By Norman Joshua
How did Indonesia’s military learn to rule through law? This essay argues that a “military-juridical nexus” between civilian jurists and army officers in the 1950s built the legal foundations of authoritarianism—transforming emergency powers into durable institutions that continue to shape Indonesia’s civil–military relations today.
Introduction
Across the world, moments of crisis have repeatedly opened the door to the expansion of military power. Populist leaders invoke emergency rule, armed forces step in to “restore order,” and parliaments and courts endorse extraordinary measures in the name of stability and national survival. Sometimes such power grabs arrive with soldiers in the streets. More often, however, they arrive through statutes, decrees and constitutional clauses. As political scientist Amos Perlmutter observed in 1981, modern authoritarianism often operates as “the rule of the few in the name of the many.”
The decisive question, then, is not only how autocrats and their armies seize power, but how such takeovers are rendered legitimate to the many.
In this case, Indonesia’s gradual democratic backsliding in the 1950s offers a revealing point of reflection.
On March 14, 1957, Indonesia’s president Sukarno declared a nationwide state of siege, placing the archipelago under martial law. This moment marked a watershed in Indonesian history, paving the way for Sukarno’s left-wing populist authoritarian Guided Democracy (1959-1965). It also enabled the armed forces to assume wide-ranging socio-economic and political roles, intervening in governance, policing, censorship, and business. When Sukarno was ousted in 1965 by the Army strongman Suharto, martial law structures eased the transition into three decades of military authoritarianism under the New Order regime (1965-1998).
Yet, almost a decade earlier, the foundations of authoritarian legality had already been laid.
Some of the most consequential work that enabled martial law happened not in the barracks or the streets—but rather in the Army’s judicial institutions, most notably the Army’s Judicial Directorate (Direktorat Kehakiman AD) and its Military Law Academy (Akademi Hukum Militer, AHM). It was there that civilian jurists and military-lawyers drafted rules and procedures—while also training their own cadre of legal operators capable of administering emergency rule in practice.
Together, these offices produced what I call as a “military-juridical nexus”—a network of military officers, civilian jurists, and legal technicians who endowed the Army’s expanding role with institutional design and juridical legitimacy.
Their work formed the scaffolding on which Indonesia’s authoritarian order would later be built.
The Jurists in Uniform
The process of rendering military power legitimate did not occur spontaneously, nor it was driven by coups or generals alone. It was built through an intricate and deliberate collaboration between soldiers and civilian jurists, who worked to translate emergency authority into durable legal institutions.
At the center of this world was Basarudin Nasution, a young lawyer from North Sumatra and graduate of the Rechtshogeschool Batavia (now the University of Indonesia Law School). Nasution was trained by renowned jurists Supomo and Djokosutono—who were strong proponents of European traditions of organicism and integralism. In 1951, Basarudin was invited by Army Chief of Staff Abdul Haris Nasution to establish the Army’s Judicial Directorate (Kehakiman Angkatan Darat) and serve as its first and only civilian director for four years.
One year later, Basarudin helped to establish the Military Law Academy (Akademi Hukum Militer, AHM) to train a new corps of perwira kehakiman—officers versed in civil, criminal, and emergency laws that could prosecute cases, draft regulations, and administer martial law in the field.
What looked like a purely technocratic reform was, in fact, a quiet restructuring of the balance between military and civilian institutions.
The AHM curriculum, taught jointly by Army officers and leading professors and jurists from Indonesian universities, placed emergency law at its core. Students learned not only criminal procedure but also the legal architecture of extraordinary powers in times of emergency. This training shaped an entire generation military-lawyers who became central to the military-juridical complex during both Guided Democracy and the New Order.
During Guided Democracy, AHM graduate Sutjipto became A.H. Nasution’s right-hand man in the martial law administrative bodies Central War Authority (Peperpu), Supreme War Authority (Peperti), and Supreme Operations Command (KOTI). Ali Said, another AHM graduate, later headed the Special Military Tribunal that tried those accused in the failed coup attempt of September 30, 1965. Most famously, perhaps, is Sudharmono—also an AHM alumnus—who rose to serve as Vice President, Minister of State Secretariat, and head of the Golkar party, presiding over a clique of AHM graduates embedded across judicial and administrative ministries in the country.
From the Classroom to the Legislature
As his students advanced through the Army’s hierarchy, Basarudin also played important roles in lawmaking. He was in the committees that drafted Indonesia’s first Defense Law (1954) and first law on the State of Emergency (1957). The latter sparked fierce parliamentary debate: some warned it revived colonial-era regulations, while others emphasized the need for a legal framework for martial law operations. When the bill finally passed in after three years of negotiations, it immediately provided the constitutional basis for Sukarno’s declaration of martial law in 1957.
Martial law expanded the military’s authority into every domain—administration, censorship, and the management of nationalized business enterprises. Military-lawyers coordinated civil-military cooperation, administered field tribunals, and oversaw censorship regimes.
It was during this period that the military discovered that legality could extend their influence more effectively than force alone, and the military-juridical complex became central to this transformation.
Basarudin himself embodied the military-juridical complex. In 1957, he became legal adviser to Army general Ibnu Sutowo, the longtime head of Indonesia’s first state-owned oil company, Permina. Three years later, as director of the Oil and Gas Bureau in the Ministry of Basic Industries and Mining, Basarudin drafted the Oil and Gas Law of 1960. This new law replaced the old colonial concession system with a new system of state contracts, which allowed foreign companies to operate as contractors to the state. This legal shift laid the groundwork for the Tokyo Agreement of 1963, paving the way for the Contract of Work and Production-Sharing Contracts that defined Indonesia’s oil governance throughout much of the New Order years and beyond.
As we see, the military-judicial complex came full circle. The jurist who once codified martial law and trained its operators also wrote the laws governing the country’s most strategic natural resource sector. This convergence was not incidental. The legal expertise developed to govern emergencies proved equally useful in managing natural resources under an authoritarian developmental state.
The Rule of Law in Uniform
Indonesia’s experience in the 1950s-1960s reveals that military authoritarianism does not grow from the absence of law, but from its strategic deployment.
The military-lawyers did not abolish the constitution, but they learned to interpret it to their advantage. Under their guidance, the state of emergency became not an exception, but a mode of governance.
The military acted as a constitutional actor—an institution that shapes constitutional meaning through the drafting and application of law. Decades before Suharto ideologically justified the Army’s guardianship of the state through the Dual Function (Dwifungsi) doctrine of the armed forces the military’s involvement in lawmaking, legal education, and civil administration already normalized its sociopolitical role.
Meanwhile, the story of this juridical-military nexus also complicates the familiar argument for colonial continuities. The New Order’s bureaucratic authoritarianism did not simply resurrect colonial institutions. It reengineered them through a post-colonial synthesis of legalism and militarism involving civilian and military actors. During the New Order, the law was not abolished—it was uniformed.
Why this history matters
Today, Indonesia once again debates the military’s constitutional powers and the scope of emergencies broadly construed. In March 2025, the Indonesian parliament amended the country’s Armed Forces Law, legalizing “military operations other than war” (MOOTW) as a core task of the TNI, while also expanding the military’s mandate in non-military issues such as cyber security, border management, and disaster management. More recently, a draft Presidential Order for expanding the military’s role in domestic counter-terrorism operations has invited deep concerns from Indonesian scholars and civil society groups. It appears that these recent legal “adjustments” are only the latest expression of the military’s constant search for legitimacy regarding their role in non-military affairs in post-Reformasi Indonesia.
In the 1950s, soldiers seek to rule not merely through coercion, but through law—anchoring their authority in legal texts rather than coups. In the 1950s, the army built law schools and legal corps to justify its growing reach under martial law. In the 2020s, it invokes legal modernization to reassert a similar presence in civilian life.
Across seven decades, the aspiration has remained the same: to ground military power in the language of legality rather than raw force.
Remembering how soldiers became jurists reminds us that authoritarian legality was never an aberration—it was a deliberate project of institutional design.
Across the world, from Ankara, Cairo, Naypyidaw, and Bangkok, militaries have pursued similar strategies by embedding themselves in the interpretation of constitutional law, administration of emergency statutes, and implementation of developmental mandates in order to normalize military interference in civilian affairs.
Indonesia’s past experience warns, however, that some of the most durable forms of authoritarianism are the ones that unimpededly get written into law.
Norman Joshua is a Research Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University. A historian of modern Southeast Asia, he studies social, political, and military history of Indonesia during the early Cold War.
This article is published under the sole responsibility of the author, with editorial oversight. The views expressed do not necessarily reflect those of the editorial team or the CEU Democracy Institute.
