What Indonesian Democracy Can Teach the World

Issue Date January 2023
Volume 34
Issue 1
Page Numbers 95–109
file Print
arrow-down-thin Download from Project MUSE
external View Citation

Read the full essay here.

Indonesia’s democracy is among the world’s most important both to understand and to defend. The world’s largest Muslim country has proven that democracy can emerge and endure in surprising ways and in a surprising place, with intriguing lessons for democratic emergence and endurance elsewhere. Yet democracy is regressing and endangered in Indonesia, in line with distressing global trends. This not only threatens the country’s 275 million citizens with the loss of their hard-fought freedoms. It threatens to deprive global democratic actors and activists of a successful example of the most plausible path to democracy in an age of democratic retrenchment: authoritarian-led democratization.

About the Author

Dan Slater is the James Orin Murfin Professor of Political Science and the director of the Center for Emerging Democracies at the International Institute at the University of Michigan.

View all work by Dan Slater

 

Image Credit: Ulet Ifansasti/Getty Images