Why Indonesians turn against democracy

Many Indonesians who welcomed the nation’s democratisation in 1998 now look on democracy with horror and shame. This chapter seeks to move beyond the focus on corruption and socioeconomic performance, which currently dominates both the literature and public discourse in Indonesia, to examine some of the deeper issues that might lie alongside such concerns, or for which they might serve as an idiom of distress. Pursuing a person-centred ethnographic approach, I show how the appeal of democratisation lies in its promise of new modes of acting and being in the world, and yet these modes of being can turn out to prove so distressing or uncomfortable that the subject turns against democracy altogether. I focus in particular on difficulties and ambivalences surrounding the expression, fulfilment, and disregard of one’s desires, opinions, and familial identifications.