Collaborative governance in the terrorist rehabilitation programme in Indonesia

Abstract

Indonesia is not free from radicalism and terrorism. Various acts of terror have occurred in Indonesia with various models and interactions. Currently, acts of terror in Indonesia have developed into the “lone wolf” model and terror involving women and children. The acts of terror with such modes are hard to detect and likely to cause fatalities. Radicalization is found to occur among Indonesians at an early age. The facts show that radical understanding has been incorporated through pre-school and elementary schools. The phenomenon shows that radicalism and terrorism in Indonesia must receive serious attention. Rehabilitation becomes very important because the facts show that the terror actors, even already serving a prison sentence, often repeat their offences. One of the programmes of the Indonesian government is to prevent radicalism and terrorism by conducting deradicalization. In Indonesia, the deradicalization programme consists of four parts: identification, rehabilitation, re-education and reintegration. The rehabilitation stage is very important because, at this stage, a process of improvement is carried out to terrorists with radical understanding. However, terrorist rehabilitation programmes in Indonesia are still not ideal. This is shown by recurrent terrorists who have previously been sentenced and rehabilitated. The terrorist rehabilitation programme in Indonesia does not have a strong legal basis and is not integrated into a particular system or model. Given its complexity, terrorist rehabilitation cannot be carried out by only one institution. The implementation of terrorist rehabilitation programmes requires collaboration between government institutions such as the National Counterterrorism Agency, Indonesian National Police, Correctional Institutions, Ministry of Religious Affairs, Ministry of Social Affairs, Non-governmental Organizations, and the communities. The collaborative governance approach by Emerson (2012) is an appropriate model for terrorist rehabilitation programmes. In the collaborative governance model, the roles and functions of each stakeholder involved in terrorist rehabilitation are optimized and each stakeholder has clear performance achievement indicators. The stakeholders in terrorist rehabilitation programmes have the same objective; namely, to turn terrorists away from radicalism and make them more tolerant, and to reintegrate them into the community. From collaborative governance, it is expected that, first, the terrorist rehabilitation programme is carried out collaboratively; second, there will be no longer any acts of terror by recurrent perpetrators; finally, the terrorists who have been rehabilitated shall be agents of change in deradicalization programmes.