In the context of Indonesia, any attempt to understand what constitutes security hinges on the issue of “whose security?” Four or more distinct securities may be at issue simultaneously: the security of the state, the security of the regime, the security of the nation and the individual citizen. For a society composed of communal groups with distinctive ethnic or religious identifications, their perceived securities may also be at stake, making the interplay and competition among the various players even more complex and irresolvable.

The terms state, regime, and nation will be distinguished here as follows. The term “state” has two contexts, an external and an internal. In the former, the state is an actor in the international system, with a distinct territorial base and exercising sovereignty. In its internal context the state is usually equated with the set of institutions that organizes, regulates, and enforces interactions of groups and individuals within its territory. It is the state, in the Weberian tradition, that holds the right to maintain and exercise coercive force to maintain order and to settle disputes. But, when the agencies and bureaucracies of the state are difficult to define, or proceed separately or in competition, for instance, when the military acts to displace the legislature, distinctions become complicated. The locus of the state and the coherence of its functional capacities at any point in time may be tenuous notions. Thus, it is necessary to distinguish the state from the regime, where “regime” refers to the small set of persons who hold the highest offices in the state and/or are the elite that effectively command the machinery, especially the coercive forces of the state. The preservation, that is, the security, of the regime will perforce involve differing notions of threat and response than those entailed in the security of the state. Finally, there is the nation — a collective of persons whose self-identification on the basis of common ethnicity, language, race, religion, historical experience, common future or a combination of these factors is viewed as the basis for the expression of legitimate political identity and power. Simply sorting out the various national/communal actors with their contending definitions and demands for security presents great difficulties. What is of primary concern for this study is to avoid making assumptions that the security interests of the state, regime, and nation are always congruent and harmonious.