This book examines how knowledge is produced in Indonesia and how its state research agencies, universities, and civil society organisations came to work as they do. It treats intellectual work as a form of labour, organised by the class relations and forms of capitalism in which it is embedded. It argues that educational and research institutions have been terrains on which competing class projects and different forms of knowledge production have taken shape.

The book traces this history across the development of Indonesian capitalism. It begins with the colonial origins of Indonesian knowledge production, when an anti-colonial intelligentsia emerged within institutions built to sustain colonial rule, while Javanese aristocrats consolidated as a bureaucratic rather than a landed elite. Under developmental authoritarianism, intellectual labour was increasingly bound to the project of national development, particularly after the destruction of the Indonesian left in 1965, as statist ambitions combined with foreign-trained technical expertise and military power. After authoritarian rule ended in 1998, market competition was layered onto the bureaucratic and oligarchic arrangements that survived, while national competitiveness emerged as an increasingly important language through which changes in knowledge production were organised and legitimised. Later chapters examine state research, universities, and civil society in turn, showing how each was reconfigured under these changing conditions and how the work of their knowledge workers became increasingly precarious. The book concludes by asking whether this growing precarity might also provide the basis for an alternative knowledge politics connecting critical knowledge workers more closely with the social groups their work addresses.

Inaya Rakhmani is Professor of Cultural Political Economy at the Department of Communication, Universitas Indonesia, where she was inaugural director of the Asia Research Centre and led it from 2020 to 2025. She co-edits the Journal of Contemporary Asia, is an elected member of the Indonesian Academy of Sciences, and writes on media, democracy, and knowledge production in Asia.