New Capital City’s Geopolitical Landscape

In changing global and domestic geopolitical context, the relocation and development of new capital city of Indonesia, Nusantara, is a strategic choice that implicates some serious challenges. As part of an archipelagic state, Indonesia’s new capital city is positioned in domestic and international geopolitical landscape dimensions using five driving forces such as resource, territory, space, power, and interest. For this reason, out of curiosity, we find it important to overview the new capital city from a geopolitical perspective. This chapter is based on a study that aimed to elaborate on interactions between the state, business, and society concerning the new capital city. The study took border regions including land and maritime boundaries, and it covered maritime access as significant factors of the new capital geopolitical landscape approach. The approach allowed us to unfold a domestic political landscape containing a triple-relationship of state, business, and society that showed their lack of coordination and their weak participation. Moreover, on the other side, we found that international political landscape supposes conflictual characteristics of Indonesia’s maritime boundaries, while there are porous borders in land boundaries and free maritime access. These are international conflicts between claimant states and societal conflict involving terrorist groups. Indonesia’s new capital city is strongly risky.