Indonesia: Moral Force Politics and the Struggle against Authoritarianism

This chapter discusses moral force as the primary nature of student activism in Indonesia. Moral force implies that student activist movements are motivated solely by moral principles and ethics, uncontaminated by any involvement in politics. The idea also points to the notion of student separatism: students should not build alliances with other social or political groups who might pollute the students’ agenda with their own interests. However, the idea was contested by a generation of radical activists from the late 1980s, questioning the whether the student movement should be moral or political.