Indonesia is a democratic republic, which rankles with the Islamist extremists, as they would purportedly want to see it become an “Islamic” state. Therefore, symbolic or not, Indonesia would always remain a target for extremists in their search of what they perceive as an Islamic utopia.

Be that as it may, Indonesia has remained robustly resistant to this extremist dominance despite many setbacks, starting from the Bali bombings in 2002. There have been alarm bells ringing over the past years about pervasive extremism; this is definitely a challenge, but the magnitude of this change is still very manageable. 

Indonesia has suffered comparably infinitesimally less Islamist terrorism than Syria or Iraq or Afghanistan or Pakistan, while having comparably far larger Muslim populations. This implies some structural resilience in the country that makes it robust against these phenomenon.

The reasons for this stoic robustness range from political to cultural to governance related paradigms, and many more. One of the biggest reasons is the sheer diversity of the country. Indonesia as a vast archipelagic nation has a huge number of ethnic groups, numbered at around 656 by some accounts, while the Indonesian Education, Culture, Research and Technology Ministry has recorded around 500 living languages.

Indonesia simply has so much access from the world and from its regions at large that it is impossible for Indonesians to live away from outside engagement, and the society has thus become multicultural and tolerant at its core.

Extremism thrives on marginalized people and vitriolic majorities hell-bent on curbing the lives of others, which is exception rather than the norm in Indonesia. One could argue about the dynamics of Poso in Central Sulawesi and Aceh which spawned a peculiar type of extremism, but the Aceh/Poso model is not at all ubiquitously pervasive around the country. In fact, though there are detractors, Pancasila with its message of inclusiveness holds much more traction than the centrifugal forces of extremism.

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