Contesting Indonesia’s Democratic Transition: Laskar Jihad, the Islamic Defenders Front (FPI) and Civil Society

Indonesia’s ormas laskar (social organisation militia) have always been a source of concern in Indonesia, and FPI (Front Pembela Islam—The Islamic Defenders Front) is particularly concerning. FPI became a major threat during the second term of the Yudhoyono government (2009–2014) and led the 212 protests of late 2016 and the toppling of Ahok in 2017. Over the past decade FPI has increasingly played a prominent role in channelling and amplifying hateful, if not violent, extremism, leading overt, public, sectarian campaigns directed against minority groups. In today’s Indonesia, issues of race and religion, at least as they apply in the political sphere, remain sites of aggressive contestation. The anti-Ahok campaign revealed how effective populist campaigns of engineered moral panic can be in the undoing of a political frontrunner. Nevertheless, the April 2019 election results show that Islamist ormas like FPI are not actually broadly popular. In the age of Trump, Johnson and Brexit it is all too clear that populism can be effective in changing the trajectory of democratic politics but populist campaigns and bellicose ormas remain dependent upon uniquely favourable conditions to succeed. It is important that Jokowi’s second-term administration targets bad behaviour—whether violent or merely hateful—rather than ‘dangerous ideas’. The horrors of the anti-PKI mass-killings of 1965–1966 continue to cast a long, dark shadow over Indonesian society. Ormas like FPI need rightly to be held accountable for bad behaviour, including acts of hate speech and incitement-to-hatred, but it is never a good idea to attempt to ban bad ideas.