Dicky Sofjan, Ph.D.
Core Doctoral Faculty, Indonesian Consortium for Religious Studies (ICRS), Universitas Gadjah Mada (UGM)
Since its inception in 2006, ICRS has been generously supported by the Ford Foundation. That amounts to almost twenty years of collaboration from providing core support to funding projects on tolerance, pluralism, sustainability, urban resilience and now polarization. Currently, ICRS is managing a grant from the Ford Foundation entitled “The Impact of Religious Tolerance and Faith-based Polarization on the Promotion of Social and Environmental Justice in Indonesia” (2023-2025).
This is part of what it called the “Global Initiative on Polarization”, which is primarily managed by Ford Foundation and its main collaborator, the Institute for Integrated Transitions (IFIT). IFIT is “an international non-governmental organization dedicated to helping fragile and conflict-affected states achieve more effective negotiations and transitions out of war, crisis or authoritarianism” (www.ifit-transisions.org). This initiative covers many countries and organizations around the globe that have been working on polarization, peacebuilding or conflict resolution.
On 7-9 February 2024, ICRS was invited to participate in the “Polarization Exploration Grantee Convening” in Cali, Colombia. One of the key objectives of the convening is to support organizations around the world “to design and implement programs that test strategic approaches to preventing and reducing polarization and its intersections with inequality, using learning-by-doing approach”.
The idea was to get the invited organizations to think together on how “the Solutions Spectrum”—a descriptive framework for solutions to polarization globally developed by the Institute for Integrated Transitions (IFIT), namely: dialogue and outreach, facts and narrative interventions, and structural reforms—can be useful as an analytical as well as a prescriptive tool.
Known as the birthplace for salsa dancing, Cali is a beautiful green city, which is located about an hour plane ride from Colombia’s capital city of Bogota. The lush green environment and clean river in the city provides a perfect getaway for the Ford partners to delve into the super complex and multidimensional problem that has beset many countries of the world.
Problematizing Polarization
It is said that polarization is a “hyper” or a “wicked problem” that requires multiple lenses and could potentially affect many domains and aspects of societal life. Yet, its definition is elusive. Both scholars and experts in the field have no agreement as to what exactly constitutes polarization, its boundaries, manifestations and implications to society. The whole group in Cali essentially agreed on a “bare minimum” agreement on the definition, which points to the clustering of groups in society.
Through various methods and techniques in the convening workshop, participants pro-actively engaged in an unconference, world café and fishbowl sessions, all designed to get the best of knowledge, insights and experiences from each and every participant, who came from different organizations, disciplines and contexts. Such an egalitarian practice may be quite common for international NGOs and CSOs alike, but academics tend to be stubborn at keeping the tradition of formal conferences, where senior scholars and experts are called in to present their views while others merely listen or pose questions to them. Thus, the Cali experience was enriching for both ICRS Core Doctoral Faculty Dr. Dicky Sofjan and Board of Trustees Member Dr. Agus Wahyudi, who represented ICRS.
Both Dr. Sofjan and Dr. Wahyudi shared the fact that Indonesia is a large country with 285 million strong population and is the largest archipelagic nation on earth with around 17,000 islands—stretched in three time zones. Of the 17,000 islands, 3000 of them are inhabited. Indonesia also has around more than 450 psycholinguistic and vernacular groups, each having their own customs and traditions. Although Indonesia is predominantly Muslim (87%), there are many other religions, including those that are served and not served by the central government. There is quite possibly also hundreds of indigenous beliefs stretching to all corners of the archipelago.
Indonesia is therefore inherently polarized. We have a mélange of races and ethnic groups, cultural practices, worldviews and political ideologies, which make the nation quite vulnerable to social disintegration and pernicious or toxic polarization. Fortunately, we have a number of unifying force that binds us together: 1) Bahasa Indonesia, which is taught in schools and tertiary education as our national language; 2) State ideology of Pancasila, which has played a strategic, moderating role for decades since its inception during the country’s independence in 1945; 3) historical seeds of tolerance, which has been transmitted through many generations.
Indonesians therefore like to see themselves as being a civilization that has been predisposed and deeply susceptible for more than a thousand years with influences from the Chinese, Arabo-Persian, Turkish, Indian, Austronesian-Melanesian, Malay and Western civilizations. Thus, diversity and pluralism are in our DNA. Even after centuries of brutal colonialism by European powers that be, Indonesia remains today quite an open and tolerant society with some flares of violence in different parts of the country during specific junctures of its modern nation-state history.
Today, Indonesia stands as the world’s largest Muslim populated country with the fourth largest population and the third largest democracy after India and the United States of America. Currently, we are number 16th in terms of real GDP, and therefore we are part of the G20 powerful countries. Furthermore, based on many political-economic risk predictions, Indonesia will soon become the fourth, if not the fifth, largest economy in the world in terms of GDP.
Indonesia is also a capital city of social media with the top largest number of accounts in Facebook, Twitter and other platforms. It is estimated that while our population stands at 285 million, the number of active smartphones in use is more than 365 million. This means that many Indonesians carry more than one smartphone or gadget everywhere they go. For many countries, the wide and deep engagement in social media have become a grave concern, as they have contributed significantly to polarization.
In 1997/1998, Indonesia experienced reformasi, a mass movement to dethrone the military government of the autocratic Suharto, who had ruled the country for more than 32 years. With this reform movement comes democratization, media liberalization, decentralization and regional autonomy, and many things in between. The human rights law and ICCPR were ratified, free and fair elections have been held, thereby ensuring rotational government. But even so, almost every election cycle, a spike in toxic and pernicious polarization occurs.
Three Major Facets of Polarization in Indonesia
Having all the traits of a potentially disintegrative and polarized nation, it is quite surprising to see how Indonesia for almost 80 years has actually faired quite well in the world scale of polarization, and how it has survived the many challenges of decolonization process, ethno-religious violence, political-electoral conflict, socioeconomic protests, and others.
Despite the resilience of the nation, Indonesia remains vigilant and are still facing three major facets of polarization:
- Religious-based Polarization
One tends to perceive that deep-seated religious conflicts are between and among religions based on the monopoly over absolute Truth. An extension to this problem has been clearly manifested in the struggle between the religion (agama) and the beliefs (kepercayaan), which for many decades have been secondary to religion. But we have also seen that religious-based polarization is internally located in each respective religion. Most religious conflicts are internal between the Catholics and Protestants, the Sunnis and Shi’as, the Buddhists and Taoists, the Hindus and their local variants. This is based on this idea of “dictatorship of authenticity”. Every religious person strives to achieve the authentic life and experience of religion. In Indonesia, religious polarization also occurs between the traditionalists (as represented by the Nahdlatul Ulama) and the modernists (as represented by the Muhammadiyah), although the latter has yet to turn to become pernicious.
- Identity-based Polarization
Historically, Indonesia has been gripped by the polarization of many ideologies i.e. nationalist-secular, nationalist-religious, religious-traditional, religious-modern, liberal/progressive and other forms of persistent ideologies. This pattern of ideologies remains to be reflected in the Indonesian electoral politics. What is more, the reformasi had in fact brought about a “conservative turn”, which has spill-overed to manifest in many different forms of polarization, including in the electoral field. The case of the Jakarta Gubernatorial elections, involving the Chinese political incumbent Basuki Purnama Cahya (a.k.a. Ahok) provides a landmark case for such toxic polarization. The competition between the traditionalists and modernists with the Salafists/Wahhabists, as a representation of an ultra-conservative of affiliation wing of Islam. This category of polarization is also able to be mobilized using ethno-national sentiments to pit against the non-Javanese groups—as the predominantly Javanese ethnic group—and the ‘others’. Of late, gender has also made its way to pose a challenge to national unity or integration.
- Environmental and Socioeconomic-based Polarization
Indonesia is a natural resource rich country with previously oil and gas deposits, minerals, gold, lithium, etc. These natural endowments unfortunately have become somewhat a liability for the Indonesian society, as they have created inequalities between the center (Jakarta) and periphery (Aceh, Papua, Moluccas and the likes of them). The socioeconomic disparity has caused violent resistance in a number of cases, especially when the interests of the local strongmen are denied or cancelled by the powers that be. As the rich get richer, and the poor get poorer, it is undeniable that the polarization could turn to become permanently pernicious.
In light of the above, setting the context is also important, as it relates to the future of Indonesia’s democracy. At least three are important to note: a) the shrinking civic space; b) the weakening and cooptation of civil society through state capture; c) the rise of social media, which has exacerbated the digital divide, while further diminishing civic space and public discourse. The task at hand now is to ensure that polarization does not become the only game in town.
