Much of the studies on religious freedom in Indonesia have established a striking disconnection between constitutional protections and the actual implementation of religious freedom, underlining the state’s failure as a protector of human rights. Yet, the emphasis on human rights has overlooked why the levels of governmental restrictions are substantially increased in democratized Indonesia, creating a trend of shrinking religious freedom. Using the perspective of civic space, this study analyses the dynamics of such a trend and the involvement of the state as a primary determinant. To demonstrate how and in what way the state engages in creating shrinking religious freedom, this study uses a combination of literature reviews and inspection on past measurements on the religious freedom situation in Indonesia. This study argues that rather than ideological factors, the dynamics of shrinking religious freedom is more related to the unrelenting endeavors from state-actors and agencies to control religion for the purpose of political motives and consideration due to the changing political landscape in a democratized Indonesia.

Is a flourishing civil society’s political activism positively correlated with the deepening of Indonesian democracy? This article addresses this question by examining the role of civil society in the 2014 presidential election in Indonesia, focusing on the collective actions of volunteer groups (known as Gerakan Relawan) that shaped both the election process and its result. While some studies on civil society activism in the 2014 presidential election suggested the connection between the role of volunteer movement and the democratic process in Indonesia, this paper suggests that the overpraised assumptions regarding the connection between civil society’s role and democratic consolidation, in the case of volunteer movement, needs to be reconsidered. This paper argues that although the activism of the volunteer movement has positively contributed to the democratic process of the 2014 election, however, realistic assessment of the volunteer movement confirms its problematic nature and the limits of volunteer activism that may contribute to the disconnection of civil society and democratic consolidation in the country.