Latent Identity, Contained Conflict: Cognitive Security In Jakarta's 2017 and 2024 Elections

Indonesia treats digital disinformation as a national security threat, yet election-risk maps list hoaxes without explaining how they become offline conflict. This article compares two Jakarta gubernatorial elections that shared similar information and identity vulnerabilities but ended differently: the 2017 contest saw mass mobilisation and street violence, whereas no comparable mobilisation was identified in 2024. Similar vulnerability does not imply identical political triggers, and the comparison treats that difference as a rival explanation. The article develops a cognitive security framework in which information threats pass through perception shift, collective mobilisation, and clash, with social vulnerability as an amplifier and collective verification as a possible dampener. Using a most-similar comparative case design, it applies theory-testing process tracing to sixteen public documents, comprising survey releases, election-body statements, news reports, and scholarly studies. Identity considerations remained salient in 2024 and internet penetration in Jakarta reached 87.51 percent, yet surveys using different instruments indicate weaker religious alignment of vote choice than in 2017. The election supervisory body named hoaxes and identity-based campaigning as risks and engaged religious and community leaders before the campaign, but the documents cannot separate this pre-emptive verification from the absence of a comparable trigger, nor fix the exact point at which the escalation chain stopped. The article reframes cognitive security as a community and institutional capacity and proposes stage-specific early warning indicators for election and security agencies.