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This chapter addresses the shifting ground of politics, religion, and media that occurred after the fall of Suharto's New Order regime in 1998. Within this context, the body of female dangdut singer/dancer Inul Daratista became a stage for a variety of cultural actors–from the most liberal to the most conservative–to try out or “rehearse” an emergent democracy in the post-Suharto “Reformasi” period of Indonesian history. The chapter maps out the social struggles played out over Inul's body and the ideological stakes, or “body politics,” that these struggles engendered. Inul's body articulates the forms of power relations that emerged in the post-Suharto era and the implications they have for discourses about Islam, pornography, women's bodies, state-civil relations in Indonesia, and changing forms of media.

The conclusion, “The Sense of an Ending,” brings the historical arc of this story to a stopping point, before the end of the struggle, with a monologue on the nature of leadership and responsibility by Eben Hezer Sinuraya. This leads to further reflections on subsequent events leading up to and beyond the 1998 Reformasi movement that led to the fall of General Suharto’s thirty-year New Order regime.

Indonesia continues to make steady progress strengthening its anti-corruption framework, adopting new anti-corruption laws, and prosecuting those who run afoul of them. At the same time, the level of corruption remains significant, as demonstrated by continued examples of public corruption including the high-profile eKTP case that has implicated at least 37 senior public officials for stealing hundreds of millions of U.S. dollars in public funds. Indonesia has a solid framework of anti-corruption laws, and recently added a focus on corporate criminal liability to its toolkit. Indonesia’s Corruption Eradication Commission (Komisi Pemberantasan Korupsi or KPK) is a bright spot of independence, professionalism, and progress for enforcing anti-corruption laws and holding corrupt judges, cabinet ministers, high ranking police officers, governors, legislators, and politicians accountable. Independent anti-corruption courts, and a skilled and well-functioning financial intelligence unit (the PPATK), are also key institutions in the ongoing battle to weed out historical and institutionalized corruption, graft, and cronyism. Indonesia’s current Reformasi era is still less than 20 years old, and as much as great progress has been made, it will take significant continued political will to combat wealthy and influential forces that continue to benefit from corruption and who will seek to undermine reform. Indonesia’s current president, Joko “Jokowi” Widodo, was elected in 2014 on a platform of reform and clean government, and the results of his upcoming re-election bid in 2019 may be a significant indicator of whether the progress made under his leadership will continue, or whether anti-corruption institutions and efforts in Indonesia will falter.

Within the context of Indonesia’s encounters with liberalism in late colonial and postcolonial times, this chapter examines Muslim discourses that are critical of both Western liberal ideology and its Islamist detractors. After problematizing the existing categories of Islamic neo-modernism, Liberal Islam, and Islamic liberalism, the chapter focuses on alternative discourses formulated by Muslim intellectuals from both traditionalist and modernist-reformist Islamic backgrounds during the Reformasi era when Indonesia transitioned from a military autocracy to a democratic system of governance. Islamic Post-Traditionalists draws on poststructuralism and postcolonial theory to offer an emancipatory trajectory for Indonesian Muslims in the twenty-first century, while modernist-reformist intellectuals have drawn on the social sciences to develop a new paradigm referred to as Transformative Islam. Instead of presenting sweeping ideas, this younger generation is more concerned with translating new regimes of knowledge into applied thinking about concrete issues, such as democratization, development, justice and battling corruption.

Chapter 6’s case study on Indonesia, as with the previous three chapters, begins with a description of Indonesia’s death penalty laws, the country’s recent history of executions, and a list of publicly known clemency grants from 1991 to 2016. Thereafter, as with the previous chapter covering Malaysia, Chapter 6 lists several counterbalancing explanations for Indonesia’s ambivalent clemency practice from 1991 to 2016. Of the four jurisdictions under study, Indonesia’s clemency practice is easily the most irregular, seemingly defined more by ad hoc case-based factors and immediate political considerations than by long-term, consistent policies on particular crime and offender categories. As Chapter 6 documents in detail, the inconsistency of clemency over time and between cases is in itself the notable trend in Indonesia. Chapter 6 argues that the medium rate of clemency in Indonesia’s death penalty system is potentially explained by several theoretically informed factors: leniency exercised at earlier stages of capital cases’ progress through the criminal justice system; democratization and Indonesia’s ‘rule of law’ politics in the post-Suharto (1998–) Reformasi (reform) era; the collective pardon of the remaining 1965 ‘coup’ political prisoners by President Habibie in 1999; and finally, Indonesia’s uniquely languid clemency procedures before streamlining reforms in 2010. The first two factors serve to inhibit clemency, whereas the latter two lift Indonesia’s clemency rate to 26–33 per cent, at the very minimum.