Internationalised oligarchy and selective neoliberal reform: the political foundations of Indonesia’s global capitalism

Since the Asian financial crisis, major Indonesian conglomerates have increasingly reorganised accumulation across national boundaries through foreign production, acquisitions, joint ventures and regional corporate networks. Nevertheless, such internationalisation poses a political and commercial problem: how does capital historically constituted through concentrated ownership and privileged relations with state power reproduce itself across different political economies? This article explains this shift as a process of internationalised oligarchy, in which the social foundations of oligarchically constituted capital persist while the institutional organisation of accumulation changes across jurisdictions. Drawing on post-crisis trajectories of Indonesian conglomerates and a within-firm comparison of the Salim Group across the Philippines, Singapore and Australia, the article develops the concept of differentiated political re-embedding. It shows that internationally mobile capital carries ownership structures, organisational capacities and political experience from its domestic formation, but is re-embedded through corporate alliances, regulatory institutions and state-business relations in host economies. Internationalisation also differentiates accumulation interests at home, contributing through contested state institutions to selective changes in regulation, economic diplomacy and regional market-making. The article further argues that internationalisation neither transcends domestic political economy nor simply reproduces it abroad: it transforms the spatial and institutional organisation of politically constituted capital.