Photo from instagram.com/prabowo
In a recent interview, Prabowo once again accused civil society groups and think tanks of being pawns of Western donors seeking to destabilise Indonesia through proxy mobilisation and cognitive warfare.
Foreign influence operations are a genuine security threat, including in Indonesia. But President Prabowo Subianto has turned the threat into a political weapon, using the language of foreign interference to suppress domestic dissent.
Rather than defending Indonesia’s democracy from external information warfare, Prabowo borrows and amplifies Russian narratives to discredit his critics, reaching for an old trick from his New Order-era playbook.
By…