In May 1998, the student-led Reformasi movement forced Indonesia's repressive Suharto regime from power and set in motion a transition to a new democratic order that has endured, against formidable odds, to the present. As the mixed outcomes of popular uprisings from Tiananmen Square to the Arab Spring attest, such an outcome is extraordinary. Both journalistic and historical accounts of Indonesia's Reformasi movement have given due credit to the students and other young people for overcoming fears paralyzing older generations and for leading the country in demanding reform. Yet the role of this cohort, and of youth activism more broadly, in fortifying the long-term commitment required to sustain any democratic transition has received far less attention.

In her new book, Activist Archives: Youth Culture and the Political Past in Indonesia, Doreen Lee fills this important gap in Indonesia's Reformasi narrative, applying a fresh lens to addressing the question of “what produces and sustains political activism” (p. 3). In this ethnographic and historical study, Lee explores how legacies of earlier youth movements shaped the collective identity of the Reformasi generation, illuminating the “proto-history” of the 1998 uprising through deep archival work demonstrating post-Suharto continuities. She then engages firsthand the production and (tenuous) preservation of the movement's material culture, tracking it across time through two years of intensive fieldwork. Perhaps most critically, her findings of persistent political activism by members of the 1998 cohort both challenge misconceptions of the student movement as “a spontaneous act of collective effervescence, due to dissipate upon its ritualized expenditure” (p. 33) and provide an important contrast to the transience of parallel youth movements elsewhere. Beneath this surface narrative, the reader can peel away Lee's documentation to discover the student movement's own “techne of paper” in the form of memoranda, manifestos, poetry, political cartoons, and legal motions—a veritable palimpsest of annotation that activists auto-archived while marking and memorializing events (p. 20).

Lee begins exploring the materiality of the movement by focusing on the “deployment of paper” as a critical vehicle of youth resistance to the state. Drawing on both Foucauldian and Derridean notions of the archive, she explains how this practice was integral to maintenance of the country's collective memory, to preservation of what the movement did and why it matters, countering the dual threats of “amnesia and anomie” (p. 39). Her description of an informant's anxiousness to get back a Human Rights Commission report on the May 1998 riots is an important reminder of the vulnerability of documentation, even government-commissioned reports, to the power of erasure—warning us that, rather than taking preservation of such artifacts for granted, we must be vigilant in guarding them and even redocumenting the evidence they provide.

In subsequent chapters, Lee examines myriad ways in which activists’ messages migrated onto other sites, including visual media and physical bodies. The liveliest accounts from her fieldwork, however, appear in her ethnography of “demo culture” and “the demonstration,” which sheds light on how this recurring and distinctive feature of civic participation in Indonesia allowed a public to materialize on Indonesia's streets. But this culture also created what she calls a “dependency,” leading her to conclude that “in many ways student politics cannot exist without the aforementioned public space that hosts the demonstration” (p. 60). The gradual accommodation of demonstrations by the state served to dull their impact, transforming them into “a permanent substitute” for actions that might alter the political equation between the state and “the People.” Yet paradoxically, Lee argues, it is the “predictability of the demonstration by which nothing changes” that allows these civil society groups to continue exercising freedom of speech without fear of reprisal or repression (p. 72).

Lee's findings on demo culture are interspersed with vividly drawn vignettes focused on specific activists and informed by extensive participant observation during her attendance of at least sixty demos—first-hand accounts that imbue this section with ethnographic authenticity. Indeed, one of Lee's most valuable contributions to the increasing body of sensory ethnography is the way she provides an almost tangible sense of what it was like to be there, in the moment, participating in demonstrations. After describing demos rather bluntly as “riddled with moments of bored silence and heightened emotions,” she recounts her experience, as an anthropologist, discovering “the lingering effects of sunstroke, thirst and cheap fashion” following a “Long March” (pp. 75, 79). Such processions under a tropical sun, she explains, are “slow, and heat stroke settles in to tint everything you see a weird Kodak yellow the next day.” Her experiences lead her to intriguing insights, such as that “heat drives people apart like a centrifugal force, for it becomes hard to sustain unity after a few hours of baking outside” (p. 79). Building upon all of these observations, Lee elucidates the tension between the practical discomforts of enacting successful street actions—heat, boredom, thirst, doubt—and the consequential seriousness that somehow transcends the petty personal concerns of the moment.

Lee's study offers a valuable expansion of research presented in complementary works, including Meredith Weiss's monograph, Student Activism in Malaysia: Crucible, Mirror, Sideshow (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell Southeast Asia Program Publications, 2011), and the more comprehensive collection of essays, Student Activism in Asia: Between Protest and Powerlessness (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012), co-edited by Weiss and Edward Aspinall. It should be of interest to students and other scholars from a range of disciplines concerned with the ephemerality and endurance of democratic transitions. Finally, Lee's study is theoretically rich, drawing on works of key theorists and adding provocative insights to the literature on youth activism, which should be a growing field of study given the vital role youth play in virtually all social movements and the importance of understanding how generations cohere and influence political transitions over time.