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

“In contemporary hybrid regimes where anti-government protests periodically erupt, a distinct mode of authoritarianism has emerged: one that governs not only through repression, but through the strategic mobilisation of emotion. This involves cultivating specific affective intensities and atmospheres that render individuals more receptive to authoritarian values and practices. Through these mechanisms, public sentiment is redirected, collective outrage is fragmented, and solidarity with democratic movements is systematically weakened. What is the political logic behind this strategy? This essay offers a provocative explanation: affective governance aims to prevent protest from expanding beyond its core participants by contaminating the movement’s legitimacy. Protesters are not only delegitimised politically but also disqualified affectively. Drawing on a governmentality perspective, I show how affective authoritarianism operates as a political technology that modulates emotion across digital spaces and converts it into a mechanism of social control. By embedding emotional cues within hashtags, influencer messaging, and algorithmic amplification—within platform systems that reward engagement and regulate visibility—the state ensures that these framings are not merely broadcast but gradually absorbed as common sense. These dynamics are organised through a set of recurring emotional patterns. Across the cases examined, I identify four dominant emotional repertoires that structure affective authoritarian governance: naming and shaming, social degradation, demonisation, and self-victimisation. Each repertoire gains momentum through digital affordances that enable the affective engineering of authoritarian power, shaping citizens not only in what they think, but in what and how they feel. This affective repositioning discourages broader publics from identifying with protest movements, even when underlying grievances are shared, thereby dissipating the momentum of democratic uprisings and sustaining authoritarian resilience without relying exclusively on overt coercion. I examine this framework through the case of Indonesia, where these dynamics became particularly visible during recent anti-government protests. I begin with qualitative content analysis and secondary social network analysis to trace the emergence, form, and timing of affective framing strategies promoted by state-aligned actors across digital platforms. I then draw on ethnographic research, including interviews, focus groups, and participant observation, to show how these framings are experienced, interpreted, and internalised at the micro level. To assess broader political consequences, I incorporate secondary survey data capturing how affective interventions are associated with the delegitimisation of protest movements and the normalisation of state repression. Finally, I extend the analysis through comparative case studies of political communication strategies in other hybrid regimes, including Malaysia and the Philippines, to evaluate the wider applicability of the framework. By theorising affective authoritarianism, this study advances the comparative analysis of digital authoritarianism by showing how regimes weaponise emotion through platform infrastructures to impede democratic uprisings. It demonstrates the affective conditions through which authoritarianism intensifies within formally democratic states, illustrating how Indonesia’s authoritarian past have evolved into subtler, digitally mediated forms of affective governance.”