Some celebrated the event as a milestone. Others, more skeptical, saw strategic camouflage rather than sincere change.

A year on, questions linger: What does JI’s dissolution mean? And more urgently, how do we ensure its shadow does not reappear, decentralized, digital and dangerously undetectable?

This is not just a policy or academic issue for me. I once studied in a pesantren (Islamic boarding school) affiliated with JI, and my former roommate became one of the Bali bombers.

Now, as a scholar and activist working in Preventing and Countering Violent Extremism (P/CVE), I view JI’s disbandment as both a professional challenge and a deeply personal reckoning. I have seen how ideologies mutate long after an organization collapses.

To be fair, JI has taken bold steps. In coordination with Densus 88, the National Police’s elite counterterrorism unit, they organized public forums in Jakarta, Surakarta, Semarang, Surabaya, Ambon and Lampung. I attended several of these sessions and interviewed not just JI members, but also their wives, children and even Densus 88 top brass.

These events, packaged as deradicalization dialogues, revealed a deeper recalibration.