The contemporary youth-led movements and protests in the Global North and South have rekindled the popular image of youths as agents of change. Indonesia is no exception, as Indonesian millennials have taken the initiative to push progressive agendas, especially after the fall of the authoritarian regime in 1998. This development has been tracked meticulously by various scholars whose works have raised hopes that the involvement of Indonesian millennials in politics will have positive impacts. Contrary to their views, however, we argue that Indonesian millennials need a stronger organizational foundation to play the role of driver of progressive agendas. Based on an online survey involving 206 progressive youth organizations in Indonesia and 82 semi-structured interviews, we found that although some of these organizations have managed to establish basic organizational mechanisms (statutes, annual plans, evaluation mechanisms), they are still not well connected to potential social bases, especially in university campuses and in provinces other than those where they are based. The absence of a broad social base potentially undermines their social justice agendas since an agenda without strong social support comes across to political elites and policymakers as mere empty bluster. We contend that our study contributes to conversations on the role of Indonesian youth in politics and the Indonesian youth social movement in the post-authoritarian era.

INDONESIAN YOUTHS AS AGENTS OF CHANGE

History often portrays youths as agents of change. Such an image stems from their involvement in critical moments such as large-scale protests, regime changes or revolutions. As youths have been at the centre stage of these moments throughout historical periods, every generation tends to produce its own narratives of how heroic youths spark social change.

The millennial generation is not an exception. Born between the early 1980s and late 1990s, the millennial generation witnessed pivotal social disruptions in which they carried on the struggle for gender equality, civil liberty, environmental justice and racial justice, reproducing the popular narrative of youths as agents of change. As they grow into adolescence and consume information through multiple social media platforms, they realize that when their freedom and basic rights are undermined, they must take up the baton for transforming their society. Combined with wanting to redress society's economic grievances, millennials seek transformations of the existing political and social order that they find repressive and impeding their hopes for a better future.

Life course events related to the transition to adulthood have been a critical part of social transformation within society. One's birth cohort or generation is argued to be one of the important determinants in explaining attitudes, beliefs and behaviours towards life course events. Therefore, to have a thorough understanding of the demographic behaviour of a society, it is important to examine generational differences in life course trajectories. Taking advantage of longitudinal information from the RAND Corporation's Indonesian Family Life Survey (IFLS), this study examines generational differences in the occurrence and timing of marital unions, labour market entry, and first adult migration of Indonesians. By using descriptive and regression analysis, this study compares whether the life course transitions experienced by Indonesians in their mid-twenties have changed between the current young adult generation, the millennials, and older cohorts, i.e., Generation X and baby boomers. The study found distinctive characteristics in the transition to adulthood for each generation. Moreover, remarkable variations in educational attainment across the generations have had critical effects on the demographic behaviour patterns of young Indonesians. The findings of this study can provide insights into societal changes in Indonesia and act as a basis for designing social policies to anticipate potential future trends.

INTRODUCTION

Life course transitions are an integral part of an individual's life cycle. People face various options at critical stages in their life trajectories. Their choices might be shaped by distinctive attitudes, beliefs and behaviours and create societal changes over time. Major life course events, such as getting married, entering the labour market and moving out from the parental home constitute critical phases of transition to adulthood and play important roles as markers for social transition and intergenerational change in a society (Berngruber and Bethmann 2022).

An individual's birth cohort or generation may act as an important determinant of the shifts in the patterns of transition to adulthood. Birth cohorts reflect structural changes over time in a country, including changes in the governmental system and economic development (Vidal and Lutz 2018). Therefore, cohort effect explains how each generation has different behaviours due to variations in the temporal situations they experience. However, birth cohorts may not be sufficient to explain changes in people's behaviours over time. Variations in people's attitudes and behaviours can also be influenced by period and life course effects (Duffy 2021).

Marine Environmental Degradation: An Increasing NTS Threat

The importance of oceans and seas for mankind is increasingly recognized by the international community. The inclusion of an ocean-related goal into the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), namely SDG 14 “Life below Water”, is a move to this end. Further development of this momentum has been seen in 2019, with important international meetings convened to discuss necessary policies and initiatives for saving the marine environment. Among the many meetings, the first Ocean Conference convened by the United Nations (UN) in June 2017 in New York was the most high-profile. This was followed by the High-level Political Forum (HLPF) for Sustainable Development in July 2017, during which the protection of marine biodiversity in the high seas was discussed amidst a host of sustainable development issues. These high-level events have successfully shaped the perspectives of the policymakers, increasing global attention towards the health of ouroceans. During the Ocean Conference this year, the UN, governments, non-governmental organizations (NGOs), regional institutions, the private sector, the scientific community, and other stakeholders offered more than 1,400 voluntary commitments, pledging to take action in saving our shared marine environment.

In Southeast Asia, where water bodies account for over two thirds of the region's area, these voluntary commitments, if translated into policies, may have important implications. The South China Sea (SCS), an important body of water in the region, has attracted growing international attention in recent years for maritime disputes involving several claimants, which include Brunei, the People's Republic of China, Taiwan, Malaysia, Indonesia, the Philippines, and Vietnam. Marine environmental protection has been overshadowed by maritime disputes in regional and international security discourses. For instance, between 2009 and 2016, the number of news reports that covered the maritime disputes was 8,795 as compared to 25 news reports on environmental protection.

The same tendency to prioritize territorial disputes was also observed in official discourse. For instance, in the Chairman's Statement of the 30th ASEAN Summit in Manila in April 2017, the SCS was the first issue of the section on regional and international issues, followed by maritime security and cooperation that included maritime environment.

At the time of my last period of fieldwork in Madagascar, Brika was seventeen. I had invited him to my house to participate in the study I was conducting about death and the ancestors (cf. Harris, Chapter 2). As with all other participants, I introduced Brika to the task by telling him that I was going to narrate a short story followed by several questions. I reassured him that these questions did not have “right” or “wrong” answers, because people have different opinions about them. I told him that I just wanted to learn about his own way of thinking.

Brika carefully listened to the story and patiently answered all my questions. Once the formal interview was over, he engaged thoughtfully with a number of additional open-ended questions about the meaning of the word angatse, the reasons for offering food to the ancestors, the significance of dreams, and the existence of people who, having died, come back to life. He explained that when a person dies “the body rots and turns into bones,” but the spirit (known as fanahy when the person is alive and as angatse once the person has died) “continues to be there.”

The reflections on sex and gender presented in this chapter were set in motion by the experience of giving birth to my son four years ago in London. Under the influence of the National Birth Association, I was determined to have a “natural birth,” free of any unnecessary medical intervention. Accordingly, one of my requests was that the midwife should refrain from telling me the sex of my baby, for I wanted to be allowed to register it “in my own time,” and to decide for myself whether the fact that the newborn was male or female should be of any relevance at all. At the time, I imagined that my Vezo friends in Madagascar, unlike some of my British and Italian friends at home, would have no difficulty in understanding why I did not want the sex of my baby to be the first thing to be uttered about him or her, only seconds after the birth. I thought they would understand my attempts to escape the strictures of the dominant “gender system of the west” (as in Errington 1990), in which a person, from the very beginning, cannot be anything at all if it is not sexed.

I thought they would understand because the Vezo with whom I had lived and worked for almost two years had impressed me for their lack of interest in the difference between people with male and female genitals – a difference which, in many contexts, appeared to make very little difference (Astuti 1993).