About Us

History

The Power, Welfare and Democracy Project (PWD Project) is a follow-up to a long-term research study aimed to strategically support the democratisation process in Indonesia. This support is critical; due to the complexities of the existing procedural-oriented framework for democracy, Indonesia has the potential to slide back into an era of authoritarianism. The PWD Project continues established partnerships between academic communities and supports their efforts to:

1. Set a critical agenda for democratisation on the basis of a thorough assessment;
2. Empower pro-democracy actors by improving their capacity for research and analysis and
3. Nurture networking and on-going collaboration between human rights and democracy experts.

The primary objective of the PWD project is to support follow-up to the democratisation research project previously carried out under the auspices of the Norwegian Programme for Development, Research and Education (NUFU) and Norwegian Agency for Development Cooperation’s Programme for Master Studies (NOMA) titled “Power, Conflict and Democracy” (PCD).ⁱ The PCD project itself was a follow-up to an initiative of Demos,ⁱⁱ in collaboration with the University of Oslo (UiO). The PWD project extends and outlines the issues of democratisation that continue to warrant further investigation. In this regard, the PWD project relies on the basic framework prepared by Demos in cooperation with the UiO; but it extends its ambition by uncovering the dynamics of democratisation beyond the role of pro-democracy actors. The project’s methodology also deepens the assessment with a series of thematic studies designed to reveal the structural factors that are often overlooked by pro-democracy activists: namely, the relationship between democratisation and welfare development, accumulation and distribution.

Management and support

The PWD Project is currently managed by the Department of Politics and Government, Faculty of Social and Political Sciences, at Universitas Gadjah Mada (JPP UGM), in coordination with the Popular Control and Effective Welfarism (PACER) program. Operationally, the PWD Project is managed by the JPP UGM’s research and publications unit: the Research Centre for Politics and Government (PolGov). This management structure continues what the Centre respectably initiated for the Southeast Asian Social Studies (CESASS UGM) program.

The PWD Project’s work is supported primarily by the Royal Norwegian Embassy in Jakarta, with contributions from Universitas Gadjah Mada and Universiteit i Oslo.