Conservative Islamic factions vs. secular nationalists: toward a civil contestation in democratic Indonesia

This paper describes how Indonesia’s presidents have delt with Islamist and secular nationalist political contestation since the preparation of Indonesian independence and how the current president compares. Soekarno’s initial reliance on civil discourse ended in his autocratic decree that banned the Indonesia’s most powerful Islamic party (Masyumi). Soeharto’s initial iron-fist approach ended up meeting some Islamic demands. B.J. Habibie helped transformed Indonesia through a democratic election in 1999, but the leader of the winning party, Megawati was defeated in the parliament that elected a pluralist Muslim cleric, Gus Dur. Gus Dur’s administration, ended by the central axis, suggests that liberal democratic processes cannot be applied in an increasingly conservative Muslim majority country. Megawati lost, partly because she is a female president unpopular among the Islamists, while SBY was sympathetic toward the Islamist’s demands, enhancing the “conservative turn.” Jokowi has used discursive and legal approaches to promote Pancasila in challenging the hardline Islamic demands, enabling him to ban HTI and FPI and to implement the speech freedom-limiting laws, leading to criticisms and the decline in the 2020 Indonesia's Democracy Index. Jokowi’s expansion of these laws to maintain unity and stability may be deemed an “authoritarian turn,” but I argue that it may be more appropriately called “the Pancasila turn.” In framing and analyzing Jokowi’s laws as a Pancasila turn, I am arguing in this paper that this lays the foundation for a more equal, civil, and democratic contestation.

Axioms for defeat in democratic elections

We propose six axioms concerning when one candidate should defeat another in a democratic election involving two or more candidates. Five of the axioms are widely satisfied by known voting procedures. The sixth axiom is a weakening of Kenneth Arrow’s famous condition of the Independence of Irrelevant Alternatives (IIA). We call this weakening Coherent IIA. We prove that the five axioms plus Coherent IIA single out a method of determining defeats studied in our recent work: Split Cycle. In particular, Split Cycle provides the most resolute definition of defeat among any satisfying the six axioms for democratic defeat. In addition, we analyze how Split Cycle escapes Arrow’s impossibility theorem and related impossibility results.

Introduction: Pluralism, Contestation, and the Rule of Law

Around the world, the current political conjuncture is one of profound challenges for constitutionalism and the rule of law. In the United States, the executive has willfully engaged in a prolonged attempt to weaponize the machinery of the state and radicalize public opinion in order to undermine a democratic election. In the European Union, the increasingly authoritarian relationship between the executive and the judiciary in Poland and Hungary is posing the most profound threat to European constitutionalism in decades. In Hong Kong, the Chinese state is actively seeking to undermine legislative and judicial independence in the face of unprecedented pro-democracy mobilizations. In India, Lebanon, Bolivia, and elsewhere mass mobilizations are challenging, and being suppressed in the name of, the rule of law. Here in Canada, the Wet’suwet’en and their supporters, as well as the Tsleil Waututh, Haudenosaunee, L’nu (Mi’kmaq), Inuit, and members of countless other Indigenous nations are contesting the very nature of the rule of law, as they assert Indigenous laws against the law enforcement of the colonial state. Around the world, the use of emergency powers in response to the COVID-19 pandemic is also raising profound constitutional concerns.

Depoliticisation, hybridisation and dual processes of stigmatisation: An examination of the civilising offensive in China’s rural areas through moral review councils

In this article, I examine the moral review councils (MRCs) established in China’s rural areas since the early 1980s. I show that MRCs create a liminal plebeian public sphere in the context of a civilising offensive that deals with the uncivil behaviours of individuals and disputes between neighbours. In this plebeian public sphere, the MRC incorporates techniques of the Maoist mass meeting, the democratic election, traditional mediation and a pedagogy of exemplars, all of which are depoliticised into purely technical instruments. Their institutional legitimacy comes from organised virtues based on councillors’ male seniority and the democratic method of their selection. MRCs, as an instrument of a civilising offensive, are a kind of paternalistic technology, which involves a complex strategy of a hybridity of acts, relationships, thoughts, desires and temptations of village residents in the context of the reform era. The people targeted in this civilising offensive often experience two levels of stigmatisation and their participation determines the effectiveness of the operation of MRCs.

Uzbek Laws Provide Responsibility For Violation Of Democratic Election Principles

Building a democratic state governed by the rule of law and a free civil society is unimaginable without elections. After all, in the election process, the diversity of opinions in society, the will, aspirations, social moods of the people are clearly reflected. Democratic elections, which reflect the diversity of views in society, the aspirations and aspirations of the people, must be legally protected. Liability for violation of the principles of democratic elections has been established. Building a democratic state governed by the rule of law and a free civil society is unimaginable without elections. After all, in the election process, the diversity of opinions in society, the will, aspirations, social moods of the people are clearly reflected. Democratic elections, which reflect the diversity of views in society, the aspirations and aspirations of the people, must be legally protected. Liability for violation of the principles of democratic elections has been established.

Information Literacy and Outcomes-Based Education in South Africa in the 21st Century: The Challenge of Disparities

In the six years since South Africa's first democratic election, there have been fundamental changes in our educational policy. An outcomes-based approach to education was introduced to Grade I in 1998. This paper will sketch some of our progressive, timely educational policies and the challenges of implementing them. It will examine the multilingual nature of South African society and its effects on publishing learning support material for outcomes-based education. This paper purports that information literacy as a cognitive concept was an idea ahead of its time in South Africa. With the low percentage of school librarians, how can we be positive for the future of school librarianship? The possibilities are there, and we have to grasp them with both hands. Information and communication technologies (ICTs) are making inroads into our sites of learning. Information literacy is, in fact, emerging with strong links to the ICT world. Where are school librarians in all of this?

Empire

Frontiers on land and bodies are performative of imperial expansion and acceleration. This chapter argues that frontier sites are especially productive of imperial formations, as they expose inconsistencies and excesses that are met with a particular rage and discipline. As such, frontier sites are productive of iterations of imperial violence, which includes the construction of new infrastructures and technologies of violence, as well as the discursive justification for this violent apparatus. Palestine is a frontier of imperial formations that is productive of war technologies, but also a site where debates over the legitimization of the use of this violence takes place. Performances on the frontiers of empire such as Palestine are constitutive of subject and subjectivities on resistance and settler colonialism in global politics. The marking of Hamas as terrorists is central to the coding and interpretations of Palestine in public discourses. The democratic election of Hamas troubled the coding of the movement as an illegitimate terrorist Other, which was met with a performative anxiety and rage by the European Union. The EU had headed the election-monitoring mission in the Occupied Palestinian Territories, and they had declared the elections transparent, free. and fair. Their response, however, was to diplomatically and financially sanction Hamas, which had profound consequences for Palestinian governance. Hamas and Gaza exposed fault lines in empire’s attempt to defend its use of violence. and as such they are also productive of new forms of enacting imperial violence. The chapter explores the performances of Tania El Khoury, whose work uses intimate scenes and audience interactivity to foreground the pain and oppression of imperial violence. Performance acts as a cultural frontier that negotiates and expresses subversive and resistant meanings of violence in global politics.

THE RESIDUE OF MILITARY REGIME DURING THE EARLY DEMOCRATIZATION ERA IN INDONESIA AND MYANMAR

This paper is a comparison of democracy structure between two Southeast Asian Nations, Indonesia and Myanmar during their early periods of Post-Praetorianism era where the state was controlled and dominated by the military. This paper found that In Indonesia, democratization after reformasi era in 1998 had successfully changed the structure of power, where the military determination in politics had been decline significantly, despite the military still hold the power to influence political and economic affairs. In Myanmar, the democratization was a result of long term transition previously planned by the military regime, so even in 2010 democratic election, the military still hold the control over the politics and tend to preserve their power within the new face of democratic system.