The Timor green pigeon Treron psittaceus, endemic to Timor, Rote, and adjacent satellite islands (eastern Indonesia and Timor-Leste), is declining because of severe hunting pressure and forest conversion. During 2002–2025, we conducted > 1,400 field days of surveys throughout the species’ range. Prior to 2000, most records were from Indonesian West Timor. Since 2000, most records (93%) and nearly all individuals (98%) have been observed in Timor-Leste, primarily within Lautem District. The scarcity of recent records throughout much of the species’ range, including Camplong (last record 1991), Bipolo forest (last record 1999), elsewhere in West Timor (last record 2005) and Rote (four records of 1–2 birds during 2004–2013), suggests that only a small, declining population persists. The population in Indonesia is possibly nearly extinct (and probably functionally so), and that in Timor-Leste is predicted to be lower than current estimates suggest. We conservatively estimate the global population to be 100–500 individuals distributed across eight sites, and consider it plausible that the population size lies towards the lower end of this estimate. A population of > 50 birds is likely restricted to a single site, Nino Konis Santana National Park, underscoring the species’ precarious status. We advocate for a reassessment as Critically Endangered on the IUCN Red List. Effective action plans are required in both Indonesia and Timor-Leste. In Lautem, community-based conservation efforts will be crucial to reduce hunting pressure. Further surveys should focus on Mount Timau (West Timor), and Lautem, Manatuto and Manufahi Districts (Timor-Leste).

This article discusses the transformation of West Sumatran (Minangkabau) subjectivity-making through legal discourses in the late colonial period. Emphasis is put on the role of Minangkabau elites who adopted such legal discourses from Dutch colonial ethnographers, allowing them to position themselves as mediators between their Sumatran peers and the colonial government and to negotiate themselves towards political power. I argue that legal subjectivities played a dual role in these endeavours; they were developed to re-fashion Minangkabau elites as experts in colonial modernity and to project these new senses of self outwards to a wider public. A flurry of publications, from newspapers to monographs on custom and court manuals, facilitated the proliferation of legal discourses and engaged in multiple types of identity formation underpinned by law. This article investigates the different types of legal subjectivities espoused in these publications and their circumscription of everyday life within the rigidifying parameters of law.

This study investigates the causal impact of temperature on labour productivity within Indonesia’s household-based enterprises. We combine rich, household-based data on micro and small enterprises from the Indonesian Family Life Survey with historical temperature data to estimate the effect of temperature on labour productivity, which we measure as revenue and revenue per worker. Our empirical strategy leverages plausibly exogenous, time-varying temperature fluctuations within specific geographic areas. The findings reveal a significant negative relationship: a 1°C increase in the 12-month average temperature deviation is associated with a 14 per cent reduction in enterprise revenue and a 21 per cent decrease in revenue per worker. Furthermore, we find that the effect of temperature on labour productivity follows an inverted U-shape and disproportionately impacts smaller businesses. Our study highlights the vulnerability of the informal sector to rising temperatures and underscores the urgent need for targeted policies aimed at enhancing the climate resilience of household-based enterprises.

This article discusses the localised provision of basic services (health, education, livelihood support) during the COVID-19 pandemic in Indonesia, by taking the case of SONJO, a digital mutual aid community in Yogyakarta, Indonesia. Through a Foucauldian governmentality analytical lens, we argue that SONJO showcases contradictory ways in which a locally and digitally self-governed community supports citizens’ welfare and well-being during a crisis. On the one hand, the community facilitates redistribution of resources by its leaders and members, ensuring the delivery of social services to those most in need. On the other hand, the community’s activation of localised practices of sambatan—rural Javanese practices of mobilising common resources in time of need—normalises the neoliberal transfer of state responsibilities and decision-making for basic services to citizens. The case study helps unpack the intertwining of neoliberal ideas—which champion individuals as self-reliant actors—and Javanese principles of harmony that emphasise social togetherness, communality, and empathy. Together, they render acceptable the unpaid labour of community members in managing services for fellow citizens within a local context marked by pervasive precarious work, underdeveloped welfare support, and recurrent natural disasters that disrupt livelihoods.

This article examines contemporary expressions of human to more-than-human interaction through the lens of technoenvironments, understood as evolving networks that bind non-animate and animate life together, shaped by mutual agency, care, and resistance. We relate technoenvironments both to multinatural cosmologies recounting mythical origins of human society in Southeast Asia through the union of mountains and the sea, and to modern approaches derived from contemporary feminist political ecology. We explore performative practices which express and shape understandings of the co-becoming of humans and more-than-humans at case studies in Indonesia and Vietnam. The first analyses an art performance in Yogyakarta Indonesia, where participants from different classes, genders, and educational backgrounds co-create mandalas articulating their imaginaries of organic agriculture. Beans, plantlets, soil and plastics became actants in their own right. The second case studies performative protests by diverse citizens of Hanoi - students, families with children, artists, and members of the LGBTQIA+ community - in response to plans to fell more than 6,000 trees. This challenged the hegemony of science-based discourse by affirming the mutual affective relationships between humans and trees. In both cases, living matter such as trees, plants, seeds, and soil becomes agents in the performative representation of people’s entanglements with their more-than-human environment. We compare the performativity of environmental protest and art along the dimensions of 1) representation, 2) creative expression, and 3) multispecies relations. To conclude, we reflect on how the cosmologies of Southeast Asia inform current multispecies relationships in the context of technoenvironments both in Indonesia and Vietnam.

This article examines how courts in a diverse and divided society navigate tensions over a polarized religious issue. The incrementalist approach that defers difficult choices about state and religion through vague compromise has been defended in polities where achieving cohesion proves difficult. This article investigates how the court grapples with incrementalist logic underlying the regulation of interfaith marriage in Indonesia. To mitigate disagreements, the Indonesian Marriage Law has left the legality of interfaith marriage ambiguous and subject to constant negotiation and compromise. This article argues that the Indonesian Constitutional Court has failed to sustain this balance, as the court increasingly leans towards the religious aspect of marriage. Indonesian experience shows the complexities of court interventions on unclear legislative agreements and contentious issues in society. The Court adopted a rigid legal interpretation based on conservative religious views, which not only undermines rights and pluralism, but intensifies tensions and complicates future negotiations.

Public opinion surveys are an indispensable tool for studying politics in Southeast Asia. But publicly available data are often in short supply in the region. To this end, we introduce SIKAP, a harmonized and open-access dataset of 58 weekly surveys (N = 95, 923) conducted in advance of, during, and in the aftermath of the 2024 Indonesian general election. We describe the data collection procedures and assess the quality of the sample. We demonstrate its utility by analyzing the effects of two political events on Indonesian voters’ attitudes in almost real time. First, we show that a constitutional crisis in August 2024 where the coalition of then President Joko Widodo (Jokowi) defied the Constitutional Court’s rulings led to a sharp but ultimately temporary decline in the public’s approval of Jokowi. Second, we show that voters who supported candidates other than Prabowo Subianto in the general election report large and persistent declines in support for democracy in the aftermath.

As part of a project investigating the distribution of the Critically Endangered western long-beaked echidna Zaglossus bruijnii in western New Guinea, we report two new records of this rarely-recorded species in forests around Klalik Village in Sorong Regency on the Vogelkop Peninsula of south-west Papua Province, Indonesia. In the most recent IUCN Red List account, of 2016, the western long-beaked echidna is reported only from this Peninsula. It formerly occurred on the adjacent land-bridge island of Salawati, but is probably extinct there. Previously, we have also confirmed records of the species in Bintuni Bay (Teluk Bintuni Regency). Our new records of the species are the first confirmed sightings in Sorong Regency. We interviewed hunters and conducted spotlighting surveys, during which we observed two live echidnas in October 2023. Interviewees were asked about their knowledge of the western long-beaked echidna and if they had encountered the animal locally. Encouragingly for its conservation, local people believe the species persists across Sorong Regency. This species appears to be relatively inactive in dry weather and more observable after rain. Our findings suggest that the presence of this species in Klalik could provide an incentive for local communities to protect the Klalik forests from snaring for wild animals and to support mammal-watching, including spotlighting of echidnas as an ecotourism-based conservation programme.