Contestations in Contemporary Southeast Asia

This book focuses on a Pentecostal-Evangelical Kenyah community in central Borneo, a region that crosses the border between Malaysia and Indonesia. The book argues that the Pentecostal-Evangelical (P/e) mode of religious authority and organization has the capacity to adapt to both the pre-existing hierarchical traditional institution such as Adat and modern egalitarian social forms. It has been necessary within the context of Kenyah’s experience of religious change as it enabled many actors from various social classes to obtain and perceive religious authority in a specific local and regional political-religious situation while promoting their identity as egalitarian and autonomous modern subjects. In contrast with other studies on the P/e church that emphasize its egalitarian spirit as a factor that supports its impressive growth, the book contends that its adaptive structural characteristics have enabled the development of this specific Christian denomination to expand rapidly andplay a dominant position in contemporary social life in various parts of the world.

The book thus provides novel findings in the study of religious change in Southeast Asia by enriching the discussion of historical transformation in the region, and analyzing the articulation of global and regional Christian movements, with the socio-political characteristics of Bornean society.

This book focuses on how Indonesian civil society organisations interact with ASEAN to shape human rights institutionalisation in the region. Using Bourdieu-inspired constructivist IR as an analytical lens, the book argues that there are pre-reflexive norms that dominate the field of interaction in the region that shape the way civil society organisations operate. This has resulted in the diverging advocacy practices, thus complicating human rights institutionalisation process in ASEAN.

This book examines the theme of privatised violence in different political settings by focusing on the Indonesian case. It argues that the persistence of privatised violence is not solely related to the historical formation of the institutions of state power and authority; it is also intricately related to predatory forms of capitalist development. Within such contexts, privatised violence is not an obstruction, but instrumental for the capital accumulation process, constituting a state of disorder. The book contributes to understanding not only Indonesia’s privatised violence but also the nature of Indonesian politics and the state.

This book presents a new organizing framework for studying democratic recession and autocratization in Southeast Asia. By introducing a new concept, “democratic backlash,” the book details how democratic recession inevitably provokes resistance that often forms the nucleus of new democratic movements, and in doing so, argues that it is important to identify these reverse trends that may eventually become dominant.

This book examines the failure of Islamic politics in becoming a hegemonic force in Indonesia and the far-reaching consequences for current practices of democracy and of Islam itself. In contrast to the thesis of compatibility between Islam and democracy following the dominant discourse of the Global War on Terror (GWOT) and neoliberal democracy, this study situates Islamic politics in broader social settings by examining its nature and trajectories throughout Indonesia’s modern political history. The book thus investigates how the practices of Islamic politics, or Islamism, have shaped and been transformed through political contestations and the formation of coalitions of multiple forces in constructing Indonesia’s socio-political landscape.

Using the concept of hegemony from poststructuralist discourse theory, the analytical framework applied in this book goes beyond liberal epistemologies of Islamism that prescribe the separation of religion from politics and treat Islamism as an object of intervention. Instead, the book is premised on the contention that Indonesia is a political construction,  in which Islam has become one of the major discourses that have defined and transformed Indonesia’s nation-state throughout history. In this view, it is argued that the nature and dynamics of Islamism are not driven primarily by different interpretations of religious doctrines, cultural norms or by the imperative of institutions. Rather, the struggles of different Islamist projects in their quest for hegemony are contingent on the outcomes of socio-political changes and contestations that involve multiple political forces, both within and beyond the Islamists, in specific historical conjunctures.

This book examines how fiction films and novels represent the communist-led national democratic (NatDem) revolution in the Philippines. Produced aboveground decades after the Philippines’ historic transition from dictatorship to elite democracy, these NatDem fictions depict how the communist movement in the Philippines confronted various national and global changes, tracking revolutionary experiences amidst the ascendancy of neoliberalism, the continuation of counterinsurgency and the emergence of non-Marxist social movements and discourses.

Figuring Resistance studies how fictions portray the tenacity of political commitment among revolutionaries engaged in the revolution's manifold history of crises, setbacks, and persistence. It illuminates the crucial role played by cultural work in creating and nourishing an oppositional public sphere, where the experiential makings of the liberation struggle in the Third World can be imagined.

This book focuses on gig work and organising among gig workers in the Indonesian online transport service, situated within the context of widespread precaritisation and digitalisation in today’s world of work. It addresses the challenges experienced by precarious gig workers in Indonesia in articulating their struggles through the discourse of precarity. Such challenges are related to the reproduction of neoliberal-derived entrepreneurial aspirations amidst the historical relative absence of stable work patterns (previously associated with more advanced economies), and the historically rooted marginalisation of broad-based labour movements as a social force. Though showcasing the specific experiences of Indonesian workers, the analysis in this book is supplemented by broad comparative insights.  It offers empirically based analysis for those interested in new forms of collective organisations and politics that emerge among workers under the imperatives of neoliberalism in Indonesia, and by extension Southeast Asia.