Hui Yew-Foong - Böcker

This volume seeks to introduce and deepen the understanding of Islam and its role in politics as encountered in different national and transnational contexts in Southeast Asia, eschewing the neo-orientalist approach that has informed public discourse in recent years. In Encountering Islam, the book lingers beyond the summary moment and reflects on the multiple impressions, suppressions and repressions, whether coherent or incoherent, associated with Islam as a socio-political force in public life. To this end, it is not adequate simply to represent the divergent identities associated with Islam in Southeast Asia, whether embedded in state-endorsed orthodoxy or Islamic movements that contest such orthodoxy. It is also important to examine religious minorities in political contexts where Islam is dominant and Muslim communities in national contexts where they are minorities. By situating these religious identities within their larger socio-political contexts, this volume seeks to provide a more holistic understanding of what is encountered as Islam in Southeast Asia.

This volume is based on papers from the second in a series of three conferences that deal with the multi-scalar processes of heritage-making, ranging from the local to the national and international levels, involving different players with different degrees of agency and interests. These players include citizens and civil society, the state, and international organizations and actors. The current volume focuses on the role of citizens and civil society in the politics of heritage-making, looking at how these players at the grass-roots level make sense of the past in the present. Who are these local players that seek to define the meaning of heritage in their everyday lives? How do they negotiate with the state, or contest the influence of the state, in determining what their heritage is? These and other questions will be taken up in various Asian contexts in this volume to foreground the local dynamics of heritage politics.

Drawing from eleven rich case studies in Asia, this book is the first to explore how heritage is used as aid and diplomacy by various agencies to produce knowledge, power, values and geopolitics in the global heritage regime. It represents an interdisciplinary endeavour to feature a diversity of situations where cultural heritage is invoked or promoted to serve interests or visions that supposedly transcend local or national paradigms. This collection of articles thus not only considers processes of “UNESCO-ization” of heritage (or their equivalents when conducted by other international or national actors) by exploring the diplomatic and developmentalist politics of heritage-making at play and its transformational impact on societies. It also describes how local and outside states often collude with international mechanisms to further their interests at the expense of local communities and of citizens’ rights. Heritage as Aid and Diplomacy in Asiaexplores the following questions: Under the current international heritage regime, what are the mechanisms of—and the manipulations that take place within—ideological, political and cultural transmissions? What is heritage diplomacy and how can we conceptualize it? How do the complicated history and colonial past of Asia constitute the current practices of heritage diplomacy and shape heritage discourse in Asia? How do international organizations, nation-states, NGOs, heritage brokers and experts contribute to the history of the global heritage discourse? How has the flow of global knowledge been transferred and transformed? And how does the global hierarchy of cultural values function?

On 17 April 2019, Indonesians marched to the polls to elect their president and vice president directly for the fourth time since 2004. The main contenders for the presidency—Joko "Jokowi" Widodo and Prabowo Subianto—were the same as when they first clashed in 2014, and the result was the same. Some of the issues raised in 2014 were rehashed in 2019, and the geographical polarization of voters had deepened along the same fault lines. There is a case for arguing that 2019 was a replay of the 2014 elections, hence the title of this book. But "2.0" also signifies progression, since nothing is ever exactly the same. 2019 has seen the intensification of cyber-politics, and the curious outcome where former opponents on the electoral battlefield, as featured on the cover of this book, ended up as colleagues in the same cabinet. This volume provides incisive analyses of the dynamics of the elections from multiple perspectives, from what is new (cyber-politics) to what persists (identity politics), from the constituencies that cut across national demographics to the regions and their peculiarities. The insights drawn out in this volume will serve as a guide for understanding the next presidential and parliamentary elections in 2024 and beyond.

This article reports the findings of an online survey conducted in November–December 2021 on Indonesians' experience and perception of fintech tools, focusing on fintech adoption in the Greater Jakarta region, which besides Jakarta, includes Bogor, Depok, Tangerang and Bekasi.One key finding is that, in the Greater Jakarta region, socio-economic status as measured by income is not a key determinant of fintech adoption. This is likely due to the more developed and mature ICT infrastructure in the Greater Jakarta region, which makes fintech tools readily accessible.However, the kinds of fintech tools that are more likely to be used—M-banking, E-wallet, Online Lending, Investment, Donations, and so on—are influenced by factors such as income, education, gender, age and occupation, suggesting that different fintech tools appeal to different groups in society according to their needs and resources.Psychological factors that are important in the adoption of fintech include having many choices in the needed financial services and feeling in control. While fintech users are concerned about data leaks and fraud, this does not deter them from using fintech.It may be anticipated that with the deepening of ICT infrastructure and public education on the safe use of fintech, fintech usage in Indonesia will continue to spread throughout the country.