Interdisciplinary research is always a gamble. All too often it results
in a series of discrete articles or monographs with no very
clear connecting theme. When the interdisciplinary research is
applied to a political or geographic area such as Indonesia, the
danger is that the spatial limits will be the only common feature
of the products of the different disciplines. Accordingly, when the
contributions from various disciplines to the study of a particular
area produce genuine synthesis, the result is of unusual interest.
Such a synthesis seems to have emerged from the work done
on Indonesia under the auspices of the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology Center for International Studies.