By Tito Ambyo
While Indonesia’s government dismissed recent protests, this op-ed argues they are a powerful, decentralized movement with deep historical roots. Defined by a profound ethic of citizen care – “Warga Jaga Warga,” – a new generation is fighting back against a democracy they feel has been corrupted by ruling elites.
Affan Kurniawan was simply trying to make a living. The 21-year-old online taxi driver wasn’t even part of the protests that erupted across Jakarta on Thursday August 28, when thousands took to the streets outraged by the Indonesian Parliament’s decision to grant itself pay raises worth up to twenty times the minimum wage. While protesters faced tear gas and water cannons outside the parliament building, Affan was just navigating the city’s chaotic streets, working, when police in an armored vehicle struck and killed him.
His death haunts me. Not only for its senselessness, but because it could have been me twenty-seven years ago. I was 18 and in high school when I joined the 1998 Reformasi movement that forced authoritarian president Suharto to abdicate. I remember older activists shielding us, teaching us what to do, keeping us safe.
That same ethic of care now manifests in what Indonesians call Warga Jaga Warga—citizens protecting citizens—a practice that has become the foundation of Indonesian resistance.
The gap between care among people and the arrogance of political elites could not be more stark.
Just two weeks earlier, Indonesians had watched Parliamentarians dancing in the chamber to a folk song sung by a student choir from the Defense University. There might not be anything wrong with the dancing itself, but it was seen as tone-deaf when the country is going through economic difficulties. When hearing about the criticism against them, one lawmaker, Ahmad Sahroni, dismissed the call to disband the Parliament as tolol – the worst kind of stupid. Another parliamentarian, Eko Patrio, instead of backing down, made a parody video showing him performing as a DJ in the parliament building. Responding to the protests, President Prabowo replaced the finance minister. It didn’t take long, however, for the new minister to once again display the stark chasm: He waved away the 17+8 demands as the concerns of a “small group” who would soon be distracted by “working and eating good food” once the country achieved 6–7% growth.
It was as if the new minister did not have a clue that his words would land on a nation in mourning and anger. It was not just Affan Kurniawan. In a separate protest, a 16-year-old student Andika Lutfi Falah died, allegedly after another act of police brutality. Meanwhile, 3,000 protesters had been arrested, including young activists like Delpedro Marhaen from Lokataru Foundation, online activist Syahdan Husein, and University of Riau student Khariq Anhar.
Despite widespread anger and disappointment with the government, Indonesia has also come together through an unprecedented process of healing and solidarity. During the protests, medical students set up street clinics, lawyers coordinated pro-bono defence, and food vendors refused payment from demonstrators. This solidarity has also extended regionally —with Southeast Asian “#SEAblings” using food delivery apps to send meals to Indonesian protesters by spoofing GPS locations.
From the outside, it might look like the protests were a sudden outburst, but the current moment represents the convergence of campaigns ongoing since at least 2015: land rights battles, environmental resistance against nickel mining, and labor struggles against systemic precarity, including protest movements by online taxi drivers. Each of these movements taught citizens that the state would not protect them—so they must protect each other.
Research by Amalinda Savirani and others reveal high participation in protest movements from young Indonesian students since 2019, intensifying through 2024–2025. Many of these are not elite university students but working-class youth facing immediate precarity for their future and their family—as researcher Rebecca Meckelburg noted in her interview with Talking Indonesia. To understand why, we need to go all the way back to the Reformasi movement in 1998.
Young people born after1998 have witnessed democracy’s promises systematically betrayed.
They watched President Yudhoyono (2004-2014) promise reform but deliver the Century Bank scandal which benefited elites while ordinary depositors lost savings. They saw Jokowi, the furniture-seller-turned-president embodying outsider hopes, push through the 2020 Omnibus Laws that gutted labor protection and stripped back environmental protections for mining, again benefiting elites, including people close to him. Meanwhile, his son Gibran rose to vice presidency through constitutional manipulation.
Their verdict? A wave of online and offline movements for democracy that are remembered mostly as a series of hashtags. In 2019, #ReformasiDikorupsi (“Reformasi Corrupted”) directly critiqued the failures of Reformasi. In 2020, #TolakOmnibusLaw (“Reject Omnibus Law”) was a rejection of the controversial 2020 Omnibus Law that gutted labor protections. In August 2024, #IndonesiaDarurat (“Emergency Indonesia”) became known as the “Blue Screen Resistance”, inspired by emergency alert system in a blue-tinged analog horror film on YouTube shared widely on social media. The video was fictional, but it was repurposed as a real call to action, warning that democracy was facing a constitutional emergency. Then, in February 2025, the same video resurfaced, but this time it was turned black, as a new hashtag, #IndonesiaGelap (“Dark Indonesia”), spread across the country.
Each movement ended swiftly, which may explain why Indonesian elites probably thought they could get away with it again by joking. But together they built horizontal networks, and through all of them the ethic of care – Warga Jaga Warga – remained constant.
The symbols may have transformed – Indonesians now rally under the One-Piece Jolly Rogers flag, Brave Pink symbolizing feminine courage, and Hero Green symbolizing workers (the color of the online delivery company where Affan Kurniawan worked). Yet marchers and social media accounts in the August 2025 movement also invoked Munir, the human rights lawyer assassinated in 2004; Maria Sumarsih, the woman behind the Kamisan protest movement (weekly vigils by families of state violence victims that have continued peacefully since 2007); and Marsinah, the trade unionist killed in 1993. The stories of these victims of state violence have been woven in past movements, too, which is reflected in another phrase that is often used in street and online protests in Indonesia “menolak lupa” (“refusing to forget”).
As a diasporic Indonesian, I witness how Warga Jaga Warga extends globally through groups like Melbourne Bergerak. This is not new—diaspora solidarity has existed since independence in 1945—but today’s digital networks enable real-time support: documenting violations, transferring funds, coordinating legal aid across borders. And minorities, like Chinese Indonesians and Papuans have also been sharing their involvements on social media.
Online platforms amplify care but also create vulnerabilities. Algorithmic spread is unpredictable videos can go viral, spawn responses, and forge connections, but they also create space for “buzzers,” paid online political operatives who spread propaganda and disinformation, and for the government to impose censorship. The fear of provocateurs runs deep, inherited from the violence of May 1998, when hundreds of Chinese Indonesian women were raped, on top of widespread looting and killing, which human rights activists said were orchestrated or exacerbated by the military to divert public attention from anti-government demonstrations. Yet protesters have developed verification networks and trusted information channels that protect citizens from manipulation —like sharing photos of people suspected of being provocateurs or arsonists.
The state, led by President Prabowo, cannot seem to comprehend resistance organized through horizontal care rather than hierarchy.
Officials look for leaders and activists to arrest or intimidate, demands to reject, social media conversations to infiltrate. Yet the movement has been called “rhizomatic”—like botanical rhizomes spreading horizontally underground through root systems, sprouting new shoots unpredictably. As Yatun Sastramidjaja describes it in her book, “today’s youth movements form a heterogeneous assemblage with multiple origins and nodes that expand in multiple directions.”
This rhizomatic movement, organized through Warga Jaga Warga, may not deliver immediate systemic change, but it persists despite repression.
From village networks to metropolitan protests, from high schools organizing to transnational food solidarity, Warga Jaga Warga reveals Indonesia’s majority: young, precarious, connected, ungovernable through traditional means, yet deeply committed to democracy and mutual protection.
Democracy is not dying in Indonesia. It is being reborn through citizens who refuse to abandon each other, who build care infrastructures of care while demanding institutional reform, who understand that protecting one another is the most radical form of resistance.
In caring for each other, Indonesians are not just fighting back—they are building the society they deserve.
Tito Ambyo is an anthropologist, writer, and journalist researching digital culture, storytelling and social movements based at RMIT University in Naarm/Melbourne, Australia, where he is also host of the Talking Indonesia podcast series.
This article is published under the sole responsibility of the author, with editorial oversight. The views expressed do not necessarily reflect those of the editorial team or the CEU Democracy Institute.
