State Power and Agrarian Reform in Southeast Asia: Comparing Indonesia (1960–1965) and The Philippines (1988–2009)

Background Agrarian inequality remains a persistent structural problem in Southeast Asia, where colonial land tenure systems produced concentrated landownership and enduring rural inequalities. Indonesia and the Philippines adopted major agrarian reform programs, but these initiatives followed markedly different trajectories and encountered different forms of failure. This study examines how state power and relations with agrarian elites shaped these divergent outcomes. Methods This study employs a comparative historical approach based on historical research methods, including heuristics, source criticism, interpretation, and historiography. Primary and secondary documentary sources were examined, including legislation, government reports, academic literature, and historical studies concerning Indonesian land reform (1960–1965) and the Philippine Comprehensive Agrarian Reform Program (1988–2009). The analysis applies a relational perspective on agrarian reform and a state–elite framework to examine policy formation, state positioning, and mechanisms of reform failure. Results The comparison identifies two distinct mechanisms of agrarian reform failure. In Indonesia, the 1960 reform framework adopted relatively radical redistributive measures with limited accommodation of agrarian elites, but the program was terminated following the political transformation of 1965. In the Philippines, the Comprehensive Agrarian Reform Program endured for more than two decades but incorporated substantial compromises that protected agrarian elite interests and limited substantive redistribution. Thus, Indonesia experienced failure through political destabilization, whereas the Philippine program experienced substantive failure through compromises embedded in policy design. Conclusions Agrarian reform outcomes depend not only on legal instruments or administrative implementation but also on the political position and capacity of the state to confront entrenched agrarian elites. Sustainable redistributive reform requires structural transformation of land tenure rather than administrative land distribution alone.