Dear Colleagues,
This paper comes out of a conference I attended in the spring, and is very rough and preliminary. In the original, I was asked to do a comparison of Philippine and Indonesian transitions, but most others at the conference were reflecting on the Arab spring, and as the conversation progressed, we decided that my paper should try to do that as well. But the task was to write about Southeast Asia in ways that allowed me to pull lessons for the analysis of the Arab Spring, and in particular to suggest things that analysts should look for. That means I needed to develop a more lesson-seeking approach to my subject matter, and I’ve tried to do that here. This is my first attempt to actually work with the dynamics of contention framework, and though I’m not happy with this draft, I’m closer than when I started. I’d be grateful for any comments or criticism you may have.
Still, in key ways, this is a paper that promises more than it delivers, and that mainly reflects where I am in the writing phase—smack in the middle of it. What it does not deliver, though promises in how I’ve advertised and introduced it, is a gleaning of lessons from my Southeast Asian cases for application to those in the Middle East and North
Africa. I have some lessons and most now think in systematic ways about Arab Spring, and do some readings. As I revise this, I expect the Southeast Asia section to shrink and the applications to… section to expand.
So, in short, thank you for reading this very preliminary draft.
Vince

Regime Transitions, Anti-dictatorship Struggles, and the Future of Protest in
Democratizing Settings
Vince Boudreau
The City College of New York
The “dynamics of contention” research program (DOC) contributed significantly to the study of social movements and protest in many ways, among them by indicating how we might appreciate and grapple analytically with contingency. That capacity has had wide implications, and promises powerful benefits in the analysis of what many call democracy movements. Two particular benefits emerge most clearly. First, in ways that theorists of revolutions would appreciate, the DOC program revises earlier tendencies to see upsurges in struggle, from their very inception, in ways defined by their ends.
Mobilization processes are contingent phenomena with a variety of endpoints, and can turn on any number of critical junctures (before which turning, we cannot really describe the action on the street as revolutionary, democratic or reformist). Democracy may not be a defining objective of so-called democracy struggles, but something that emerges from the interaction of people interested in a whole range of different things—in state power, in revenge, in avoiding arrest, in ending human rights violations. Democracy and democratization may be an established movement goal from the outset, or a kind of settling point that all agree upon, at least provisionally, over the course of struggle.
Democracy can be a way of framing several entirely different political programs.
If democracy is a contingent, rather than inherent objective of struggle, it probably require analysis in light of on-going, historically rooted contentious processes— and the pattern of democratic consolidation (that most optimistic phrasing) require the attention of contentious politics specialists no less than that of democracy theorists. A host of questions follow. If democracy movements do not always begin in the search for democracy, what happens to other interests or orientations mobilized into the struggle?
After the transition, do all activists accommodate themselves to new political rules and objectives, and if so, with what consequences? Will revolutionaries still pursue state overthrow? What factors influence movement trajectories in the new dispensations? In unlocking the role that contentious politics plays in democratic transitions, one needs to look both backwards and forwards from the transitional moment to identify how patterns of struggle carry forward to eventually help define relationships between a citizenry and the new system’s emerging institutions.
What of the new system itself? Have conceptualizations of democracy helped or hindered our understanding of how social movements interact with emergent democratic or hybrid regimes? Many describe democracy, once established, as a naturally preferred

and so politically inevitable system, hampered in the end by mainly coordination and communication problems. Others see it as mainly self-regulating, designed around processes that domesticate recalcitrants toward political moderation via electoral competition. But the idea of democracy as an automatically stable resting place is a thin fiction, primarily because it treats threats to democracy as exogenous to the democratic process. Accordingly, theorists (particularly those writing for a policy audience) caution against a hard-line backlash, but imagine that democratic procedures, properly organized, would cool passions and resolve conflict. Guided by such assumptions, democratization efforts often impatiently pursue early elections and the construction of strong civil society organizations, even in hotly contested post-conflict settings..
These core policy programs of the democratization agenda contain glimpses of some suppressed assumptions about what motivates activists: a desire for a fair political system, demands that core rights be protected, and some interest in transitional justice.
But if all manner of activists find themselves in democracy struggles, and the relationship between activists and democratizing goals is a contingent one, we should concentrate our inquiries around questions that get at that contingency, examining how differently positioned activists engage processes of struggle against authoritarian regimes, how processes of struggle influence activist collectives, and how the movement emerges into the new dispensation and interacts with the emerging political order. For the purposes of such inquiry, we should, in particular, operationalize a conception of democracy as a mode of political competition, rather than as a system that delivers stability, or justice or something else. We must then ask how activists, in the particular social formations in which we find them, are likely to engage that mode of competition (in the particular institutional formations that they find it.
). What relationship, in particular, will emerge between demands that establish the parameters of politics—the new rules and institutions that are the architectural substance of a democratization process—and the content of politics: the content of policy, the allocation of resources, and the new dispensation’s distribution of power and voice?
A significant number of analysts set out to explain transitions to democracy as if social movements were more or less epiphenomenal to a process driven by elite realignment, defection, and contestation. Even when democratization theorists bring mass mobilization back in, they often treat it as a contributing factor to elite efforts.
Social movement theorists, in contrast, more often ask about factors that allow movements to “succeed” of their democratizing objectives. What would an approach that marries the two perspectives look like? It would, I think, seek to explain the relationships between the mobilization processes that create pro-democracy activists and processes of regime fragmentation that create democracy advocates with some sort consequential institutional positioning. In analyzing that relationship, it would examine the character of interests and social relationships brokered into movement formations, and find out what happens to them. It would, in short, acknowledge the centrality of how social movement stand in the larger transition process, and make the relationship between democratization and other movement programs an explicit object of study.
This paper attempts to develop an approach to these questions. In it, I begin with

some broad brush reflections on two Southeast Asian cases that I know quite well
(Indonesia and the Philippines) and attempt to tease from them more general questions about the relationship between political contention, regime transitions and post-transition dynamics. I then pivot from those Southeast Asian cases to consider some broader and more general theoretical propositions suggested by these cases, with, it must be admitted up front, some largely superficial references to the transitions in North Africa and the
Middle East. In executing this turn, my objective is less to answer questions than to raise them, and to call attention to some important lines of comparison between the MENA cases and those in Southeast Asia. I begin to theorize the post-transition contention by establishing the different ways in which they were situated in situating it in what may also have been very different anti-dictatorship struggles, transition processes, and emergent institutional settings.
In the abridged account, I am most interested in calling attention to what I hope is a useful distinction in what democratization is , and to show how two elements of the process interact differently in the two cases. I argue for the analytical utility of looking at democratization processes, and the interaction of activists with that process, in terms of efforts to: 1) write new political rules and 2) use those rules in substantive competition over resources and opportunities. Of the first question, I will be concerned with how participatory and sustained the process was. Of the second, I will examine how dynamics of political competition change activists and the social relationships in which they are embedded. In relationship to how both play out, I will examine two political dynamics closely associated with the DOCs program: polarization and brokerage, because both seem to have consequences for how legacies of struggle are transmitted to post-transition politics. I use reflections on these dynamics to ask both how activists influence the movement toward or away from democracy, and how the shifting terrain of a regime in transition influences activism and social movements.
In order to set up this investigation, I begin by constructing two very stylized accounts of the Indonesian and Philippine transitions, designed to draw attention to several of their key features. I’ll describe these features in more detail below, but their core elements include the following: how stable and comprehensive, and diverse were anti-dictatorship movement social relationships? How were these different strands (in cases where there was diversity) pulled together—that is, how did brokerage operate in that process? How did the transitional process reinforce or disrupt those relationships, and what was the relationship between efforts to write, and to use new political rules?
Finally, what patterns characterize activists’ engagement of participatory institutions?
Many social movement accounts are primarily interested in establishing how mobilization process occurred and what contention looked like. I am most interested in establishing how mobilization, struggle and regime transition influences how activists position themselves in the new regime, and what clues that position may hold for subsequent governance. Together, these questions help illuminate whether the struggle for democracy unifies movements or fragments them, whether it divides movements from other elites actors, and how social relationships and obligations that pass through the transitional process factor into subsequent movement politics (and what that may say about contention, participation and democracy).

Dynamics of Contention in Three Arenas: The Stylized Accounts
In what follows, I adopt a path dependent approach to the two narratives, asking what legacies of past political dynamics get carried forward to influence politics after the transition. The accounts emphasize elements of contention already highlighted in this paper’s introductory pages: the weight of social relationships on movement politics, the influence of transitional contention in driving movement actors toward or away from one another, or toward or away other elite actors in the transition and beyond, and finally, the sequencing and impact of efforts to reconstruct and use new democratic processes and institutions. The accounts that follow look at three different periods in the process: the anti-dictatorship movement—with particular emphasis on the way that movement enters into the final, democracy movement phase, the transition itself, with particular emphasis on the way it reshuffles political and social relationships, and the subsequent construction of a new governing system.
1. Anti-Dictatorship Movements and Democracy Movements
Institutions of struggle that developed to resist the Marcos and Suharto dictatorships could not look more different. In the Philippines, the 1972 declaration of martial law accelerated an existing mode of social movement organization in the partylinked and state-power oriented multi-sectoral movements. Across the political spectrum, movements developed programs for national power and integrated the more finely grained programs of movement “sections” (i.e. farmers’ groups, labor unions, student or youth organizations) into that larger struggle. Movement networks were differentiated functionally, and a broad range of networks, oriented around the different points of the ideological compass, took shape. In Indonesia, with very few and limited exceptions, activists were allowed neither to organize nor to concatenate into expansive networks.
Protest was therefore more ephemeral, and more closely demanded the resolution of specific problems in particular communities: that, for instance, a specific dam not be built, or a new traffic rule or toll be repealed. The reasons for these variations need not detain us at present—but lie in histories of how the dictatorship originally pushed itself onto the scene, and how its subsequent repressive policies interacted with opposition efforts. The point for the moment is that movement patterns, once established, set the stage for the imprint that subsequent contention would leave on movement institutions and practices.
1.1 The Philippines:
Several important elements constitute what we may call the Philippine antidictatorship movement template. First, activists built movement organizations as parts of a long term, state-replacing initiative, animated by explicit ideological commitments, and differentiated functionally, within any ideological network, and ideologically among the networks themselves. Functionally differentiated organizational sections (political

leaderships, entry-level mass organizations, affiliated non-governmental organizations, and in may cases military and electoral arms) grew up along what Filipinos called sectoral lines (i.e. women, workers, students, farmers). Full time movement organizers brokered and maintained the relationships embodied in these organizations, and that brokerage occurred mainly within the formal party-movement-insurgency structure.
The dynamics of the Marcos dictatorship allowed these movement organizations to flourish. The regime conceived of itself as a modernizing political force, with a natural appeal to an emerging urban middle and upper class linked to industrial activity rather than the plantation agriculture of the traditional elite. Anti-communism and the argument that development required authoritarian control underpinned the regime’s hopes for an elite-backed constitutional authoritarianism. This strategy required the state to allow space for bounded urban protest organizations and campaigns—demonstrating to the urban middle class the arrangement’s liberal possibilities. Periodic regime crack-downs pushed these advocacy organizations toward the radical flank, re-polarizing things, and creating a close connection between armed and formally legal movement formations. In time, cycles of liberalization and crackdown contributed to the growth of a larger and larger organized anti-dictatorship apparatus, holding together a broad range of particular
(what was called sectoral) movement demands within a state replacing agenda. This pattern had three consequences that are important for our present purposes. First more or less formal social movement organizations developed steadily over the course of Marcos
Regime. Second , from the outset, those activists had elite allies who were also displaced by Marcos, some of whom actively participated in movement activity, and other of whom would work closely with movement forces during the transitional period
1.2 Indonesia
Save for several exceptional separatist insurgencies, Indonesian activists, following the bloody elimination of the communist party in 1965-66, never developed anything resembling Philippine organizational formations, in large measure because of the regime specifically proscribed and repressed activist organizational formations.
Rather, the Indonesian activist pattern contained the following main elements: First, while Philippine movement organizations were long term and formalized, containing full time organizers, Indonesian activist formations were emergent, informal and small scale.
Even comparatively organized Indonesian legal aid associations never produced mass organizations, and student efforts to build non-governmental organizations avoided base building activity in favor of research, discussion and case-specific advocacy. Second,
Indonesian activist organizations never developed any integrated, multi-sectoral program for governance, and never conceived of themselves as candidates to wield state power.
To the extent that different activist collectives were brokered together—and for the most part they were not—the effort advanced via the efforts of public intellectuals to encourage a discourse about democracy and reform. But over the course of the Suharto regime, these connections were loose, short term, and produced very little organizationally. Indonesian activism had very little in the way of an organizational apparatus, and so very little in the way of social relationships between activists and mass constituencies.

The Indonesian regime managed challenges to its authority with a combination of legal prohibitions, targeted crackdowns, and veiled threats that invoked the 1965-66 anticommunist violence. The regime depended on a larger and more powerful bureaucracy than Marcos controlled, with the larger Indonesian military more firmly at its core. It was only when an increasingly divided Suharto regime--with divisions that partly reflected its longevity--launched a modest liberalization effort to disperse its critics that activists had the opportunity to situate their dissent in more robust organizational settings. Student councils grew more political and NGOs built small and localized followings. Muslim organizations made less tentative forays into political advocacy, and dissidents appropriated the previously tame PDI (Partai Demokrasi Indonesia) and made it a more robust opposition vehicle. Despite these stirrings in its final decade, however, the
Indonesian state under Suharto was masterful in cutting off protest and scattering its opponents, and so the sharpest tensions in the authoritarian edifice were within the government, rather than between government and an activist network.
Many differences set the Indonesian and Philippine experience apart from one another, but I wish here to highlight two. First, the involuted and organized Philippine movement structure, in which movement leaders and cadres attempted to develop stable relationships with their mass bases contrasts to an under-organized Indonesian activist sector that had few long term individual or organizational members. Second, the ideologically explicit differences among Philippine movement networks had no real parallel in Indonesia. In part, of course, this was a function of the lower level of
Indonesian organization—less organized movements perhaps less explicitly need ideology. But it also reflects the post-politicide Indonesian context, in which any formal ideology carried the stain of subversion, and the subversive tag carried the threat of extermination. (For a slightly more elaborate discussion of this point, see “A note on comparative ideology” at the end of this paper.)
For the purposes of questions raised at the out set of this essay, these differences are consequential in several ways. Philippine movement organizations had to approach democracy in relationship to both what it promised politically for long term movement goals, and for what it would allow activist to accomplish to meet social obligations to their mass base. Hence, even organizers and activist who saw democracy as a limited accomplishment needed to think about a reform agenda that would keep mass members in the game. Indonesian activists, if devoid of powerful organizations did not carry such steep social obligations into the transition. Second, Philippine even as they would form a democracy movement of exceptional breadth and evocative power, Philippine movements each had explicit ambitions for their own networks, which ranged from particular visions of the post-transition government to a desired to benefit (against rivals) in the new dispensation. The cooperation of people power but thinly disguised a tradition of rival among movement networks. In Indonesia, while general suspicion did exist between secular and Islamic movements, and between different Islamic networks, they had not the same sense of sharp and organizationally-embodied rivalry. Both differences would be important going forward.

2. Two Transitions
Both the Indonesian and Philippine governments fell in an upsurge of protest following a protracted crisis—both of which began with an economic shock, and proceeded from that shock to protest, repression, and broader and broader protest against the regime. Over the course of this sequence in both countries, formerly reliable regime allies, many in government, began to call for reform, and in the final days of each dictator, trusted military officers delivered an ultimatum that led to the executive’s withdrawal. Nevertheless, important differences exist in the relationship of these events to Indonesian and Philippine activist positioning, and in the way activists would reorient themselves in the new dispensation.
2.1 The Philippine Transition
Economic shocks (some self-inflicted and some exogenous) and dramatic human rights violations triggered anti-Marcos mobilizations that swelled the ranks of the organized movements, and placed them in interaction with a new wave of less organized protests. In light of this upsurge, movement groups that had long been divided from one another began to work together in coalition projects. From 1983-1986, centrist mobilization was so sustained and powerful—appropriating so many established civic and religious institutions--that state violence proved unable to clear the political center, and that altered existing patterns of polarization, brokerage, and mobilization. Rather than brokering newly activated dissidents into established movement groups as they had once done, new brokerage processes occurred between existing groups and new, more moderate and programmatically limited democracy advocates (many of whom were late of the regime itself).
This shift had two immediate consequences. First , the pivot point for regimeresistant polarization shifted sharply to the political center—from an earlier conflict between state-replacing left revolutionaries and authoritarian stability to one between the regime and those who advocated a more open and transparent political process. Second , this shift extended key sites of brokerage to outside of stable movement formations.
While organizers inside the ideological/sectoral/insurgent formations continued to build and maintain their internal social relations, organization leaders increasingly were in the position of linking their capacities and activities to more contingent activists with a discrete democratization agenda. In this process, brokered agreements that linked movement organizations to the democracy movement downplayed many existing modes of struggle (armed insurgency) and political demands (basic transformation of the structures of economic and political power), substituting instead demands for free and fair election, the protection of key rights, and a participatory process to reconstitute representative government, Importantly, this mobilization process moved the movements’ internal social arrangements, including demands for the substantive redistribution of power and wealth, into the broad democracy coalition.

The Marcos regime succumbed to a people power movement in which a vast number of fairly conservative and elite actors had, in the heady days of the struggle, positioned themselves as “revolutionaries” and even taken positions in underground movements. In the months and years that followed, this would all get sorted out—but for the time being, the broad people-power coalition was the new government, with ex-
Marcos officials, human rights lawyers and activists, and members of the elite political opposition all involved. Movement leaders had the opportunity to develop close ties with members of established political families, and could also insert some of their most important reform agenda items into the general narrative of the day. Everyone—even those who owned haciendas—accordingly talked about the necessity of land reform.
All—including those who had private armies—raised the banner of human rights. The movement laid claim to government control, but in doing so, placed many from traditional political and elite families---latecomers to the anti-dictatorship movement—in the forefront.
From early 1986, several things marked the stages of the transition. First, until
July 1987, the president exercised special executive powers, which she could use to make laws by decree—but used these with extreme caution. In the middle of 1986, a constitutional commission that originally spanned the political spectrum (though some members of left organizations walked out) drafted a constitution that was later ratified in a popular agenda. And, in July 1987, the first post-Marcos elections took place, ending the revolutionary period and the President’s special executive powers. In these various stages, the unity forged in the democracy struggle among different activist groupings survived, and they largely worked together.
For our purposes, the key outcome of the transition was three fold. First, movements retained strong connections with their mass bases, although the transition did little to resolve the specific demands that brought farmers, workers, and other poor and working people to the movement. Second, because procedural debates and discussion regarding the constitution came up first in the transition, differences among the various movement strands did not prevent them from all supporting the constitution, or from working together for its ratification. Finally, the movement’s central place in the transition and in the discussions that followed meant that from the very beginning, elections were seen as a venue for movement activity, even if the first exercise swept a coalition of administration/people power candidates into office.
2.2 The Indonesian Transition
The Indonesian transition bore some resemblance to the Philippine protests of
1986, but the differences are more significant. The eventual regime-ending events followed a paralyzing financial crisis and extraordinary external pressure, both of which triggered broad but largely uncoordinated social mobilization (with a significant food riot component) strong fragmentation within the regime, and more assertive advocacy from pro-democracy forces. Public intellectuals in the pro-democracy circles often called upon government actors or soldiers to lead the democracy process in the name of the
Indonesian people. Street demonstrations that began as uncoordinated protests against

basic commodity price increases focused on eventually on matters like the announcement of a post-election cabinet that included many Suharto family members and cronies— dissatisfaction that resonated with excluded members of the polity who were losing ground as Suharto circled the wagon and his closest allies closed ranks.
Days before massed and eventually exuberant student led protests occupied the national assembly complex to initiate a final confrontation, security forces attacked student demonstrations, killing several. The murders triggered a wave or rioting and violence that left perhaps 1,500 people dead and shook the old regime to its very core.
Behind the scenes, factions of the Indonesian military squared off against one another, and though they eventually resolved their conflict, things teetered on the knife’s edge for several days-- until Suharto resigned and his vice president took power. Student protests continued as the newly post-Suharto regime moved toward more liberal and democratic practices, but the movement that gathered that day never clearly coalesced into a coherent network, not did the students welcome participation from other sectors of Indonesian society. Most importantly activists never translated their role in the transition into any position (qua movement) in the new government.
Brokerage and polarization patterns (the two dynamics we noted in the Philippine case) were different in this Indonesian case. Laboring under organizational restrictions,
Indonesian brokers typically operated within organizational sites appropriated by the movement (such as the PDI) or weakly, in very small activist collectives. Crucially, brokerage never connected the two sites most central to Philippine mobilization: between different strands of protesters and between Indonesian activists and reformers in government. Movement activity helped spur on reformers in government, but Suharto’s departure left everyone else in power, and did nothing to incorporate activists into government. The key brokers of the New Order period—experienced operatives within the Suharto state and its party apparatus—remained in place, politically important, and largely disconnected to such activist collectives as existed.
Polarization patterns reflected this mode of brokerage. While the Suharto regime grew more isolated over the course of the regime crisis, those who drew away from him never coalesced in an oppositional pole. Rather, an initially tentative—but socially quite limited—gulf emerged between the Suharto government and its democracy critics. The economic downturns of 1997-1998 polarized relations between authorities and a more restive and ungovernable society—but activists operated in light of (and in some fear of) that polarization rather than as its agent. Finally, regime fragmentation did not typically drive a core of reformers toward the movement. Worried members of the parliament, the
Golkar party and the military forced his resignation because they were concerned about succession, economic collapse, and social stability: few embraced movement demands for a limited military role in politics or a new constitution. Hence, the modalities of polarization in Indonesian do not line up as isomorphically as in the Philippines, but instead stretched between the government and a range of challengers, on a range of issues. These mobilization pressures were sufficient to drive Suharto from power, but left important legacies for activism in the post-Suharto period.

Nor did elements of the latter transition period do much to build relationships between Indonesian activists and those in power. Unlike in Manila where an extended and broadly inclusive process to write a new constitution emerged, changes in the
Indonesian framework for government took place via discrete (though sometimes quite bold) constitutional amendments, but did not invite anything like broad participation. At key moments and on key decisions, such as the late 1998 debate over whether the military would retain its reserved seats in parliament or its political functions, protest exerted substantial influence. But in the main, the process was a governmental affair, and emerged via the decisions of elected officials. Moreover, unlike Philippine groups,
Indonesian activists had neither the organizational power nor ready programmatic orientation to immediately advance a national or sectoral reform agenda. Rather, the political space opened by the democratic transition allowed activists to begin to explore constructing larger organizational networks, or to articulate issue specific demands for reform.
These processes, combined with anti-dictatorship dynamics that we discussed previously, produced consequences here that differ from those in the Philippines.
Movement activists had very little in the way of obligations or organized connections to mass constituencies, and indeed would set out to construct such connections—often figuring out how to do so as they went along—over the next decade. Second, the absence of activist participation in constitutional discussions meant that the transition did nothing to close the gulf that existed between poorly organized activists and government officials, and very little happened over the following years to close the gap between government and movement groups. Finally, because of the movement’s general remove from formal politics—and a lingering sense that such politics were not an a appropriate venue for an activism that had long been characterized by patterns of moral witness—meant that activists did not immediately see elections as a venue for advancing their power, were not strongly drawn to form parties or endorse candidates, and tended to view the movement of individual activists into party work as defections from the cause. In combination, this meant that the transition did left activists with more freedom to explore what advocacy and organizing would mean, but little immediately in the way of social obligation, a movement apparatus, or relationships to political power. The contrasts with the
Philippine case should be apparent.
3 Post-Transition Politics
What seems most in need of explanation, in the comparison between the two cases, is how a well-positioned, programmatically sophisticated and at least apparently unified Philippine movement could have failed to drive a more thorough democratization process. Indeed, a closer look at movement politics will reveal further puzzles, for over the past decade or two, Philippine movement organizations have campaigned for warlords and political clans in elections, been implicated in corruption scandals, sided with military coups, and in many ways failed to advance the movement agendas with which each came into the post-Marcos period. In Indonesia, activists entered the democratic period, as we have noted, with weaker organizations, less in the way of broad

unity, and relatively weak positions vis-à-vis government. But the democratic system has grown stronger and little by little movement organizations are emerging as more stable advocates for a reform agenda that has been slowly elaborated over the past years. The reform impetus remains weak, and Indonesian activists are still more likely to leave a movement for a political career than to position their movement as an actor in elections.
But movement groups have been far less implicated in allegations of corruption and the like—and in any case, are, in relationship to their initial positioning at the start of the democratic process, stronger than before—whereas Philippine groups seem far weaker.
Finally, to the extent that we can attach some movement role in the forging of a strong democracy, the deterioration of Philippine democracy over the last decade stands in start contrast with the elevation of that in Indonesia, which Freedom House now regards as
Southeast Asia’s only full democracy. What accounts for the difference?
3.1 The Philippines
So then what happened to Philippine activism where such strong movement power deteriorated so quickly, and do countervailing dynamics seem in evidence in the
Indonesian case? In seeking an answer, I will refer to the same dynamics we discussed earlier—brokerage and polarization. Movement engagement with the Philippine constitution writing process meant that substantive movement demands, for land and labor reform, the protection of human rights, and the removal of US bases, found their way into the document. To push for those substantive inclusions, movements demonstrated for broad and universal policy reform, in some of the country’s largest demonstrations in its history from 1988 through 1990. Marchers variously demanded comprehensive land reform, a new labor code, and a host of other reforms—all posed in universalistic language.. Movement organizations jockeyed with one another for position in those demonstrations, but broad coalitions held them together, and channeled rivalries into common efforts. In that process, social relationships between movements’ political leadership and their mass bases survived—as did reciprocal obligations embodied in those relationships. Moreover, movement unities, across rival ideological networks, persisted.
By around 1991 two new things changed the political landscape. The newly elected legislature had passed sweeping universalistic reforms on virtually every important social and political reform agenda. The new laws were both unprecedented in their breadth, and so broad as to insure that implementing activity would determine whether they would have any real effect, and for whom. At around that same time, a range of new electoral laws came into effect that established the “party list” system—a set of 50 reserved seats for “cause-oriented” electoral parties: any party running on the party list could win (only) three of these seats, and could ally with parties running in the larger, unrestricted electoral contests, but not run candidates in them.
Both changes signaled a shift in the overall dynamic governing political contention. As the policy conversation moved to matters of implementation, movement organizations sought to name their leaders and allies to bodies set up by the different executive agencies, and to use those positions to determine how measures like the

Comprehensive Agrarian Reform Law would be implemented, and what communities would be its most immediate and direct beneficiaries. As the policy process moved from universalistic conceptualization to particularistic implementation, the broad movement coalitions dissolved and particularistic, often patronage-seeking connections emerged between movement groups and those in power.
Much the same thing happened in the electoral realm. Under the influence of the party list system, movement engagement with the electoral process became an intramural competition among movement organizations; moreover, the increase leverage over one another and garner resources, activist parties were driven to ally with, and endorse, traditional and elite-driven parties running in the larger competition. As with the shifting policy dynamics, movement engagement in the electoral process evolved from a collaboration across activist streams to a competition among them, and produced closer alliances with old style politicians with no real connection to the movement. As with the policy collaboration, activists were able to justify these alliances both because they seemed to enhance movement power—power that could be useful in advancing a strategic program. Second, the alliances produced resources and access to those who had resources, in ways that would satisfy mass demands. In both policy and electoral realms, then, activists began more often to seek selective benefits for movement members, and neglected both the effort to secure the universal implementation of the reform agenda or protracted political goals. Factional disputes among politicians and political parties, and movement alliances with one or another faction determined whether any activist circle would protest an incumbent, ignore that incumbent’s bad behavior, or secure resources from him or her.
Elements like the introduction of the party list system could not be predicted ahead of time, and so post-transitions were in substantial measure contingent. But in what ways does the progress of Philippine politics depend on earlier legacies? Three matters come to mind. First , because the transition built on the energies of movements with long standing relationships to mass bases, and those relationships survived into the new dispensation, activist leaders needed to find ways to satisfy those bases. In this sense, such social obligations predict pressures that movement leaders would feel as they engaged democratic politics. All movement organizations in transitional settings may feel some pressure to deliver on the promise of democratic reforms, but we would anticipate that pressure to increase in direct proportion to the strength and longevity of social ties between movement collectives and their mass members.
Something else seems to matter here as well. The breakdown of the broad activist consensus that helped oust Marcos and extended through the period of constitution writing and even the drafting of broad policy reforms began to break down at precisely the point when the collective conversation about the rules that would govern all transformed into efforts to use those rules to allocate resources and secure new relationships to elected office and other sources of political power. The shift in the political tenor of the Philippine left can be said to combine both influences transmitted from the anti-dictatorship movement and influences of political competition, carried out under the auspices of the divisive party list system. That is: s econd , because people

power was brokered together in the democracy phase of the anti-dictatorship movement, connections across movement streams were fairly brittle, and demonstrated that quality when the transition passed into the competitive use of democratic institutions.
Finally, what of the alliances that emerged between movement activists and established elite politicians? Such alliances were naturally convenient ways of securing resources and power. We have already seen, moreover, how the ideological framework of struggle that Filipinos followed (ideological in the sense that it conceived of a difference between short term and long term movement objectives) imagined that more or less opportunistic short term modes of accumulating power and resources could be justified in exchange for more ideologically defensible long term goals. But the particular pattern of movement era political polarization also plays a part in these politics. Third , that is, the social connections that emerged between politicians and activists (a legacy of polarization patterns during the transition) rendered electoral politics an accessible terrain for movement activists.
3.2 Indonesia
Compare the Indonesian case. In Indonesia, activists were not under any pressure to deliver concrete goods to mass members—or, to put the matter more clearly, did not encounter the same trade off that Philippine activists often did: between pursuing long term policy advocacy or securing selective benefits to a membership. Moreover,
Indonesian activists were not working to keep large brokered coalitions together, and were not under the same pressure that Filipinos felt in the democracy movement phase, to develop the broadest united front possible. Filipino unities, forged in the struggle against
Marcos, were also sustained through a post-transition period that included a long consultative process of constitution writing, in which activists collaborated on the rules of democracy and so, as we saw, deferred the competitive aspect of electoral and policy processes. Indonesians had no such process, because the radical changes to their constitution emerged one by one, without much in the way of competition. Rather, elections followed close on the transition, and if they did not drive activists apart, neither were they an attractive object of activist attention. Indonesian movements saw the electoral arena as hopelessly corrupt and dominated (as it was) by political operatives from the New Order period. While individual activists might leave a movement to join a party or a campaign, in so doing, they severed their affiliation with the movements (and were thought poorly of by activists who remained behind). Hence, in neither the policy nor the electoral arena did connections between movement organizations, activists, and the dominant structures of Indonesian politics take place. For all these reasons,
Indonesian activists mainly, in the years following the transition, worked to build small activist collectives, to develop new political frameworks, and to develop their skills. Nor were they likely to steer their movement activist toward electoral politics, for they had neither the access to politicians, nor a transitional process that placed them in proximity to professional politicians, or equipped them with the skills that such politicians might need.
This is not to say that activists did nothing after the transition. They concentrated,

in the main, on local level initiatives such as campaigns to establish and elect local ombudspersons, or to reform local policy departments. Given the history of communal violence in Indonesia, many worked directly with social groups to discuss and try to repair legacies of violence. Building on new order styles of advocacy, local NGOs continued to work on individual cases of land expropriation or to weigh in on cases of local electoral corruption. But precisely because of their organizational disarray, their distance from the main currents of the reform process, and their difficulty developing broad and multi-sectoral reform agendas, Indonesian activists continued a patterns of decentralized advocacy, all the while building up their capacities. Hence, as Filipino activists were entering a period of fragmentation, internecine competition and closer involvement with elite political forces, Indonesian activists remained less competitive (or engaged) with one another.
3.3 Case Comparisons
What can we glean from this comparison? First, movement activists operating in the post-transitional era will feel more or less pressure to produce concrete benefits to maintain such social relationships as transfer into the new dispensation, and this is likely to vary with the breadth and stability of relationships between movement leaders and their mass bases. That is, well organized movement relationships will put pressure on activist engagement with democratic systems and processes to deliver goods to their mass members, for as long, at any rate, as they maintain those relationships. Analysis should therefore carefully examine the fate of social relationships embodied in movement collectives and assess their impact on movement strategy and politics.
Second, and beyond the depth of these social ties, the diversity of connections brokered into a movement should matter, because, as we saw in the Philippine case, that diversity puts stronger competitive pressure on movements relative to one another.
Recall that democracy movements are often composite affairs, made up of pre-existing organizations seeking a variety of goals. Moving past the democratic transition, analysts should watch for the disaggregating pressure of electoral competitution to be most keenly felt on diverse activist collectives, seeking diverse gains but brokered together during the democracy movement. For such movements, electoral competition and the implementation of policy reforms may move them from thinking in broad collective terms to more selective and constituent-specific manners. Weakly connected coalitions may respond to competition by attempting to outflank one another, particularly when they are under pressure to respond to mass member needs—and patterns of competition my produce the greatest tensions among erstwhile allies with claims on similar kinds of resources (eg. former allies in an agrarian reform campaign). In some cases, this may simply produce less ambitious activism. But in some cases, it may also lead to patronage dynamics between activist supporters and professional politicians. The pursuit of patronage may be most likely when broad activist unities have deteriorated to make systematic reform may seem out of reach.
While we have not, in this two case comparison, sufficient information to flesh out a typology, we can observe the following: well established but diverse movement

organizations with long term goals and internal obligations, brokered during the democracy struggle in the Philippines produced strong pressure to deliver material resources to mass members, and great susceptibility to a fragmentation that soon produced competition over those resources, and eventually a descent into patronage politics. Weaker organizations and brokerage mechanisms in the Indonesian case produced a smaller activist surge, but less in the way of subsequent internal pressures in the movement. What of other combinations. For instance, what happens when a strong organizations with long term goals that does not exist in a divers and brokered coalition?
Does its breadth mitigate the descent into competition that we observed in the
Philippines? Can we expect programmatic efforts to draft and implement systemic reforms to have greater momentum and staying power?
Finally, none of these developments are merely the consequence of previous processes of brokerage or polarization—or of the reversal of these processes. Rather, key triggers for changes in activist strategy or relationships depended on shifts in the overall democratization process, particularly between constitution writing and competition. The move from the rule writing to the competitive phase of democracy in the Philippines strained the democracy movement’s weakest constituent connections—despite the unifying influence of the constitution writing phase. Moreover, other institutional factors accelerated that social erosion, like the particular structure of the party list system. In
Indonesia, activist dynamics were smaller but less disturbed by political competition, in part because activists had not been as aggressively brokered into the process, and polarization dynamics had not driven them to close relationships with professional politicians. If less immediately a force in the electoral realm, that is, Indonesian activists were less vulnerable to the corrosive influence of electoral politics. Rather than driving entire movement organizations into the electoral fray, individual activists left their movements to participate in elections, and that meant that activism was shielded from the political dynamics that tore at Philippine unities.
4. Lessons
What lessons can we derive from this brief and stylized comparison, both for
MENA transitions and for the role of activism in post-transitional societies more generally. In the most general terms, I have argued that activist trajectories after democratic transitions are the produce of three influences. First, social relationships may be more or less efficiently transmitted from pre-transition movements, and analysis should pay attention both to the depth and diversity of the democracy movement’s constituent strands and the ways in which the transition influences those relationships.
Note that a diverse democracy movement is likely to produce post-transition fragmentation, as constituent members seek the next step in their different programs of struggle. Well organized and politically diverse democracy movements may be most vulnerable to fragmentation, and in fragmentation, to seeking selective advancement.
Analysts looking to examine what will happen to democracy movements should therefore examine what kinds of collectives make up that movement, how they are brokered together, and what goals lie camouflaged behind their shared demands for democracy.

But they should also ask what the transition does to these social relationships, and in particular, whether it places activists in a closer or more distant relationship to the emerging democratic institutions.
Second, this paper suggests that we should look at the two elements of the transitional process—the rule making and the competitive phases, and examine how they are sequenced, in what ways each one takes place, and what influence they have on social relations. A participatory constitution writing process can deepen social connections among activist, or at least defer competition among them. The impact of electoral competition will depend on whether social ties draw activists into elections, as occurred in the Philippines, or keeps them aloof, as in Indonesian. We can, moreover, imagine other patterns with other consequences—as when a rule writing process takes place in close proximity to electoral competition, and in ways that seem influenced by efforts to write political rules that favor particular interests. Moreover, the impact of elections and policymaking will also depend on whether the democracy movement was mainly a coalition of diverse actors, or a more unitary force. In the latter such case—different than what we see in either the Philippines or Indonesian—electoral competition may solidify a movement’s position and activate boundaries between movement actors and their opponents.
Finally, although I have treated this aspect in less detail, the emergent institutions of the new regime can do much to accelerate or slow down these dynamics, and should be examined for their impact on movement unities and strategy. The Philippine party list system certainly accelerated divisions among movement organizations, and in some cases even created them within movements. An Indonesian electoral system that required well aspiring parties to clear substantial institutional hurdles dampened the already faint activist aspirations to join the electoral arena. Other institutional arrangements, in other places, will interact with existing social processes to unify or fragment activism, drive activists toward systemic reform or the search for selective advantage, pull them toward electoral politics and an engagement with policymaking or away from the new democratic system.
A Note on Ideology
Movement histories also sharply influenced the way they thought about how advocacy and struggle should work. Indonesian activists, in explicit consequence of the anti-communist murders that initiated the New Order, initially were unwilling, and eventually unable, to think in ideological terms, or to translate ideology into movement praxis. The point, to be clear, is not merely that Indonesians were restricted from access to any single ideology or ideological range (communism, Marxism, social democracy, or some other variant). More, they were barred from developing any ideological foundations that could justify cooperation in struggle among different kinds of people, nor to think about how modes of collective action were likely to lead to political goals.
On both fronts, the state-mandated ideology, the Pancasila, provided a smothering, inadequate answer: people should concentrate on making their voices heard to

government—and having called attention to a particular perspective or complaint, society should stand down, and let government (the implementing arm of the “big Indonesian family”) take over from there.
Things worked differently in the Philippines. When movement organizers worked with mass constituencies, often did so via the medium of the large meeting designed to recruit or consolidate memberships. Virtually without fail, such meetings contained elements so routine that they acquired nicknames: the “pol-spec” and “nat-sit” (the
“political spectrum” and “national situation,” respectively). The political spectrum depicted a movement network’s standing in relationship to other formations, generally arranged on a right to left continuum. The national situation analyzed the character of government, the state of the movement, and factors like US activity and the disposition of business or the Church. Organizers also typically discussed the movement’s “political line;” that is, given a position in the political spectrum, and the national situation, what forms of struggle did the movement pursue, and how exactly should that struggle produce political change?
Two things should catch out attention here. The first is that the national situation discussion unfolds in explicit recognition of the difference between strategy and tactics.
Second, Philippine praxis and theorizing emphasized the instrumental aspect of politics, precisely those orientations that Pancasila killed in their Indonesian cradle. Together, these two ideational elements provided a foundation for movement building. They encouraged the development of ten or twelve point programs that knit different sectoral constituencies together in cross class alliances with statist programs for political change.
In pursuit of those programs, moreover, they allowed a distinction between short term activity and long term goals. Hence, while Indonesian activism turned on conceptions of moral witness and attitudinal change, Philippine movements focused on modes of struggle and assumed that the appropriate projection of power could change things.