Conclusion : Social Movements, Patronage Democracy, and Populist Backlash in Indonesia

Abstract

This concluding chapter focuses on the challenges faced by these different movements in postauthoritarian Indonesia. Having acknowledged the advances social movements have made individually and collectively, the chapter points to their structural weaknesses and failure to gain traction in the political arena as evidence of their enduring fragility. This fragility, it argues, is a product of the patterns that continue to dominate Indonesian society, namely clientelism, the reliance of extralegal means to achieve political outcomes, and the ever-growing strength of rival political movements, which seek to mobilize the disenfranchised for different, and often antiliberal, ends. This chapter contends that incrementalism is not sufficient in such circumstances if Indonesia's progressive social movements wish to prevail. Instead, the chapter concludes that they must continue to strive for “root-and-branch transformation of the social order,” with the goal of transforming Indonesia into a society based on ethical universalism, not particularism.