The post-Suharto era proved conducive for the expansion and re-examination of Indonesian history and historiography, both academic and popular. There emerged a veritable 'history industry' in the past 10 years as hundreds of titles have appeared that relate one way or another to history and memory. One characteristic of this develop-ment, as one may expect, is the dominance of the popular-type as opposed to the aca-demic or scholarly ones.Entitled Unfinished nation: Indonesia before and after Suharto, the book under review here is one in the more recent batch of work on this subject. By foregrounding the role of mass mobilisation politics in the nation-building process, it offers a pro-vocative interpretation of the history of twentieth-century Indonesia, as it goes against the grain of much of Indonesia's mainstream nationalist historiography.
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