As anticipated for several years, an increasing number of Indonesian prisoners convicted of terrorism-related offences are now completing their prison terms. For Indonesian authorities, this represents a particularly prickly policy challenge. At the centre of this challenge is the need for a greater understanding of the efficiency and effectiveness of Indonesia’s deradicalisation program and post-sentence risk assessments. The success of these programs will determine the future security of Southeast Asia.

In December last year, Indonesian authorities granted the early release of Umar Patek—the chief bombmaker for the 2002 Bali bombings—after a series of sentence reductions for good behaviour. Resentment about the decision has been aired in both Indonesia and Australia. The Bali bombings remain the worst terrorist attack Australia has ever experienced.

Prison-sentence durations are often opaque in the Indonesian justice system. Patek has been held up as a model of rehabilitation by Indonesian authorities, with his reported remorse and efforts to counsel his fellow prisoners lauded as a win for Indonesia’s reform programs.

Since 2000, Indonesia has arrested around 3,000 offenders for a range of terrorism-related offences. While the government has proposed a policy of prison segregation and higher security for terrorists, overcrowding in prisons has made that virtually impossible.

At the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic, Indonesia’s prisons housed 270,000 inmates, despite having the facilities for only half that number. Rising arrests exacerbate the problem, since prisons lack the resources to supervise convicts. As a result, terrorists meant to be in isolation have mingled with hundreds of other prisoners, and riots have led to deaths and prison escapes. Overcrowding has turned Indonesia’s jails into potential ‘schools of crime’; if inmates weren’t radicalised before, they might be now.

Since 2012, Indonesia’s deradicalisation program has played an integral part in its counterterrorism strategy. A series of courses facilitated by state institutions, civil-society organisations and individual prisons provide life-skills training for the post-prison world, such as financial management. They also offer theological seminars, often run by former terrorists.

Inmates can choose to participate in any of these courses or avoid the program entirely. While participant consent does encourage buy-in, the program can fail to reach individuals who desperately need it. The opt-in system has allowed individuals like suicide bomber Agus Sujatno to refuse participation, serve out their sentences, and return to the outside world even more invigorated than before.

Sujatno was a repeat offender. First exposed to radical ideas in school, he officially joined the terrorist group Jamaah Ansharut Daulah in 2015. In March 2017, he was sentenced to four years in the high-security Pasir Putih prison for building the bomb used in a suicide attack. However, overcrowding and understaffing meant the prison was far from high security. Sujatno refused to participate in the prison’s deradicalisation program or engage in dialogue with officials. Instead, he served his four-year sentence and was released without parole. In December 2022, angered by Indonesia’s new criminal code, Sujatno launched a suicide attack at a police station in Bandung, killing himself and an officer and injuring 10 others.

Sujatno’s case is not an outlier. Between 2002 to 2020, around 100 former terror convicts reportedly reoffended, and those are just the ones that authorities know about. They don’t know how many are spreading their training or ideology under the radar, but at least 11% of all of those released reoffend. The majority of reoffenders are in the community for less than two years before their next run-in with authorities.

This is a failure. Before his release, Sujatno was placed on a red list of militant convicts for his behaviour in prison. After the suicide attack, officials admitted that they were not caught off guard by his relapse and instead lamented that they could not read terrorists’ minds. Even though the executive director of the Jakarta-based Center for Radicalism and Deradicalization Studies, Adhe Bakti, requested that police urgently monitor those on red lists, the combination of overworked officers and limited resources allowed Sujatno to slip through the cracks.

The next few years are critical. They will test the effectiveness of deradicalisation programs and post-sentence risk assessments. Will individuals like Patek revert to their old ways, or will they become successful contributors to society like former terror convict Ali Fauzi Manzi?

Ali Fauzi is the youngest brother of Mukhlas, Amrozi and Ali Imron of the Bali bombings. Mukhlas and Amrozi were executed, while Ali Imron is serving a life sentence. Through family and friendship ties, Ali Fauzi joined terror group Jemaah Islamiyyah along with his brothers. He was arrested in the Philippines in 2004 and extradited to Indonesia to serve a three-year sentence. Humane treatment from police and the deradicalisation program helped him reform his views. He then founded the Circle of Peace Foundation in 2017, working to help deradicalise former fighters and reconcile with the victims’ families, including those from the Bali bombings. In February, Ali Fauzi received a doctorate in Islamic education for his research on religious moderation for former terrorists. He is focused on bringing necessary reforms to Indonesia’s deradicalisation program.

Australia and the US may be just shifting their focus from fighting transnational terrorism in other countries to domestic terrorism, but countries like Indonesia have focused on domestic terrorism for decades, building deradicalisation programs and programs to counter violent extremism. Australia continues to improve at this, such as its reassessment of the use of a violent extremism risk assessment, which determines potential court orders for extremists completing prison sentences. Although no system is perfect, countries would do well to share and learn from each other’s experiences.

The Bali bombings brought Indonesia and Australia closer together in the fight against terrorism. During the eighth ‘2+2’ meeting on 9 February, the Australian and Indonesian foreign and defence ministers committed to ‘continued dialogue on the progress of deradicalisation programs in the region’.

Perhaps the next chapter of this relationship is for Australia and Indonesia to work together to strengthen deradicalisation programs and post-sentence risk assessments to further protect communities from terrorism. These strategies will determine the security landscape of not only Indonesia and the Pacific, but the world.

Racism has emerged as a security issue—yet again. This has been brought home dramatically by the attack in Christchurch and the responses. Like many nations, Australia has had to deal with deadly violence from residents motivated by an extreme version of Islam that operates across national boundaries. The programs and interventions government has put in place have had significant success in countering jihadist terrorism. But structurally and ideationally, racism is a fundamentally different matter than jihadism and will therefore demand different approaches.

The countering violent extremism page on the Department of Home Affairs website sets out the government’s intention to ‘build resistance to all forms of violent extremism, whether politically, religiously or racially motivated’. It asserts that, ‘The best way to counter violent extremism is to prevent radicalisation emerging as an issue by addressing the societal drivers that can lead to disengagement and isolation’.

The Australian government’s Living Safe Together webpage explains how the government funds ‘settlement and multicultural community initiatives’ designed to ‘enhance Australia’s social cohesion by supporting community harmony, migrant integration and strengthening economic participation’. This is to assist communities to ‘identify and prevent people from moving down the path of radicalisation to violence’.

It’s an approach that’s strongly influenced by several decades of experience with and research on violence arising on the radical fringes of a particular religion. The emphasis is therefore primarily, although not exclusively, on migrant and settler communities with a focus on social groups that are identifiable because they share an origin, culture, language and/or religion, and especially Islam.

The strategy involves equipping communities to identify the behavioural signs displayed by individuals undergoing a conversion by extremist ideology in time to intervene. The advice proffered is general and assumes that a ‘radicalisation’ process is involved that can be detected by certain changes in behaviour and social relations that make the individual undergoing them stand out from the crowd.

But race is not interchangeable with environmental, political or religious ideology. There are no equivalent identifiable ‘communities’. The campaign against jihadist extremists could target the Islamic culture in which it was most likely to arise and authorities could monitor the religious institutions which might breed violent ideology. The communities in which individuals showing signs of conversion could appear were tight knit. Views on race, including a strong attachment to race as a way of making sense of the world, are ubiquitous and transcend nationality, religion, class, education and gender. They are not located in a particular community.

On one hand racism is an everyday affair and self-identification by race is widespread. Many people would dispute that they hold racist notions on the assumption that racism involves overt discrimination. However, it is in day-to-day conversations and exchanges that racial identities are formed and perpetuated. In Racism and everyday life: social theory, history and ‘race’ (2016), Andrew Smith examines how ‘ideas of everyday-ness have been a part of, and are marked by, the history of modern race-making’.

Others hold clear hierarchical views about race. But they don’t form a consensus. Some separate humanity into Caucasian, Asian and African, perhaps adding Mongolian, Polynesian and Melanesian, sometimes with Indigenous Australians and Native Americans included. Even within those groups, Europeans are sometimes divided into the Nordic, Alpine and Mediterranean races or Aryans and non-Aryans. For many of these, race serves not just to distinguish groups but to establish superiority based on race. This is powerfully demonstrated In The races of Europe: construction of national identities in the social sciences, 1839–1939 (2016) by Richard McMahon.

Richard J. Perry in ‘Race’ and racism: the development of modern racism in America (2007) notes that ‘assumptions about the reality of “race” have dodged evidence and adapted themselves to contradictory information’. He points to the ‘vastly different life experiences that millions of people face as a result of being cast into one or another “racial” category’. That the biological reality of race is scientifically discredited doesn’t obviate racism.

People dispossessed, repressed or discriminated against because of racial tagging are often forced into degraded and desperate circumstances that affirm for them that they are a separate racial group, while their circumstances in turn reinforce for the dominant group that the differences are race based. Mandisi Majavu argues in Uncommodified blackness: the African male experience in Australia and New Zealand (2017) that the ‘data suggests that, in both Australia and New Zealand, race serves as [an] invisible borderline, demarcating who legitimately belongs or does not belong’.

The apparent motivation of the Christchurch killer was not unambiguously racist, or at least not overtly white supremacist, according to his manifesto. He does share with other mass murderers like Anders Breivik the racially tinged conviction that Europeans as a group are under threat from the demographics of immigration.

Understanding the motivations of such people—which will be especially important for security agencies seeking to recognise and prevent further episodes—will be hard. An expert team examining the evidence described Breivik as possessing ‘the capacity for complex thought and a well-developed understanding of human nature and emotions’ and as demonstrating ‘a mind significantly more rational and reality-based than one might presume at first glance’.

The proponent of race-based violence is unlike the radicalising jihadist who promotes ‘an increasingly strict and literal understanding of a given belief’, uses ‘ideological language’, and often does not have ‘a genuine understanding of the ideology they claim to represent’. Racists blend in.

Preventing race-based violence is going to be extraordinarily difficult for the security agencies, mainly because of the role that race plays in society, politics, science, government administration, health outcomes, sport, education and policing. It’s likely that daily life experiences and simple exposure to the norms and practices that surround them, not the internet, will establish the foundations for racist extremism.