PCD Journal Vol. V No. 2, 2017 211 Contextually-Grounded Democracy: Broadening Pathways for Democratisation Purwo Santoso and Joash Tapiheru Received: 16 October 2016 | Accepted: 7 September 2017 | Published: 16 October 2017 Abstract As norms and mechanisms, democracy has been set in place and the democratic political system is in operation, while the practical standard for expressing democracy is tightened, to make monolithic global governance. Those who fail to comply with the standards are subject to a kind of punishment. At this end, democracy becomes undemocratic, as opportunity to propose alternative ways of expressing commitment to democracy is hindered by the specificity of the prevailing regime. In response to this inclination, contextualized expression of democracy is inevitable. Context does matter, as important as the democratic values. The fact that unanticipated issues of democratisation keep emerging, signals the importance of reconciling the prevailing global regime with the particularities in matching local and national contexts. Yet, the contextualised expression is vulnerable to local and national subversions by the predominating power. Democratisation, then becomes a detailed craftsmanship nurtured by a testable commitment to democracy, in so far the country is endowed with commitment to the ethics of democracy. By using the case of Indonesia’s still ongoing democratisation this article maps out the challenges in meeting the standard with the particularity. The analysis in this article provides insights in fostering the contextualized democracy movement in the Asia Pacific Region. Keywords: democracy; context and contextualisation; discourse; discursive engagement Introduction For centuries, democracy might be the most popular word on this planet, yet unanimous consensus on what this term constituted has never been reached. This is in contrast to a little more than a decade of optimism toward liberal democracy as the only available and practical alternative following the end of the Cold War. Nowadays, more and more people become more sceptical toward democracy, especially in its liberal variant. The scepticism is levelled either at the claim of democracy as a set of universal values or the feasibility of a certain institutional design of applying it.