Predictive Factors in the Emergence of Religion-Based Radicalism in East Java, Indonesia

Religion-based radicalism remains a significant challenge to social cohesion and pluralism in Indonesia, particularly in culturally diverse settings such as East Java. This study examines the multidimensional factors associated with vulnerability to religion-based radicalism across East Java by integrating Partial Least Squares Structural Equation Modeling (PLS-SEM) with k-means clustering. A quantitative survey was conducted with 357 respondents drawn from 38 regencies and municipalities. The analytical model comprised five interrelated domains: religious–ideological, socioeconomic, political–governmental, media–technological, and psychocultural factors, together with a family–community contextual construct. The PLS-SEM results indicate that all five domains are positively and significantly associated with religion-based radicalism, with the psychocultural domain showing the strongest direct association. The structural model demonstrates very high in-sample explanatory power for religion-based radicalism (R² = 0.965). In contrast, the family–community contextual construct does not show a statistically significant direct association with religion-based radicalism, indicating that its assumed protective role is not empirically supported by the present model. K-means clustering further identifies three levels of vulnerability—high, moderate, and low—distributed unevenly across East Java’s five major subcultural regions: Arek, Mataraman, Pantura (North Coast), Pandalungan, and Madura. Given the purposive sampling design and the predominance of younger and student respondents, the findings should be interpreted as patterns observed within the study sample rather than as population-wide estimates for East Java. Overall, the study highlights the value of combining multidimensional structural analysis with spatial clustering and suggests that prevention strategies should be culturally grounded, geographically differentiated, and responsive to local psychocultural, socioeconomic, political, and digital contexts.