Join us for a talk with Dr Lauren Bakker, Faculty of Law, University of Indonesia. The (im)balance between state and non-state authority in today’s Indonesia is the subject of a collaborative research project carried out by Lauren Bakker (Radboud University Nijmegen) and Lee Wilson (Cambridge University). The project, a comparative ethnography of civil militia groups in four different locations with different ethnic and religious profiles in Kalimantan, Sulawesi, Bali and Java, looks to examine the securitisation of local governance in these field sites. In this presentation results will be presented from fieldwork carried out from June to August in two locations (East Kalimantan and North Sulawesi) during the first phase of the project. Departing from theoretical concepts of state control and sovereignty, the paper focuses on the manifestation of power in public and economic practice, the place of human relations, and on non-state authority as a modern form of (un)civil society.