‘De-radicalization’ of convicted terrorists inside Indonesia’s prisons : What alternatives?

This research is concerned with the problems that occur in the rehabilitation of convicted terrorists or known as Violent Extremist Prisoners (VEP) inside the Indonesian prison system under the current global countering violent extremism (CVE) regime. In Indonesia, those problems consist of prisoners’ rejection of existing rehabilitation programs, further radicalization of other inmates and the recruitments inside the prison to violent extremist organization. By using a combination of approaches in the tradition of discourse analysis and semi-structured interviews, this thesis questioned dominant discourses and theories of de-radicalization as way to rehabilitate convicted terrorists which is predominantly used by the Indonesian National Counter-Terrorism Agency (BNPT), International organizations, and several NGOs. The dominant discourses from both actors resulted to Daniel Koehler’s classification of Type D and Type E de-radicalization model by emphasizing huge aspect of ideology and governmentality. This approach is likely to face rejection from inmates due to three factors: power-relations within securitization regime, solidarity, and identity construction in the anatomy of Salafi-Jihadism as the social movement. Therefore, this research finds that current discourse of de-radicalization maintain VEP to label government as ‘infidels’ and NGOs as ‘strangers’ as the reason of rejection. Studying disengagement and de-radicalization within social movement analysis will unpack the missing discourse hence bringing transformative manner for the current production of knowledge regarding policy of terrorist rehabilitation in the Indonesian context. Relevance to