Indonesia's soft power gap is an institutional and capital problem, and the business community cannot afford to wait.

While global platforms seamlessly track millions of digital streams, Indonesia's music royalty system remains painfully manual, opaque and overly centralized. To understand why this structural gridlock persists, we must first demystify how music copyright actually works.

When confronted with external shocks, will ASEAN members continue to support one another, or will national interests gradually overshadow regional solidarity? 

True security isn't built on policy papers or steel, but on the enduring, human-to-human friendships that anchor the Australia-Indonesia alliance.

Prabowo’s foreign policy begins to look less like a collection of diplomatic initiatives, which is lacking, and more like the external dimension of an ambitious industrial strategy.

The most plausible path to optimal solutions may require trial and error, and such experimentation is obviously best pursued at the national, rather than the European, level.

To restore broken public trust and shield children from institutional abuse, we must replace outdated taboos with mandatory classroom body literacy by embedding adolescent reproductive health education in school curricula.

Some of the previous gloom has lifted from the market. The focus now turns to whether demand is strong enough to underpin higher price levels.

As two of the Indo-Pacific's largest democracies converge in Jakarta next week, India and Indonesia are moving past historical sentiment to forge a high-tech, maritime alliance that is destined to reshape the Global South.

What began as a signature government initiative has spiraled into an institutional disaster, where a toxic blend of military indoctrination, extreme fiscal bypasses and fatal medical negligence resulted in the deaths of five civilian trainees. Halting the program is not enough, the state must be held fully accountable for subjugating a grassroots civilian economy to a lethal, top-down military culture.

The shocking graft scandal within the National Nutrition Agency is a stark warning that good intentions cannot survive without robust oversight. If the president’s flagship welfare program can be so easily compromised, Indonesia’s heavily funded, opaque National Police force cannot afford to wait any longer for deep financial and structural reform.

By carving a permanent, legally protected blind spot into its financial system, Indonesia’s new bond shield risks turning the nation into a premier conduit for global money laundering. In a single legislative session, Jakarta may have traded a decade of hard-won international trust for short-term sovereign capital.

As water supplies across the globe come under growing strain, water-related considerations will shape economic policy and political decision-making as well as firms' investment decisions, risk assessments and corporate strategies.

The opening of the Embassy of the Republic of Albania in Jakarta marks the beginning of a new chapter in our diplomatic journey that began over 60 years ago, reflecting not only the profound transformations that our countries have undergone but also our deeply shared values as we continue to strengthen bilateral cooperation.

By weaponizing cherry-picked data and ignoring the far deadlier reality of cold temperatures, the WHO is once again sacrificing evidence-based public health to manufacture a costly, counterproductive climate emergency.

Behind the superficial stability of the latest United States-China summit blitz lies an enduring systemic rivalry, leaving an isolated Tokyo to step into the vacuum and anchor a fracturing international order.

As great powers trample democratic ideals in a ruthless scramble for strategic alignment, caught-in-the-middle nations face the constant threat of becoming mere collateral damage. Yet, a fierce countercurrent is rising: a fearless, unbought generation of youth refusing to let their freedom be bartered away by autocrats and foreign patrons.

Whatever order emerges from the current crisis, its durability will depend not only on deterrence but also on economic incentives that make conflict costly.

Indonesia’s chronic educational underperformance will never be solved by a top-down curriculum updates. Until policymakers focus on rebuilding foundational cognitive habits, like attention spans and reading stamina, long before students reach university, each new ministerial launch will simply deliver a fresh document to the same broken classroom.

The last El Niño in 2023–2024 threatened rice supplies. This one may be worse for farming, because climate change is adding extra heat on top of disrupted rainfall.

As geopolitical and technological shifts rock the region, Japan and ASEAN are evolving their 50-year "heart-to-heart" partnership into an indispensable anchor for Indo-Pacific stability and economic resilience.

As ASEAN deepens its energy ties with Moscow, the bloc faces a volatile new reality defined by long-range drone strikes deep inside Russian territory. To safeguard its economic future, Southeast Asia must balance the allure of vast Siberian reserves against the growing vulnerability of the infrastructure that delivers them.

The linguistic and social evolution of bahasa binan, particularly its entry into Indonesian popular culture, ironically highlights the continuing stigmatization and discrimination of the queer community from where it originated.

The Patriot Bond promises to fund national development, but its exceptionally low yield tells a different story. By offering sweeping legal immunity to wealthy investors, the vehicle risks morphing from an innovative financial tool into a toxic, de facto amnesty.

In a world of intertwined global value chains, the US and China have undeniably developed a relationship of “mutually assured economic pain.”

To fund its ambitious development goals without crashing the economy, Indonesia must shift its focus from raising tax rates to fixing the fragmented institutional machinery required to collect them.

The Hormuz crisis has pushed nations to rethink their energy strategies. Does that mean we should expect a dramatic reduction in fossil fuel use?