This article examines gotong royong as social citizenship in the second half of the twentieth century in Indonesia. Gotong royong was traditionally understood as a collective spirit among neighbours to strengthen economic and social resilience. However, the institutionalisation of the system through massive development programmes since the 1940s has influenced the common people's perception and practice of it. This article argues that the co-option of gotong royong as part of the discourse of nation-state building transformed the popular view of labour and capital mobilisation from an openly critical stance to apparent submission. Gotong royong became a means of social engineering and an ingenious linguistic strategy by which state elites orchestrated control over the making of citizens. Still, Indonesians have remained vigilant of their participation in gotong royong, and about the potential for its misuse by corrupt officials.

ABSTRACKThis paper analyzed the people’s practices of citizenship in Central Java during the 1950s using the conceptual frame of social risilience. The notion of risilience had so far been studied in terms of security, food and energy supplies, and social nets on natural disaster risk reduction. Meanwhile, the period of the 1950s in Indonesian history had attracted many studies to focused on political aspects, such as parliamentary system of governance, regionalism and the dreath of economic crises leading to a change in political regimes. During the 1950s the newly independent state of Indonesia had to struggle for physical, political and social infrastructures, partly as the post-Second World War recovery project.This paper showed that, regardless of the difficult situation and limited financial sources, the Indonesian people during the 1950s proved themselves to be risilient. They took an active part in the daily communal life activities. By using historical method in analysing several newspapers of the 1950s, this paper argued that the people’s participation in philantropy programs, social organizations and solidarity movements, significantly formed a strong social tie in the presence of the weak Indonesian State. The people showed a type of citizenship through which a quality of social risilience was performed and contested. However, it was hard to identified the institutional pattern in these practices of citizenship.ABSTRAK Artikel ini mengkaji praktik kewargaan sehari-hari masyarakat Indonesia, khususnya di Jawa, tahun 1950an dalam bingkai ketahanan sosial. Selama ini konsep ketahanan telah dipahami dalam konteks keamanan, ketersediaan pangan dan keberlanjutan energi, dan jaring sosial menghadapi darurat bencana alam. Di sisi lain, kajian tentang periode 1950an dalam sejarah Indonesia terfokus pada aspek politik menyangkut percobaan sistem pemerintahan, isu-isu regionalisme dan krisis ekonomi yang berujung pada pergantian rejim kekuasaan.Artikel ini bermaksud menunjukkan bahwa pada periode 1950an itu, praktik kewargaan sehari-hari masyarakat menunjukkan pola yang jika dibaca dalam konsep kontemporer merupakan bentuk ketahanan sosial masyarakat. Periode 1950an merupakan masa-masa awal kemederdekaan Indonesia dengan kondisi pasca perang yang membutuhkan pembangunan infrastruktur di berbagai bidang. Meskipun demikian, dalam kondisi struktur negara yang masih lemah itu masyarakat membuktikan kemampuan bertahan dan berpartisipasi dalam aneka dimensi kehidupan sehari-hari secara kolektif. Dengan metode sejarah untuk membaca berbagai berita surat kabar tahun 1950an sebagai sumber data primer, artikel ini menyimpulkan bahwa praktik kewargaan sehari-hari  dalam bentuk program-program filantropis, perkumpulan sosial dan aksi gerakan sosial merupakan penanda ketahanan kolektif masyarakat dalam menghadapi keadaan tak menentu akibat lemahnya negara ketika itu. Meskipun demikian, praktik kewargaan tersebut cenderung tidak memiliki struktur institusional yang baku.

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From the turn of the century up until the 1930s, public education under Dutch rule in Indonesia developed both quantitatively and qualitatively, but this expansion was interrupted, and even reversed, by the onset of the Great Depression. Focusing on schoolteachers in particular, this essay examines the trajectory of education policies in colonial Indonesia in response to the crisis, from the initial measures, to partial recovery in the mid-1930s, up to the Japanese invasion of 1942. The crisis ushered in the policy of indigenisation, which saw large-scale education reorganisation, including the substitution of European teachers with much lower paid Indonesians. Indigenisation was also a political response to the spreading of nationalist ideals through the growing number of independent schools run by Taman Siswa and the Muhammadiyah. Hence, the intention was also to transform Indonesian teachers into cultural agents who would propagate a government-formulated concept of cultural identity among their own community. However, indigenisation contributed to the gradual delegitimisation of colonial authority through the exodus of well-educated Indonesians who had been intended as docile imperial subjects.

In tsunami risk-reduction programs the survivors’ life history provides first-hand information about how they responded during and after a catastrophe. However, knowledge of tsunami-related experiences is not always systematically managed and institutionally communicated across generations. Some risk reduction programs lack of informed knowledge of tsunami-related experiences and consequently tend to be insensitive towards survivors’ life history. The aim of this paper is to examine how tsunami survivors constructed their tsunami-related knowledge and collective memories, taking the cases of Banda Aceh, Indonesia after the 2004 tsunami and Sendai, Japan after the 2011 tsunami. This paper, in particular, seeks to explore how the survivors’ experience helped to institutionalize their tsunami-related knowledge in a transferrable risk-reduction consciousness. Using first-hand interviews as well as interview recordings which were accessible online, this paper argues that in both cases of tsunami survivor cohorts, knowledge of tsunami-related experience was constructed through survival strategies and recovery processes in the aftermath of the events. Knowledge of survival strategies was constructed over time; and the longer period from the time of event, the more tacit the knowledge was. The process of knowledge construction was systematic in the Sendai case but was vernacular in the Banda Aceh case. However, in both cases the need for more engaged institutional communication between the government agencies and the people was evident.