The Creeping Hand of the State in Post-Reformasi Indonesia: Is Democracy in Irreversible Decline?
Year: 2019
Type: article
Abstract: There has recently been much hand-wringing and discussion about the global decline of democracy and liberal values.This debate is especially acute in Southeast Asia, where many recently democratized states appear to be back-sliding into authoritarianism and embracing illiberal values.In Indonesia, this can be observed in the increasingly influential role played by hard-line Islamic groups in shaping state policy, and concessions made by politicians to such groups, such as proposed anti-LGBT legislation.The state has also begun to encroach on the public sphere in worrying ways.While this does pose some fears about the future of liberal values in the country, this article argues that it is not an unexpected turn of events in a socially conservative country with under-developed institutions and weak rule of law that is working through the challenges of economic and political development.Rather, placing democratization on a pedestal and viewing it as a cure-all back in the 1990s created unrealistic expectations for what democracy was and what it could do.It minimized the complex, nuanced nature of how young democracies would actually struggle to balance the interests of a wide range of social actors, or that the beliefs and values underpinning democratic systems might change over time.What we are witnessing in Indonesia, and in the larger regional and global context, is thus not the death of democracy but the messy guts of the democratic process in action.
Author: James Guild
Language: English
Topic: Asian Studies and History
Subfield: Sociology and Political Science
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W3004223788