Indonesia Study Group: Abstracts

3:00–4:30
September 01 2009

Political Economy and Islamic Politics: the Case of Indonesia and the Larger Debate
Richard Robison

This study seeks to explain the why Islamic politics in Indonesia has failed seriously to challenge the ascendancy of secular power and to mobilise popular support behind the banner of Islam. It is framed in the context of larger theoretical debates and in comparative experiences, especially in North Africa and the Middle East. At the heart of the argument is the proposition that Islamic politics and its various manifestations are shaped in conflicts over power that accompany the advance of market capitalism. Thus, Islamic politics is not defined in simple cultural categories of radical or moderate or as responses to different institutional arrangements but as specific forms of politics that variously reflect: a). the defence of small property and the provincial social order based around religious clerics and landowning and small business classes; b). the attempt to create a form of populism that harnesses cross-class anxieties on the part of marginalised middle classes and a new urban poor to a politics of Islamic identity; c). an attempt to establish a place for Islamic urban middle classes and professionals in the modern market economy and the democratic state. While there are important parallels across NA/ME and Indonesia, it is proposed that, in the first and last of the above cases, Islamic politics in Indonesia has been characterised by a pronounced unwillingness to disturb existing social relationships and a consequent preference for the consolidation of its interests within the state rather in cross-class coalitions. Most important, there has been little room for mobilising mass support either through populist or electoral politics in an arena where secular nationalist forms of populism are highly pervasive and resilient and embedded within the state itself