Protest coordination across divisions: brokerage under democratic backsliding in Indonesia

Scholarship on civil society in Asia has often emphasized the structural constraints facing collective action under democratic backsliding. Yet less attention has been paid to the conditions under which fragmented civil society actors can overcome existing divisions and achieve coordinated protest without forming an integrated movement. This article asks how fragmented civil society actors achieve coordinated protest under conditions of democratic backsliding and how variation in local associational fields shapes this process. Drawing on protest mobilization in Yogyakarta and Surabaya, Indonesia, between 2019 and 2025, the article traces how post-electoral declines in political efficacy reinforced grievances accumulated through earlier experiences of repression and perceived rights erosion, creating common incentives for mobilization. Shared grievances alone, however, did not overcome existing divisions. We argue that their translation into coordinated collective action depended on brokerage, and that the mediating work required of brokerage varied with the degree of associational miscibility within local fields. Associational miscibility shaped the connections and shared understandings on which brokers could draw: in Yogyakarta, higher miscibility allowed brokerage to build on repeated interaction, overlapping activist ties, and established channels of communication, whereas in Surabaya, lower miscibility required more substantial mediation across segmented constituencies. In both cases, brokerage enabled episodic protest convergence without producing an integrated movement. By identifying the conditions under which coordination can emerge despite persistent fragmentation, the article offers a processual account of episodic protest convergence and develops the concept of associational miscibility to explain variation in the mediating work required of brokerage across local contexts.