Harmony and biopolitics: The discursive traces of the authoritarian regime in Indonesian communication scholarship

Harmony is a central concept in many Asian communication theories that are used to explain the cultural practices of Asian societies. However, there is no scholarship in communication in Asia that celebrates harmony more than Indonesia. In Indonesian communication scholarship, harmony is usednot only as a lens or perspective for understanding phenomena but also as an idealization and even manifests in practices that are nearly ritualistic. This study demonstrates that the excessive desire for harmony in Indonesian communication scholarship is a discursive effect of the authoritarian regime of the New Order 1966–1998. Harmony acts as a cohesive element within the concept of the integral state. Harmony becomes an instrument of biopolitics and serves as a modality for producing, circulating, and enacting power that subjects and governs individuals through a set of disciplines, even encouraging the de-individuation of the populace into a communal identity represented by the state as an institution. Indonesian communication scholarship, closely tied to the New Order’s authoritarian regime, actively promoted harmony for the sake of developmentalism doctrine. After the fall of the New Order authoritarian regime, the field of communication in Indonesia still maintains harmony in the reproduction of its academic discourse.