Governing the Outrage: Affective Authoritarianism and Anti-Government Protest in Southeast Asia

In 2025, Indonesia experienced one of its most volatile political moments since the 1998 revolution. The immediate trigger was the killing of a rideshare driver by military personnel in Jakarta, which sparked weeks of demonstrations across major cities. At several points, the protests appeared poised to ignite a crisis on the scale of 1998 with the idea of “another revolution” circulated widely on social media and in public debate. Yet escalation never materialised. This article argues that affective governance played a decisive role in containing the protests. Existing analyses explain the crisis through authoritarian statism, militarisation, elite conflict, or deepening inequality. While these structural factors matter, they overlook how political power increasingly operates through the management of feeling. Through coordinated emotional reframing that cast protest as chaos, dissent as moral failure, and unity as civic virtue, the state reshaped public sentiment, fragmented outrage, and curtailed solidarity. The protests also revealed that Indonesia’s authoritarian past has evolved into subtler, contemporary forms of control that govern emotion rather than relying solely on overt coercion, most often through digital media. As digital platforms intensified and weaponised emotion, influencing both the scale of mobilisation and the state’s capacity to delegitimise dissent. Using a governmentality perspective, I show how affective authoritarianism operates as a political technology that mobilises and modulates emotion across digital spaces. Emotion became an object of governance, embedded in hashtags, influencer scripts, algorithmic amplification, and coordinated messaging, circulating through everyday digital practices and crystallising into common-sense judgments about authority, dissent, and national belonging. Drawing on qualitative social media observation, content analysis, and interviews with activists and civil society organisations, I identify four dominant emotional repertoires that structured the conflict: naming and shaming, social degradation, demonisation, and self-victimisation. Each repertoire gained momentum through the affordances of digital infrastructures that determine what becomes visible, what feels credible, and which emotions appear legitimate. These dynamics show that authoritarianism in Indonesia is not only imposed from above but emerges as a shared emotional and digital atmosphere. Affective governance does not require constant directives from the state; it is assembled through everyday communicative practices. Through these small but repeated acts, authoritarianism becomes a lived, affective environment rather than a purely institutional structure of rule. The Indonesian case illustrates how emotion, technology, and participation intersect to sustain authoritarian tendencies within formally democratic settings. More broadly, it suggests that the foundations of authoritarian support cannot be understood apart from the digital environments that organise visibility, amplify particular emotions, and normalise specific forms of political conduct. By foregrounding the emotional and digital mechanisms that underwrite authoritarian resilience, the article contributes to scholarship on digitally mediated emotion and the affective infrastructures that sustain contemporary authoritarianism in hybrid regimes. It shows how mass support and compliance are cultivated not only through institutional repression but through the everyday emotional modulation that now defines political life.