Book reviews

Transmigration in Indonesia, by J M Hardjono. Oxford in Asia Current Affairs. Kuala Lumpur: Oxford University Press 1977; xv, 116 pp, 8 maps, 15 tables. £6.00.

Myths and Legends of Indonesia, by Jan Knappert. Singapore: Heinemann Educational Books (Asia) Ltd, 1977; 198pp. £2.40.     

Book reviews

The Indonesian Tragedy by Brian May, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1978, pp. xvii, 438. £8.95.

Comment fut tranchée la liane céleste, et autres textes de littévature orale bunaq (Timor, Indonésie), edited by Claudine Friedberg from the collection and translations of Louis Berthe, Paris: Société d'Études Linguistiques et Anthropologiques de France (Langues et Civilisations à Tradition Orale 25), 1978; pp. 294, 8 plates, 2 maps and several figures in the text.     

Mother-Die: Plant Names and Folk Beliefs

The use of the name mother-die for cow parsley (Anthriscus sylvestris (L.) Hoffm.) and beliefs associated with this name are examined, as well as the beliefs found to be essentially those of the twentieth century most prevalent in northern England. Other plants which have been called mother-die, plus other names given to cow parsley, are also discussed, as are folk beliefs associated with these names.     

US-Australia-Indonesia Trilateral Security? Conditions for Cooperation

Since the 1950s, US strategic architecture in the Indo-Pacific has been premised on its hubs-and-spokes model of bilateral alliances and security partnerships. Since the 2000s the US began working toward forging deeper interrelationships between its regional allies and partners. The emerging strategy ultimately aims to interlink long-standing allies like Japan and Australia, and also non-traditional partners in the development of a security network capable of maintaining the regional ‘rules-based order.’ In analysing the US-led triangular Indo-Pacific geometry, this article considers the prospects of an evolving and substantive US–Australia–Indonesia security trilateral. It does so by utilising Miller’s ‘conditions for cooperation framework’ to test the likelihood of greater cooperation between these three states. These conditions include cultural similarity, economic equality, habits of international association, the perception of common danger, and greater power pressure. It concludes that while there remain strict limitations on any formal alignment between the ANZUS partners and Indonesia, there are convergent interests in key sub-strategic areas in the maritime space and thus a viable path toward greater trilateral cooperation but not, as yet, formal arrangements.     

Practices of Illegalisation

This article contributes to theorising the often unrecognised continuities between the illegalisation of migrant and refugee mobilities as an effect of lawmaking or other state practices of border policing and immigration law enforcement and the illegalisation of the rights, claims, and juridical status of minoritised citizens. Against a backdrop of resurgent right-wing nationalisms, we pursue this transversal analysis of state practices of illegalisation to draw attention not only to labour subordination and disposability but also the more fundamental relationship between law and terror. The making of such regimes of citizenship takes place in obvious ways at the ostensible outer edges of nation-state territories. They are also replicated in the various spatial arrangements that ensure racialised dispossession within global cities, cities that are better understood as reconfigurations of settler-colonial cities. We argue that the study of practices of illegalisation allows critical poverty scholarship to better discern how sociopolitical categories and classifications that are central to wider processes of marginalisation and domination may arise or be reinforced as effects of the state’s legal productions of illegality.