Indonesian Regional Policy in the Focus of National Research Schools: А Сomparative Analysis

Indonesia is the largest country in Southeast Asia, which has a serious impact on international processes in the region. At the same time, Indonesia’s foreign policy is shaped by a number of external and internal factors. Using the method of comparative analysis, the author aims to analyze the four most analytically developed national schools exploring Indonesia and its foreign policy. The criteria for analyzing the specifics of national schools are assessments by experts and researchers of Indonesia’s regional policy, its goals and role in decision-making processes on key issues of regional development including security issues amidst the intersection of the interests of the United States and China in Southeast Asia and the emergence of a new spatial dimension of the clash of these interests - the Indo-Pacific region. Special attention in the study is paid to Islam and its influence on the foreign policy course of modern Indonesia. The presented comparison of expert assessments of various national research schools of Indonesian foreign policy with a special focus on its regional policy makes it possible to identify specifics of national schools in the analysis of Indonesian foreign policy and suggest a set of factors which influence or shift the focus of research in accordance with the foreign policy of those states whose national research schools are examined in this article. The author comes to the conclusion that the perception of Indonesia’s role and place in regional processes in Southeast Asia differs among researchers from different countries and correlates not only with the national specifics of foreign policy analysis, but also with the goals and objectives pursued in the foreign policy of their state in relation to Indonesia, the Southeast Asian region and the broader macro-regional space, which is becoming an environment where the interests of various international players clash.