Volume 14, Issue 1

A terrorist attack in Jalan Thamrin Central Jakarta on 14 January 2016, killed eight people, including the four attackers, and injured over 20 others. While the attack was amateurish and failed to achieve the mass casualties no doubt sought by the planners, it successfully garnered considerable media coverage and galvanised Indonesia’s policy and law makers to act on revisions to the country’s anti-terrorism laws. The paper discusses the attack itself, which reveals aspects of current terrorist strategies, transnational planning, funding and communications, and links to ISIS. It argues that the attack illustrates weaknesses in Indonesia’s treatment of convicted terrorists, notably in sentencing, corrections and rehabilitation. The paper then discusses the role of the media and securitization theory to explain the timing and momentum for law reform. It concludes with a discussion of likely revisions to the terrorism laws, including possible significantly increased police powers and a potential role for the Indonesian military in counter-terrorism operations unprecedented in the post- reformasi era.

The notion of a sovereign polity holding a monopoly over law that is followed within its jurisdictional borders is threatened by the phenomena of transnational law and normative pluralism. Authoritative norms can be highly influential upon legal processes within the borders of a polity. Those norms may be derived from other legal systems, religious or belief systems or a combination of both. In this era of globalization, normative pluralism exists as an everyday fact of life almost everywhere in the modern world. This article considers the normative pluralism that has been experienced in Arnhem Land in the Northern Territory of Australia and the need to further develop the pluralism model of semi-autonomous social fields.