The objective of this project is to explain the enduring influence of conservatism in democratic processes in the Global South, identify major features of this ideology, and analyze its parallels and divergences with Western conservatism.
Conservatism is defined as a reactionary, pragmatic, and cross-class idea-cum-movement in defense of hierarchies, stability, and tradition. Studies on conservatism, however, tend to be Western-oriented, paying less attention to specific forms of non-Western conservatism. At the same time, conservatism in the Global South is typically examined in terms of institutional and material dimensions of democratic backsliding, neglecting the negative impact of conservative ideas on democratic quality. The transformation of Indonesian conservatism in recent decades (1966-2017) provides a vantage point from which to critically analyze conservative thoughts and praxis globally. This project, through archival studies and interviews, will pursue this inquiry by studying the lives and thoughts of three leading groups of middle-class conservative thinkers in Indonesia: anti-communist intellectuals, pro-market economists, and Islamist anti-feminist women activists.
The project hypotheses that the enduring influence and consolidation of multi-strand conservatism in Indonesia is an expression of turbocharged mesocracy or middle-class rule, where the middle-class, out of fear of lower-class redistributive demands and socio-cultural dislocations under capitalism, support an elitist form of democracy, market economy with limited social welfare, and patriarchal family values. Combining approaches from political theory, intellectual history, and area studies, this project will contribute to the Asian and Mediterranean Studies research group, located at DFLM at UniTo, which specializes in cultural studies, politics, history, linguistics, and social development in Asia and the Mediterranean Region from an empirical and interdisciplinary perspective.