State and Society in a Post-Authoritarian Indonesian City

A Study of Liponsos Keputih Surabaya

Dini Nurul Ilmiah

and Karnaji

Sociology Department, Universitas Airlangga, Surabaya, Indonesia

Keywords: equality, panopticon, domination of power, resistance

Abstract: This research examines the state and society relationship in the post-authoritarian era in Indonesia. Through

the exploration of the Liponsoso Keputih, a shelter for people with social-welfare problems in Surabaya,

this paper looks at the panopticon mechanism employed by the shelter and the forms of resistance carried

out by the residents in order to understand the relationship between the state’s apparatus and the ordinary

people in the state-funded shelter. It describes the everyday politics through which power and

subjectification occur and how they are reproduced in daily activities. Using a qualitative technique, this

research observes the everyday politics in Liponsos Keputih and interviews persons who can relate to the

information that this research needs. This work concludes that the state’s domination over the people in

state-funded social facilities remain, although the demand for an altered approach has grown since the 1998

political and bureaucratic reformation. This is depicted in the surveillance techniques and social control

inside the shelter which posits the occupants as the subject of the working power. To a certain degree, it

drives the emerging resistance carried out by the occupants who try to escape from the system of power that

the shelter produces.

1 INTRODUCTION

The collapse of the New Order regime in 1998

marked changes in many aspects of Indonesian

politics and societies. This moment is considered to

be the inception toward a democratic society in

which prosperity can be built upon the equality

found in politics, economy, law, society, and culture

in the frame of decentralised power (Aspinall and

Fealy, 2003). However, scepticism emerges along

with the later progression of democratisation

through which, as Nordholt (2003) argues, the

distribution of power is sometimes accompanied by

a particular form of authoritarianism. The extent to

which the equality of the people is upheld is still

under question, including for people with social-

welfare problems. This has also become an

important issue in Indonesia.

In Surabaya, the second largest city of Indonesia,

people with social-welfare problems are

accommodated in a state-funded shelter called

‘Liponsos’ (Lingkungan Pondok Sosial). The shelter

for people with social-welfare problems in Surabaya

was founded in 2013 according to the Municipal

Decree Number 3, 2013 (Surabaya Government,

2013). It also reflects the implementation of the

national constitution in which the state has

responsibility for helping people with social-welfare

problems. Generally, Liponsos aims to improve

people’s lives, as they are considered to have social-

welfare problems. People with social-welfare

problems are an individual, family or community

group who, due to a social-economic obstacle,

difficulty or disruption, cannot fulfil their (physical,

spiritual and social) needs adequately and

reasonably. Simply put, society is considered to be

prosperous if someone’s life is considered to be

culturally worthy, while those with lives that are not

"worthy" are considered to be people with social-

welfare problems, especially those whose existence

can be disrupted by the running of the system.

Liponsos is not merely limited to those have social-

welfare problems in the traditional meaning, such as

poverty or disability. It also includes people who

have been considered a ‘social anomaly or deviant'

like homeless people, prostitutes, transgender

individuals, beggars and so on.

Ilmiah, D. and Karnaji, .

State and Society in a Post-Authoritarian Indonesian City.

DOI: 10.5220/0008817401010106

In Proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Contemporary Social and Political Affairs (ICoCSPA 2018), pages 101-106

ISBN: 978-989-758-393-3

101

In Surabaya, there are two Liponsos founded by

the municipal government, namely Liponsos

Kalijudan and Keputih, known together as Liponsos

Keputih. Both are under the supervision of the

municipality of Surabaya. People who have been

accommodated in the Liponsos are usually referred

to as ‘a resident'. They come from several regencies

in East Java, in which most of them have been the

victim of raids in the city of Surabaya by the polisi

pamong praja or civil police (Tribun News, 2018).

In 2016, Liponsos Keputih had 1536 residents which

consist of aging people, the homeless, and people

with mental illness. Despite the fact that the

Liponsos Keputih annually returns the residents

back to their families, the number of its occupants

remains high. It is always over the capacity of the

building. Liponsos Keputih aims to accommodate

600 occupants, but every year, the residents total

more than 1,000 people.

The overcapacity of the Liponsos attracts public

attention, such as whether the occupants of the

Liponsos are well-treated. Responding to this

hesitation, according to their website, the head of

social services in Surabaya insists that the Liponsos

Keputih is able to accommodate its residents

properly. In addition to control over the food quality

served to the residents, the Liponsos’s management

also delivers events and training which aims to

empower the residents so then they have non-formal

skills that they can employ after their return to

society. This is not only to improve the quality of the

service that the government provides to the people

with social-welfare problems, but also to confirm

that the government is changing its approach to

social equality issues. The head of the municipal

social services asserts that Liponsos Keputih is not

‘the place to punish the deviant’ but that it is a centre

that empowers less fortunate people. This paradigm

follows what has been mandated in the 1998

political and bureaucratic reformation, which is that

instead of being repressive, the state apparatuses

should promote a persuasive approach in society and

posit themselves as a facilitator to empower people

within the frame of democratic political culture

(Ricklefs, 2001).

Within the context of the public shelter in

Keputih Liponsos, this article examines the extent to

which the changing paradigm of the state-society

relationship occurs in the local context where the

state and people are in a face-to-face situation with a

social services background. In so doing, this article

analyses the structural design of the Liponsos

Keputih building within which the occupants stay to

receive governmental service relating to the

problems that they have. Through the surveillance

system that the Liponsos Keputih employs, this

article aims to understand how the state treats social-

welfare problems. Furthermore, this article also

brings to the fore the occupants' experiences inside

the Liponsos Keputih to dismantle the position of

the occupants as well as to discern the meaning of

being ‘a resident' in the Liponsos Keputih. Their

experiences, to a certain degree, describe the way

that they are treated during their stay in Liponsos

Keputih.

1.1 Liponsos Keputih Surabaya

Surabaya is the second largest city in Indonesia after

the capital of Jakarta. Located on the North coast of

Java which links the northern coastal Javanese cities

and the Madura Island, Surabaya has functioned as

the centre for labour and commodity exchange in the

eastern part of Java since the late colonial era (Dick,

2003). Despite losing its prominence since the

establishment of Jakarta as the state capital during

independence, Surabaya has maintained its position

in the Indonesian social-economy since the

appointment of the city as the centre of Eastern

Indonesia’s growing industry. Thus, since the

colonial era, Surabaya has become the destination

for labour migration, both from the surrounding

regencies of East Java and outside the island along

with the growing industrialisation before and after

independence (Dick, 2003; Peters, 2013).

Overwhelmed with the number of migrants,

social welfare has emerged as a problem that the

municipal has to deal with. Since the colonial era,

land and housing were the major issues that the city

experienced when the landless-homeless migrants

occupied vacant spots in the city (Dick, 2003;

Basundoro, 2010; Colombijn, 2010). It produced

sporadic land occupations throughout the city,

particularly around public burial places, on the

riversides, and along the railway sides. The problem

of land and settlement also stimulates the emergence

of urban kampung, which is associated with the

settlement of stereotyping poor dwellings as the

source of urban problems such as crime, dirtiness

and irregularity (Peters, 2013; Basundoro, 2013). In

the 1980s, the municipal initiated a partnership with

poor people to improve their settlements, called the

Kampung Improvement Program (KIP). It addressed

several issues of the kampung, such as roads,

footpaths, water supply, drainage, sanitation and

waste management (Silas, 1992). Since then, the

removal of such problems in the city has been

ICoCSPA 2018 - International Conference on Contemporary Social and Political Affairs

102

gradually carried out to increase the quality of life in

the city.

The city's improvement project does not only

address the kampung settlements, but also urban

public spaces. By the 1997-1998 political and

bureaucratic reformation, the city began the

clearance of the public space from any form of

illegal occupation in search for a green and clean

city. This was apparent in the displacement of

people, particularly the poor, from public spaces

such as street-sides, riversides, city parks, markets

and so on (Peters, 2010). It included the removal of

pedicabs, street-side food stalls, street vendors, street

singers, beggars, and illegal shelters. For the

migrants who had no living space, the municipal

provided a shelter to accommodate them for a period

of time before they returned back to their hometown.

The shelter idea dates back to 1997. Since the

improvement projects were carried out, the

municipal prepared the shelter to accommodate

landless migrants in the city (Rulyani, 2010). The

shelter was located in Jl. Keputih Tegal, Keputih,

Surabaya. This was the first stage of the Liponsos

Keputih. At that time, this was used to shelter people

with social-mental problems such as the psychotic,

the homeless, beggars, prostitute women,

transgender individuals and aging people. Since

2010, the municipal built new shelters to separate

people with particular problems, such as a shelter for

children and the aging, a shelter for differently abled

children, and a shelter for people with leprosy as a

few examples. Recently, Liponsos Keputih has also

become for people with social and mental problems

or people who have been raided for particular

reasons.

2 METHOD

2.1 Research Approach

This research is a qualitative study that has

attempted to understand the state-society

relationship in the democratisation era of Indonesia.

In doing so, we have looked at the monitoring,

disciplinary, and supervisory practices in a total

institution called Liponsos. We used qualitative

methods because this type of research is difficult to

measure with numbers since it is closely related to

social interactions and social processes. To 'expose'

the practice of power, it is necessary to have

qualitative principles and methods in place that can

extract information from the informants.

The reality of Liponsos Keputih is the practice of

monitoring and normalising the residents. The

inhabitants, who in their daily lives spend their time

in the barracks, are always monitored to ensure that

they obey the rules. Over-monitoring provokes the

emergence of resistance in the Liponsos Keputih,

such as the breaking the roof of the bathroom.

During the data collection, we were immediately

involved and became part of Liponsos Keputih as

volunteers while doing observations as well as the

data retrieval process itself. The researchers stayed

at Liponsos Keputih Surabaya, sleeping and

spending the night in a cell to make a full

observation. Over time, researchers got in touch with

informants that met the criteria of this study.

The data collection in this study was flexible but

always adapted to the conditions of the field. The

data was collected through observation and in-depth

interviews. First, the researchers did the observation

part of the data collection. The observation used all

of the five senses. This allowed us to see, feel, and

interpret the world along with the various social

events and symptoms of it, as the research subjects

can see, feel and understand. In its definition, the

observation was a primary data collection procedure

that carried out by viewing, observing and recording

the behaviour and conversation of the research

subjects using the observation guidelines. During the

observation, in-depth interviews were also

conducted. This was to the information needed to

uncover the focus of the research.

3 RESULT AND DISCUSSION

3.1 Panopticon Mechanism in

Liponsos Keputih

The design of Liponsos Keputih puts the residents in

a restricted space situation. The barracks are made

like a cell with iron bars along both the windows and

doors. This allows the officers to monitor the

situation inside the barracks. This is what Foucault

calls a confinement technique (Foucault, 1977). The

residents may only exit the cell at the time allowed,

for skills training for example. Afterward, the

occupants are redirected back to the cell.

In the past, Liponsos used a confinement

mechanism inside the large barracks with no

partitions. The residents used to live together in the

large barracks with a locked gate. This model is

inclined toward facilitating communication and

planning, including plans to breaking the rules. In

2014, the design of the Liponsos barracks was

State and Society in a Post-Authoritarian Indonesian City

103

thoroughly reset and renovated to be what it is

today. The barracks are installed with partitions and

categorised into several parts to accommodate

different people and their irregularities. They are

separated in a clear space. This redesigning of the

barracks is quite effective in managing the

occupants. It reduces potential resistance and even

anarchism in the Liponsos, which used to be carried

out by the occupants. With the renovation of the

barrack design from the previous era, proven

anarchist actions by the residents has lessened. The

extensive Liponsos Keputih’s barrack design, which

in 2014 was then split into several parts, aims to

increase surveillance and reduce the number of

suspicious communications and networks among the

occupants in the barracks.

In Liponsos Keputih, there are particular places

for those considered to be breaking the rules. These

places are located in sectors A, B, and C. These

three sectors are devoted to the occupants who try to

break the rules or make chaos inside the Liponsos.

The occupants who are involve in these prohibited

activities are isolated in particular cells which the

officers call ‘the prison'. This shows there to be a

repressive and corrective attitude for those who

cause problems in the barracks. Furthermore, to a

certain degree, it also shows the dominant power of

the officers of the Liponsos Keputih. They have an

absolute authority to define what is right or wrong

and to determine the extent to which the occupants

deviate or not. In short, the officers have the

authority to determine if a person is guilty and the

punishment that follows.

By controlling the residents, the officers use this

position prestige to gain their obedience. The

occupants who roam after doing their obligatory

work outside of the barracks (cleaning the barracks,

for example) are hinted to by several symbols that

the officers can easily do such as movements that

tell them to be silent - with their forefinger placed in

the mouth. The sign of shaking one’s hands makes

the occupants automatically understand that they

must re-enter the cell. This practice exemplifies how

the Liponsos Keputih occupants remain inferior

when in front of the officers.

For Foucault, the shifting strategy of punishment,

from the openly displayed corporal punishment to

the non-physical punishment, indicates that the body

no longer needs to be touched as a target of

punishment. However, it does not mean that there is

no way to control the subject. In addition to the

body, another aspect that has become an important

tool used to produce a docile subject is called the

soul (Foucault, 1977).

The reality that occurs in the Liponsos Keputih

can be attributed to Foucault's thoughts. The officers

of Liponsos Keputih - especially those who serve as

security with a stout, firm and fierce performance -

have the authority to supervise and discipline the

occupants. With this authority, the officers are

entitled to walk around, to monitor the cell’s

circumstances, to control the cells and to drive the

barrack’s discipline by enforcing activities and rules.

In the previous era, the occupants never knew

that they were being watched by someone in the cell

appointed to do so by the officers. He 'recorded'

everything that occurred inside the barracks and

reported it to the officers. This surveillance method

was successful since the officers eventually thwarted

all of the occupants’ plans to riot.

Nowadays, Liponsos is installed with Closed

Circuit Television (CCTV) inside the barracks. The

CCTV monitoring system is monitored at the

security post, which makes the residents always re-

consider if they want to resist. The residents never

know when the CCTV is actually turned on and

monitored, and when it is switched off. The sign of

'this area is equipped with CCTV' seems to remind

them that they are being watched by a camera

recorder. The impact of this makes the residents

always feel anxious.

This is what can be said of invisible scrutiny. The

officers are entitled to know whatever they want

about the occupants. By knowing all the activities of

the residents, all planned events and models of

deviation can be controlled. The officers have

mapped out and understand the people’s knowledge.

According to Foucault, between knowledge and

power, there is a particular type of relationship that

develops (Foucault, 1977). There is no practice of

power that does not bring about knowledge, and

there is no knowledge that does not contain power

relations. Finally, it can be said that there is the

'conquest' of knowledge and the re-formation of

power relations between residents and the staff of

the Liponsos Keputih.

3.2 The Form of Resistance to the

Panopticon Practice in Liponsos

Keputih

The artificial resistance committed by the residents

is the expression of a dead-end and simultaneously,

as a way out of the rules and a departure from the

form of domination in Liponsos Keputih, Surabaya.

They are a group that does not have the courage to

take risks. This kind of resistance is carried out by

groups of residents who have no sufficient resources

ICoCSPA 2018 - International Conference on Contemporary Social and Political Affairs

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and power. They use soft means to express their

resistance. Dominated people tend to develop low

profile techniques. They appear as if they have no

desire to surpass or overthrow the existing power.

Many of the residents do not dare to struggle

because of the threat of punishment that they have to

endure when breaking the rules. In this case, their

repatriation will be inhibited if they try to rebel.

They tend to choose to be the subject of the rules

even though they do not entirely agree on the claims

truth by Liponsos Keputih Surabaya. The raids and

the imprisonment of the occupants mean that the

occupants consciously agree that they are guilty.

Yet, they are aware that the system of power has

subjugated them, which in turn forces them to feel

guilty. In this case, there is a form of hegemony. The

domination that occurs is the beginning of

hegemony. According to Gramsci, it works with the

idea that enduring the domination of the ruling class

is a way of dominating the ruled ones (Bates, 1975).

In Liponsos Keputih, despite the fact that the

hegemony has penetrated the occupants’ knowledge,

it does not entirely work since sometimes the

occupants try to escape by resisting the rules. Under

this oppression, resistance in various forms and

degrees occurs. In Liponsos Keputih, individual

hidden resistance is more effective when carried out

within the limitations of the barrack. The resistance

that they do in the barracks refers to the form

resistance that Scott (1985) formulated as a weak

struggle which is mostly carried out in their

everyday life, such as through speech, gossip and so

on.

The rather discriminative treatment of the

officers towards the occupants also triggers the

emergence of covert resistance. Giving freedom to

certain residents (especially the trustees) and not to

others causes the residents to feel that they are being

discriminated against by officers. The residents

express their disappointment through covert and

blatant resistance. On the one hand, covert resistance

is carried out by cursing the officers when they are

not there, cursing the occupants who are treated

better or telling the researchers and co-occupants of

their treatment. Blatant opposition refers to open

resistance, which entails risks. Some of them have

tried several times to use verbal resistance in the

form of blasphemy, criticisms, protests, and so forth.

The extreme resistance emerges when they reach the

climax of their discontentment. After repeatedly

complaining to the officers, and having been given

no freedom - even simply to get out of the barracks

for fresh air -, the residents decide to resist. The

latest happens is the eviction of twenty-three

occupants from the Liponsos. The latest were street

children, which are perceived negatively by the

officers.

4 CONCLUSION

The changing political and bureaucratic milieu

triggered by the 1998 reformation has been expected

to promote a more civil culture in Indonesian social

life. The long-reigning New Order regime concealed

civic life behind an authoritarian form of

government which allowed the state apparatuses to

undertake what they wanted so long as they were in

line with the leader's will. The moment of the regime

change is understood to be the coming of age of

democratic culture and the foundation of a better

civic life in Indonesia which is committed to

upholding human rights and maintaining equality.

The state should be less dominant in determining

public life. Nevertheless, this does not seem to

happen easily since the New Order legacy in

Indonesian politics does seemingly not allow lower

groups to have an equal treatment and role in public

affairs (Hadiz, 2000).

What Hadiz formulates appears in several

aspects, including in the social services exemplified

in the Liponsos Keputih in Surabaya. As this study

shows, the state’s domination remains in Indonesian

bureaucratic customs. The technology that the power

of the state apparatuses employs allows for the

reproduction and proliferation of power. Despite

resistance, the occupants - as the dominated group -

are still subject to being ruled and subject to the state

apparatus. This confirms the hesitation that emerges

on the democratisation of Indonesia, which would

bring in the fulfilment of basic rights for all people.

The technology of power in Liponsos Keputih

does not only accentuate the discipline that ensures

the working of the Liponsos. It is also the way that

the power of the state is reproduced in the living

system in the Liponsos. The panopticon mechanism

is carried out in a complex manner. Many

informants were not thoroughly aware that there

were invisible and unconscious monitoring

mechanisms, i.e. monitoring through a WhatsApp

group coordination, the 'spy' strategy and

understanding the deviant residents’ habits. This

produces domination that, regardless of the

democratic norms that Indonesia is working toward,

is embedded in everyday life in the Liponsos

Keputih in Surabaya.

State and Society in a Post-Authoritarian Indonesian City

105

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