Aside from being an archipelago, Indonesia is the fourth most populous country in the world and surrounded by seas and neighboring countries in Southeast Asia. It becomes difficult for the country to draw distinction between internal and external security threats. In line with this, Indonesia continued its National Action Plan on Preventing and Countering Violent Extremism (NAP-PCVE) in response to threat like terrorism. It is based on a soft-approach like prevention, law enforcement, and international partnership and cooperation to address violent extremism (VE). The NAP-PCVE of Indonesia also focuses on aligning its national legal framework into the international legal framework. In relation to this, legal overlapping, manipulation, and lack of funding sources and victims fund are identified as some of the reasons for ineffective CVE measures and in needs of plans and revisions faced by Pakistan.
Unlike the gaps addressed in the latter part, Indonesian NAP-PCVE had distinct features in addressing some problems on PCVE like assigning terrorism-related statistics to statistics agency to avoid manipulation, inclusion of women in the security sector and anchoring its approach on gendered NAP-PCVE, continued implementation of NAP-PCVE in central and local government levels, and submission of biannual reports about implementation and strategy to the joint-secretariat (JS) and the president. It also emphasized the community policing, youth engagement, important inputs for community organizations, and criminal justice model based on the law-enforcement approach in terrorism. Indonesia’s transformation from government-based approach into the combination of whole-of-society and whole-of-government approach can influence other countries to follow, like Pakistan’s NAP-PCVE. With this information about Indonesia and Pakistan, it reflects the fact that the NAP-PCVE requires both long and short-term plans.
