An ever-growing number of citizens in Indonesia’s Riau Archipelago are coming to
adopt a ‘post-democratic’ subject position. Having once been enthusiastic about
democratization and the democratic ideal, they now come to see their previous
enthusiasm as misguided, arrogant, or naïve and increasingly feel that democracy has no
place within either their lives or Indonesia’s future. Arguing against conventional ideas
of ‘authoritarian nostalgia’, I argue that rejections of the democratic ideal need to be
grounded in the personal meanings that democratic citizenship has come to carry for
people through attention to relational ethics, temporality, and domestic political
economy. This may have broader implications for how ‘democratic rollback’ is theorised
on a global scale.