Reconfiguring repression: violence against journalists in Indonesia under democratic backsliding (2014–2025)

Violence against journalists in Indonesia has been reconfigured as a broader system of repression under democratic backsliding. This article examines how repression adapts under such conditions by conceptualizing violence as authoritarian innovation. Repression is redistributed across forms, perpetrators, and targets, preserving deniability while maintaining disciplinary effects. Analyzing 780 documented incidents (2014–2025) from the Alliance of Independent Journalists (AJI), the study codes violence across forms (physical, digital, legal, obstruction), perpetrators (state actors, non-state actors, unknown), and targets (individual journalists, media organizations). The analysis traces violence’s longitudinal reconfiguration under democratic backsliding. Three patterns emerge. First, physical attacks persist but increasingly coexist with digital harassment and obstruction. Second, perpetrator attribution becomes increasingly opaque, with unknown actors responsible for more incidents than police or non-state actors by 2025. Third, attacks targeting media organizations rise sixfold. The findings extend authoritarian innovation and press freedom scholarship, revealing how repression adapts temporally through accumulation and layering.