Ian Douglas Wilson

The figure of the ‘penyusup’—shadowy provocateur who incites unrest and pushes protest beyond the bounds of legitimate political action—has become deeply entrenched in Indonesia’s interpretive repertoire for understanding episodes of mass mobilisation. This trope functions not only as a rhetorical device but as a durable framework through which both state and segments of civil society narrate the transformation of peaceful protest into violence. It is argued that it also operates to obscure the political agency of marginal political actors, many of whom were at the forefront of recent protests.

Commentators have often cited a deepening of identity-based social fault lines across Indonesia’s vast sociopolitical landscape. Yet the country has experienced little of the kinds of communal conflict or electoral turmoil of near neighbours in recent years. Drawing on observations of electoral politics in Jakarta, this article argues that top-down electoral polarization bears little resemblance to how identity and difference are experienced and utilized as pragmatic resources in the urban politics of the everyday. This dynamic helps to explain why the parameters of electoral polarization have dissipated post-election and failed to translate into deeper forms of societal-level conflict.

Indonesia’s regional elections scheduled for 27 November will be the largest in the nation’s history and the first to extend to all the country’s provinces, regencies and cities. A Constitutional Court ruling in August that significantly lowered candidate eligibility thresholds was opposed by the House of Representatives. However, it backed down from an attempt to legislate around the ruling after widespread public protest broke out. Large party coalitions have nonetheless operated to constrain the parameters of regional electoral contestation, blocking popular candidates and delivering an increase in single candidate no-contest elections. What is emerging is an increasingly opposition-free form of electoralism, in which local and sub-national political elites broker agreements around power and resource sharing.

Security is a significant structuring force in Indonesian cities, with public and private security practices having multiple and overlapping implications for the daily lives of residents. These range from the patchworks of social segregation produced by privately securitised spaces of middle and upper-class residential enclaves, through to the daily existential challenges of securing access to essential resources such as housing, space and livelihood faced by the urban poor. Many sources of insecurity for residents, from the ubiquitous to public order regimes and the police, are also at the same time frequently guarantors of security. As such security, and its governance, acts as a reflection of and a catalyst for social, economic, and political divisions and interests. The paper explores the dynamics of political contestation over urban security governance in Jakarta, Indonesia’s largest urban centre, emphasising the blurred lines between private and public security regimes.  It does so via an analysis of the relational dynamics between militias and kampung neighbourhoods in Jakarta, highlighting tensions between ormas as hired enforcers of powerful clients, but also as highly dependent upon community approval. It also considers the growth in popularity of private security providers among the cities upper middle-classes, and the anti-democratic reconfiguration of urban public-private space.

Democracy is spatial by nature. Cities make possible, inhibit, or prevent different types of democratic practice, representation, and change. Street-based politics in Jakarta, such as for example, have driven some of the most significant changes of modern Indonesian history, from the student-led demonstrations of 1998 to the mass protests of the 212 movement. Similarly, proximity to state power has been crucial to civil society’s ability to provide advocacy and governmental oversight. The stark socio-economic contradictions of Jakarta and its perennial woes such as flooding, and congestion generate political tensions that challenge elite-preferred images of the nation and the veracity of narratives of development and modernisation. As such the capital has not just been the nations symbolic centre, but also a crucial spatial setting for Indonesian democratic praxis; a heterogenous and often chaotic space of mobilisation, contestation, conflict and advocacy. Nusantara represents, in this respect, more than a symbolic repositioning of the nation’s centre but a potentially significant shift in the spatial practice of democracy itself as an outcome of the disentangling of national government from a ‘nation in microcosm’ megacity. This poses important questions regarding how the new capital will re-spatialise relationships between institutional and non-institutional democracy, particularly within a broader context of democratic regression. Technocratic ‘smart cities’, for example, have been argued as inherently exclusionary and anti-democratic, whereas isolated purpose-built capital cities are often associated with increased corruption. Drawing on theories of cities as spaces of democratic practice and reflecting on the experiences of purpose-built capitals Brasillia, Putrajaya and Naypyidaw, this paper will consider the impacts, challenges and outcomes the moving of the capital from Jakarta to Nusantara may have for the spatial practice of democracy.

• By the end of 2023, there will be 271 interim regional heads who are appointed rather than elected, accounting for more than half of the regional leadership posts throughout Indonesia.

• The legal basis of the interim leader appointment process has been contentious and subject to challenge, especially when some of the appointees have a substantial term in office before the next election, or when they execute significant policy changes.

• Critics argue that handpicked interim leaders are beholden to those who have appointed them and would use the advantages of incumbency to promote central government interests, and unfairly favour some stakeholders over others in the 2024 elections.

• The phenomenon of appointed interim leaders has intertwined with renewed questioning by political parties and elites of the legitimacy and future of regional elections with senior government ministers, among others, proposing a return to the political appointment of regional leaders and the ending of democratic elections.