G20 is being fundamentally rewritten to steer a fractured world through a relentless modern polycrisis.

3 months ago
Opinion premium

Analysis: Resource export monopoly: Prabowo’s risky solution to under-invoicing

President Prabowo Subianto recently delivered a striking announcement: his administration plans to gradually place exports of Indonesia’s natural resources under state control to combat alleged under-invoicing by resource exporters. While the proposal could help address persistent under-invoicing, it has also raised concerns among businesses and economists, who warn that it risks becoming a misguided solution that opens the door to rent-seeking and ultimately harms the economy and public welfare.

3 months ago
Academia

The clock is ticking for Malaysian politics

Whether the national polls are triggered by the explosive multibillion-ringgit fuel subsidy crisis or accelerated by cascading state-level collapses, the political alignment is fluidly shaping up.

3 months ago
Editorial premium

Show or short of force?

Indonesia’s flashy new fighter jets look impressive, but recent wars prove that expensive planes are useless without a powerful, layered missile defense system to back them up.         

3 months ago
Academia

Opaque oil deals around Hormuz test the petrodollar

There are growing signs that major Asian importers are adapting to the new reality by striking direct arrangements with Gulf producers.

3 months ago
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Setting the right course on maritime law enforcement discourse

An ongoing judicial review before the Constitutional Court concerning the criminal investigation power of the Indonesian Maritime Security Agency (Bakamla) exposes a structural problem of thinking upon maritime law enforcement. 

3 months ago
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Why presidential banter fuels public anxiety

The humor, sarcasm and barbed language utilized on stage represent a deliberate cultural attempt to construct a new form of state-approved common sense.

3 months ago
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A cold shower for the AI mania

Although generative AI tools have improved rapidly and now outperform humans across many tasks, the market's current euphoria may not be justified. With AI firms increasingly resorting to debt financing, it is worth pausing to consider all the things that could go wrong.

3 months ago
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Article 33 and Indonesia’s natural resource governance test

Indonesia's new export regulations on natural resources is a test of governance that draws upon a constitutional provision that mandates their use to ensure the prosperity of its citizens.

3 months ago
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From batik to botox: A brief history of status signaling in Indonesia

From an earlier age of Balinese tooth filing and Javanese courtly refinement to today’s SCBD culture of lip fillers and jawline contouring, the history of Indonesian status signaling reveals how power is continually rewritten onto the human body.

3 months ago
Opinion premium

Analysis: Rp 101 trillion fintech loans raise youth debt concerns

The Financial Services Authority (OJK) has reported that outstanding loans from financial technology (fintech) lending services, locally known as pindar, reached Rp 101.03 trillion (US$6.1 billion) as of March, underscoring the rapid expansion of Indonesia’s online lending sector and the growing difficulty of containing its risks. Of that amount, the aggregate non-performing loan risk rate, measured by the industry’s TWP90 indicator, which tracks loans overdue by more than 90 days, stood at 4.52 percent in March, significantly higher than the 2.77 percent recorded in March 2025.

3 months ago
Editorial premium

Deterring talent

Young Indonesian diaspora now question whether returning home to serve in public institutions is worth the risk if ambitious reforms can later be reframed as criminal acts.

3 months ago
Academia

Super El Niño? Prepare, but do not panic yet

Twin cyclones helped trigger massive ocean warming in the Pacific. But whether that leads to a strong El Niño is still uncertain.

4 months ago
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Balancing passengers' rights and airlines' survival in ASEAN

To save Southeast Asia's aviation sector from collapse due to geopolitical and economic crises, regulators must scrap outdated price controls and shift from penalizing airlines to sharing the responsibility of passenger care.

4 months ago
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From coronavirus to hantavirus: Ecosystems in crisis

As human activity shatters ecological boundaries, viruses once confined to the wild are finding dangerous new pathways into our world.

4 months ago
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The US and China must learn to coexist

The Beijing summit between Donald Trump and Xi Jinping showed that competition between the United States and China need not become a zero-sum struggle for supremacy. 

4 months ago
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ASEAN’s historic Marcos–Hung rice agreement

The year-long staple food agreement signed at the ASEAN Summit marked a major breakthrough for the region in facing the global energy and food crises.

4 months ago
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Risky reawakening of state-controlled commodity exports

it remains to be seen whether President Prabowo’s ambitious "single window" export policy will turn Indonesia into a global price maker, or will tight state centralization trigger a historic crisis of market trust.

4 months ago
Opinion premium

Analysis: Presidential Palace taps new media to expand outreach

The Presidential Palace has partnered with the Indonesia New Media Forum (INMF) in a move it says could significantly expand its social media reach, potentially adding up to 100 million views per day.

4 months ago
Editorial premium

50 bps for financial stability

This country is finding itself at a point where policymakers at the central bank and the government need to choose between faster growth or stability, we cannot have it all.

4 months ago
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Pragmatism is defining the new China-US trade order

This shift is best understood through the emergence of a strategy that prioritizes immediate corporate wins over long-term structural overhaul.

4 months ago
Academia

The Giant Sea Wall project: Climate adaptation or a costly folly?

Addressing the causes of land subsidence will determine whether the Giant Sea Wall works as planned, as a flood defense for Java's northern coast, or if it will lead to unintended consequences such as exacerbating ecological damage.

4 months ago
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Service delivery holds the key to social protection returns

Indonesia's Rp 508 trillion social protection budget can only achieve its true value when the government stops focusing on how much it spends and starts fixing the fragmented digital architecture that is holding it back.

4 months ago
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Sustainable economies will own the future

Though the political and cultural backlash against “sustainability” is real, so is the global economic transition toward cleaner energy technologies and electrification.

4 months ago
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Can Indonesia still make Big Tech pay for news?

A presidential regulation that depends on voluntary negotiation ultimately asks platforms to act against their own commercial interest out of goodwill.

4 months ago
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From sovereignty to accountability: Southeast Asia’s ICC moment

The case signals that Southeast Asia’s long-standing reliance on sovereignty and non-interference is increasingly colliding with growing demands for accountability.

4 months ago
Opinion premium

Analysis: Govt accelerates WtE push as national waste crisis worsens

The Bantar Gebang landfill in Bekasi, West Java, has once again come under scrutiny following a fatal landslide in March, in a new report that ranked it among the world’s largest methane-emitting landfills in 2025, highlighting the country’s mounting waste crisis. The government has since enacted Presidential Regulation (Perpres) No. 109/2025 to accelerate investment in waste-to-energy (WtE) projects, while state asset fund Danantara has stepped in to coordinate investment and operations nationwide. However, major hurdles remain, including regulatory uncertainty, high investment costs and environmental as well as public concerns.

4 months ago
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