The Southeast Asia Forum experienced an embarrassment of riches in 2009-2010.  In no previous academic year had the Forum enjoyed the intellectual company of so many first-rate scholars working on Southeast Asia at Stanford.  They were six in all—Marshall Clark (Australia), James Hoesterey (US), Juliet Pietsch (Australia), Thitinan Pongsudhirak (Thailand), Sudarno Sumarto (Indonesia), and Christian von Luebke (Germany)—three for the full academic year and three for two months apiece.  All six visitors shared their findings and thoughts on Southeast Asia in talks hosted by SEAF.  Not least among the pleasures of having them at Stanford was a Spring 2010 seminar in which they read each other’s work in progress and shared ideas as to how it might be improved.  These conversations gave specific, heuristic, and collegial meaning to the abstract notion of “a community of scholars.”

Here are brief updates on all six as of the end of June 2010:  

Marshall Clark

A lecturer in Indonesian studies at Deakin University in Australia, Dr. Clark came to Stanford on sabbatical to spend two months at Stanford in Spring 2010 writing up and sharing his research findings with US-based colleagues.  Publications associated with his stay at APARC include two books, Maskulinitas:  Culture, Gender and Politics in Indonesia (Monash University Press, 2010) and Indonesia-Malaysia Relations:  Media Politics and Regionalism (co-authored with Juliet Pietsch and forthcoming in 2011), and two articles, “The Ramayana in Southeast Asia: Fostering Regionalism or the State?” in Ramayana in Focus, and (with Dr. Pietsch) “Generational Change:  Regional Security and Australian Engagement with Asia,” The Pacific Review  During his time with SEAF he presented papers at venues including the Association for Asian Studies convention in Philadelphia in March 2010.  In April at the University of California-Berkeley at the Islam Today Film Festival he moderated a discussion of the ins and outs of making movies in Indonesia and Malaysia. (2010).

He returns to his position on the faculty of Deakin University.

James Hoesterey

Dr. Hoesterey was awarded the Walter H. Shorenstein Fellowship to spend the academic year at APARC working on several projects, including revising his University of Wisconsin-Madison doctoral dissertation into a book.  Based on anthropological research in Indonesia on media-savvy Muslim preachers, Sufi Gurus and Celebrity Scandal:  Islamic Piety on the Public Stage should be under review in 2010 for possible publication in 2011.  Also in the pipeline are an essay, “Shaming the State: Pop Preachers and the Politics of Pornography in Indonesia,” to appear in a volume he is co-editing with political scientist Michael Buehler, and chapters in Muslim Cosmopolitanisms and Digital Subjectivities:  Anthropology in the Age of Mass Media.  During his fellowship he spoke to audiences at several US universities.  In March 2010 he was elected incoming chair of the Indonesian and East-Timor Studies Committee of the Association for Asian Studies.

In Fall 2010 the BBC-Discovery Channel series “Human Planet” will feature Dr. Hoesterey’s work as a cultural consultant with documentary-film makers in West Papua.  He will spend AY 2010-11 in Illinois as the Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in Islamic Studies at Lake Forest College.  

Juliet Pietsch

Dr. Pietsch is a senior lecturer in the School of Politics and International Relations at the Australian National University.  During her two-month sabbatical at Stanford in Spring 2010 she worked on two books:  Indonesia-Malaysia Relations: Media, Politics and Regionalism (with Dr. Clark) and (with two other co-authors) Dimensions of Australian Society (3rd ed., Palgrave Macmillan, 2010).  In April, jointly with Dr. Clark, she spoke at the Berkeley APEC Study Center on “Indonesia-Malaysia Relations and Southeast Asian Regional Identity.”

Dr. Pietsch returns to her faculty position at the Australian National University.

Thitinan Pongsudhirak

Dr. Pongsudhirak is an associate professor in the Department of International Relations in the Faculty of Political Science at Chulalongkorn University, whose Institute of Security and International Studies he also heads.  He was selected to spend a month at Stanford in Spring 2010 as an FSI-Humanities Center international scholar, and was supported for a second month by FSI’s Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law.  During his time on campus he focused on the turbulent politics of Thailand—in an article drafted for the Journal of Democracy, in a number of shorter pieces, in lectures at various venues, and in interviews with media around the world.  (For a filmed interview on 4 June 2010, see http://absolutelybangkok.com/thitinan-on-continuity-change/.)

Dr. Pongsudhirak will briefly rejoin some of his Stanford colleagues at a conference on Asian regionalism to be hosted by APARC in Kyoto in September 2010.  Meanwhile he continues his scholarship and teaching at Chulalongkorn.

Sudarno Sumarto

An Indonesian economist specializing on poverty reduction, Dr. Sumarto spent AY 2009-2010 at APARC as an Asia Foundation fellow writing up research, lecturing on and off campus, and advising Indonesian officials on anti-poverty policy.  Notable among the publications resulting from his residence at Stanford is a book, Poverty and Social Protection in Indonesia (Singapore / Jakarta:  ISEAS / Smeru Institute, May 2010), which he co-edited and most of whose chapters he co-wrote.  Noteworthy, too, is a co-authored essay, “Targeting Social Protection Programs:  The Experience of Indonesia,” in Deficits and Trajectories: Rethinking Social Protection as Development Policy in the Asia Region (forthcoming, 2010).  Indonesia-related subjects of writing in progress include lessons from the cash transfer program, how such transfers have affected political participation, and the impacts of violent conflict on economic growth.  During his stay at Stanford, Dr. Sumarto was chosen to co-convene the September 2010 Indonesia Update conference in Canberra on “Employment, Living Standards, and Poverty in Contemporary Indonesia” and to co-edit the resulting book. 

Dr. Sumarto returns to Jakarta to become a senior research fellow at the Smeru Institute, which he co-founded and directed, and to continue his work on poverty alleviation in Indonesia.

Christian von Luebke

Former Shorenstein fellow Dr. von Luebke completed the first year of a two-year German Research Foundation fellowship at Stanford writing a book on democracy and governance in Southeast Asia.  Before the end of 2010, Gauging Governance:  The Mesopolitics of Democratic Change in Indonesia should be in the pipeline toward publication.  Other relevant work includes “Politics of Reform:  Political Scandals, Elite Resistance, and Presidential Leadership in Indonesia,” Journal of Current Southeast Asian Affairs (2010), and a co-authored piece on current economics and politics in the Bulletin of Indonesian Economic Studies (2010).  Pending revision and resubmission is an article on the political economy of investment climates in Indonesia.  In the course of the year he spoke on his research before audiences in North America, Europe, and Southeast Asia, and co-organized a panel on Southeast Asian politics to be held at the annual conference of Oxford Analytica in the UK in September 2010.

Dr. von Luebke’s plans for AY 2010-11 at Stanford include research and writing on Indonesia and the Philippines and teaching a course on Southeast Asian politics

Prominent Indonesian Muslim intellectual Nurcholish Madjid once declared “Islam Yes; Islamic political party No!” Voters in contemporary Indonesia seem to agree with this basic sentiment. Despite the recent Islamic revival that has dramatically increased public expressions of piety, Islamic political parties have failed to gain any significant electoral traction in Indonesia. In fact, between the 2004 and 2009 national elections, support for Islamic parties actually decreased from 38 percent to approximately 28 percent. Yet during those same five years, the Islamic political parties that failed to win at the ballot box mobilized enough political and popular support to pass one of Indonesia’s most divisive pieces of legislation—the Anti-Pornography Law. These seemingly contradictory elements of Indonesian politics provide starkly different impressions of Islam’s political role. Does a weak showing in the country’s electoral politics indicate the imminent demise of Islam in Indonesian politics? Or does the politically adept maneuvering of Islamists—who seek political power through legislation about bodily discipline—foretell gloomy days ahead?

Explanations for this paradox depend largely on where we look for “the political.” Political scientist Greg Fealy has described Islam in Indonesia as a mosaic. If we spend too much time focusing our gaze on one single area, he observes, we lose sight of other patterns elsewhere in the mosaic. To understand political Islam by ballot box alone is to miss the cultural undercurrents that have direct bearing on Islam and politics in Indonesia.

The anti-pornography bill was not only a political battle waged inside the parliament building; it was also a media drama that played out in the newspapers, televisions, and on the Internet. Human rights and women’s advocacy groups vehemently protested an early version of the bill, which stipulated that women would be prevented from leaving their homes during certain evening hours. From a different vantage point, the mostly Hindu island province of Bali threatened to secede, arguing that the article prohibiting “revealing” clothing in public would wreak havoc on the island’s tourism industry, still sluggish after devastating bomb attacks in 2002 and 2005. Whereas many non-Muslims worried about the “Islamization” of Indonesia, proponents of the bill lamented the “degradation of national morality.”

Popular Muslim television preachers were among the bill’s most vocal supporters. Eager to parlay their celebrity appeal into political clout, TV preachers Ustad Jefri Al-Buchori and Arifin Ilham helped to lead the so-called Million Muslim March to rally public support for the anti-pornography bill. Celebrity preacher and self-help guru Abdullah Gymnastiar led a sophisticated multimedia campaign to promote the bill through television, radio, the Internet, text messages, and public rallies. All of these popular preachers, in step with the political strategy of the Indonesian Council of Ulamas, invoked the religio-political language of moral crisis in an attempt to control the terms of political debate. Unable to win an election, Islamic groups flexed their moral muscle in the public sphere. From the pulpit of his Sunday afternoon television program, Gymnastiar characterized those against the bill as “having no shame” before God or country. Nearly every single political party, anxious not to appear “un-Islamic,” voted to support the anti-pornography legislation.

The political participation of a new generation of media-savvy religious leaders reveals a sentiment quite different from Nurcholish Madjid’s liberal aspirations. As one proponent of the Anti-Pornography Law put it, “Islamic political party No; Political Islam Yes!” Whereas utopian visions of the international caliphate may not resonate with Indonesian voters, it appears that political Islam—as played out on the public stage—is alive and well. What remains to be seen, however, is whether those who engage in the politics of piety also have the moral courage to champion Indonesia’s more pressing issues of poverty and corruption.

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Shorenstein APARC Dispatches are regular bulletins designed exclusively for our friends and supporters. Written by center faculty and scholars, Shorenstein APARC Dispatches deliver timely, succinct analysis on current events and trends in Asia, often discussing their potential implications for business.

In five new books -- three of which were produced as part of Shorenstein APARC's in-house publishing program, distributed through the Brookings Institution Press -- Center academics tackle an array of issues related to Asia's past, present, and future, from both policy and historical perspectives.

Islamism: Contested Perspectives on Political Islam was published by Stanford University Press in November 2009. But the story behind the book dates back five years to November 2004. It was then that Donald K. Emmerson and Daniel M. Varisco agreed to disagree.

Emmerson spoke on "Islamism: What Is to Be Said and Done?" (video link and discussion) at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington DC on 30 November 2009.

Varisco, a Hofstra University anthropologist with expertise on Islam and the Middle East, had invited Emmerson to join a panel on "Islam and Political Violence: The ‘Ismhouse' of Language" at the 2004 annual meeting of the Middle East Studies Association.

Emmerson was pleased to accept. Not since graduating from high school in Beirut had he lived in the Middle East. He had specialized instead on Indonesia, famously known as having more Muslims than any other country, yet spatially and spiritually peripheral to the Middle Eastern locations of Mecca, Medina, and the Al-Aqsa Mosque. Emmerson relished the chance to interact with experts whose knowledge of Muslim societies had been acquired mainly in Arab settings. He also shared Varisco's interest in discussing the controversial and contested meanings of the words "Islamism" and "Islamist." Since 9/11 these terms had become increasingly common in English-language discourse on Islam, Muslims, and violence by Muslims claiming to be acting in the name of their religion.

On the panel, before some two hundred MESA attendees, Varisco and Emmerson politely disagreed. Varisco argued that "Islamism" and "Islamist" were invidious terms that falsely linked Islam to terrorism. For the sake of consideration and accuracy, he said, they should not be used. Without advocating self-censorship, he defended his refusal to use "Islamism" or "Islamist" in his own writing and teaching.

"Inventing Islamism: The Violence of Rhetoric" is the title of Varisco's MESA paper as it appears in the book. "Why," he asks, "do we need a term that uniquely brands Muslims as terrorists rather than just calling them terrorists and militants, the way we could easily do for followers of any religion or any ideology? As scholars and students of religion, should we not be doing all we can to refute the notion that Islam is intrinsically more violent than other religions?" (Islamism, p. 33.)

Emmerson agreed with Varisco that the terms "Islamism" and "Islamist" were often used to conflate Islam, Muslims, and violence. But Emmerson argued that the words were not so uniformly and falsely invidious as to warrant their deletion. In his view, in addition to referencing radical views and acts, the terms usefully named a variety of mostly peaceful ways of expressing and advancing subjective interpretations of Islam in public life. Phrases such as "democratic Islamism" and "moderate Islamists," hr argued, were already fairly common in scholarship and the media. His chapter is entitled, accordingly, "Inclusive Islamism: The Utility of Diversity."

After the session at MESA, Varisco, Emmerson, and copanelist Richard C. Martin, an Islamic studies professor at Emory University, spoke of someday turning the discussion into a book. Busy with other projects, they postponed this one, but eventually took it up again as an experiment with an unusual format: As a neutral party, Martin (with the later addition of one of his graduate students, Abbas Barzegar) would edit the book, which would open with chapters by Emmerson and Varisco stating their views. Scholars of Islam from around the world would be invited to comment briefly on the dispute. More than a dozen experts in or from the Middle East, North Africa, North America, and Southeast Asia contributed remarks, which fill the middle of the book. Varisco and Emmerson end the volume with chapters that update and extend their respective arguments in response to each other's and the commentators' views.

An anonymous reviewer of the manuscript for Stanford University Press suggested that Islamism as a phenomenon was on the decline, implying that the relevance of Islamism would follow suit. In Emmerson's opinion, this may not happen soon. Juxtapositions of Islam, Muslims, and violence continue to occur in a range of Muslim-majority countries. At the same time, a great variety of Muslim leaders and organizations committed to peace, dialogue, and democracy continue to demonstrate the civility of Islam as they understand it. This rich spectrum of motives and associations will continue to challenge analysts around the world -- scholars, journalists, and policymakers alike.

Is Islam a religion of peace? War? Neither? Both? In the case of those Muslims who do carry out acts of violence or intolerance in the name of Islam, should their claims to have been motivated by religious imperatives be accepted as true, rejected as false, or bracketed as subjective? How considerate and how accurate is it to assert that any Muslim who engages in terrorism must not be a true Muslim? What is a "true Muslim"? By whose standards?

Is it appropriate to argue, with Emmerson, that to speak of "Islamic terrorism" wrongly and hurtfully implies that terrorism is intrinsic to Islam as a religion, whereas the notion of "Islamist terrorism" merely links such violence to one among many possible ways of interpreting Islam as an ideology? Or should these distinctions about words be ignored in favor of actions, including possible revisions of American policy, that can help to diminish the incidence of supposedly religious violence, whatever its actual nature may be?

In months and years to come, Muslims accused of having planned or committed violence against American targets will be judged in a series of civilian and military trials here in the United States. The defendants will likely include high-profile individuals such as Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, charged with plotting 9/11, and Nidal Malik Hassan, accused of the November 2009 rampage at Fort Hood. Some of the accused may admit responsibility for acts of violence and portray what they did as required by Islam. Some may accuse the US government of waging war against Islam. Some may claim innocence, or attribute what they did to personal reasons unrelated to religion. Stimulated by these proceedings, commentators on the Internet, in the press, and on talk shows can be expected to debate "Islamic terrorism" versus "Islamophobia."

Quite apart from whether fresh acts of terror occur, interest in the questions that Islamism features seems, at least to Emmerson, unlikely to decrease.

More than any of his predecessors, President Obama has reached out to "the Muslim world." But what of the terms and the timing of that demarche? If, as expected, he visits Indonesia next year, he will try to build on his oratorical successes in Istanbul and Cairo by addressing Muslims in the country that has more of them than any other. He has a way with words. But what words should he use? Is "the Muslim world" too diverse even to exist? Do "radical Islam" and "Islamism" defame a religion for acts of violence done in its name, or are these terms only politically incorrect? Among Muslims around the world, sympathy for terrorism as jihad appears to have declined. Would the US be better off ignoring religion and dealing with Muslim-majority countries from Morocco to Malaysia in purely secular terms: as nations not congregations? Is it time to revisit the entrenched assumption that the revival of religion has killed secularism and rendered policies based on it as offensively ethnocentric as they are empirically naive? If the "clash of civilizations" misnames a plethora of clashes between Muslims themselves, should the enlightened mutual reassurances of elite-level "inter-faith" dialogues give way to less rhetorical and more realistic efforts toward "intra-faith" understanding and conciliation?

What, in short, is to be said, and done? Prof. Emmerson's talk will also reference his latest co-authored book, Islamism: Contested Perspectives on Political Islam (Stanford University Press, November 2009).

Past, present, and future Southeast Asianists linked to SEAF have ignored the hoary joke about the contest whose first prize is one week in Philadelphia and whose second prize is two weeks in that city.  Several of them are on the program of the Annual Meeting of the Association for Asian Studies (AAS) to be held, yes, in Philadelphia on 25-28 March 2010.

Inaugural Lee Kong Chian NUS-Stanford Distinguished Fellow (2007-08) Robert W. Hefner (Boston University) will preside over the proceedings in Philadelphia as the elected president of the AAS.  He will also lead a Presidential Rountable entitled “After Reformasi:  Trends in Southeast Asian Muslim Politics and Culture.” 

Current APARC Shorenstein Fellow (2009-2010) James Hoesterey (University of Wisconsin-Madison) has organized a panel with the intriguing title “Red, White, and Green?  Islam in Indonesian National Politics and Political Culture.”

Former LKC NUS-Stanford Distinguished Fellow (2008-09) Mark Thompson (University of Erlangen) has prepared a panel entitled “Comparing Across Southeast Asia:  Regional Patterns of Politics.”

Former Shorenstein Fellow (2003-04) Erik Kuhonta (McGill University) has put together a “border crossing” panel on “Class and Democracy in Asia.”

Future SEAF Visiting Scholar (Spring 2010) Marshall Clark (Deakin University) will head a panel on “Regionalism in Asia.”

As of this writing—27 October 2009—the full roster of all Annual Meeting panelists and roundtablers was not yet available.  So the list above does not include SEAF-associated scholars who will appear on panels or roundtables that they have not themselves organized.  (These scholars include, e.g., SEAF’s director, Don Emmerson, who will chair and discuss “Democracy and Identity in Southeast Asia.”) 

Nor, of course, do the above names include SEAF visitors and alumni who are on the programs of other upcoming professional meetings.  Two in this category who come to mind are Christian von Luebke and John Ciorciari.

Current German Science Foundation Visiting Scholar (2009-2011) and former Shorenstein Fellow (2008-09) Christian von Luebke is co-organizing a panel at the 6th Conference of the European Association for South East Asian Studies (EuroSEAS), to be held in Gothenburg, Sweden, 26-28 August 2010.  The panel’s provisional title is “The Challenge Within:  Indonesian Politics between Center and Periphery.”  Christian’s paper will focus on the politics of public-sector reform.

Former Shorenstein Fellow (2007-08) John Ciorciari (University of Michigan) will present a paper at the International Studies Association’s annual convention in New Orleans in February 2010.  Entitled “Theories of Institutions in Indian Foreign Policy,” the paper will apply to Indian evidence some of the ideas he developed in his revised dissertation on Southeast Asia.  (For more on John’s work, see “Where Did They Go and What Have They Been Up To?  John Ciorciari” elsewhere in the NEWS on this website.)

Contrary to the old joke, and in light of the talents and knowledge represented by the SEAF-linked scholars slated to speak at the AAS in Philadelphia, that city in late March is assuredly worthy of being at least a two-week first prize.  And if you’re in a travel-planning mode, consider New Orleans in February and Gothenburg in August as well.