Living Together Beyond Liberal Democracy: Examples of local decision-making in Indonesia

Our study discusses the term "Demokrasi" in Indonesia, the world’s fourth-most populous country. Indonesia’s political development after the fall of the authoritarian Suharto regime in 1998 has often been hailed as a promising democratization process, but has been experiencing tendencies of democratic stagnation and autocratization in the 2010s and 2020s. In our study, based on secondary literature, participant observation and long conversation in different parts of Indonesia, we make two arguments: first, we argue that the Indonesian term "demokrasi" has for a long time been part of state parlance. As such, the term "demokrasi" has also been used as an instrument of resource exploitation on the part of elites and has consequently lost some of its credibility for emancipatory grassroots efforts. Among others, however, it remains a concept of aspirations and hope. We discuss the genealogy of the term with its ambivalences and tensions. Our second argument is that people do not necessarily use the term democracy or local equivalents for their communal political participation. Often, they use other terms to describe their collective decision-making practices. We offer detailed empirical examples from a large group of villagers in the Poso region in Central Sulawesi, who counter the prevailing elitist economic structures with their own efforts of collective decision-making and economic planning.