Playing Politics: Power, Memory and Agency in the Making of the Indonesian Student Movement

• In Event: Bridging Region and Discipline: Social Movement Studies and Southeast Asia I

Abstract

Based on an ethnographic study of the Indonesian student movement, and building on identity and narrative approaches in social movement theory, this paper presents a novel theoretical approach to the multi-layered dynamics of student protest, by introducing the concept of ‘playing politics’. First, ‘playing politics’ refers to the process of acquiring activist dispositions and a ‘feel for the game’ of activism through playful socialisation. Second, it refers to the performativity of student protest, which involves a mimicry as well as mockery of institutionalised political roles and repertoires. Third, it refers to the ‘play realm’ of the Indonesian student movement, which has a ‘special license’ to protest not granted to other actors due to historical mythologisation; yet, there are limits to this license which are also subject to ‘play’, in the form of symbolic battles which the student movement engages in with the state, both over its protest targets and over the representation and control of its identity and agency as a legitimate political subject. ‘Playing politics’, then, provides an alternative perspective on the interplay of student agency and state repression, by re-embedding student movements in political culture as well as the collective and personal experiences of its actors. While the first part of the paper will illustrate these dynamics with the rise and subsequent splintering of the 1998 student movement, the second part will address the question of regional comparability. Can we identify specific patterns to student protest in (Southeast) Asia from this perspective of ‘playing politics’?

Author

• Yatun Sastramidjaja, University of Amsterdam