In-Person Panel PS4.4

Reimagining Democracy: Narrating Gender, Community and Civil Society

Co-opting Indonesian Cyberspace: Oligarchy, Civil Society and the Battle for Digital Hegemony 

Ary Hermawan 

My research examines the rise of digital control strategies in Indonesian cyberspace. Combining the Gramscian framework of civil society and the Murdoch School critical political economy approach, this thesis departs from the theories dominating the literature on internet control or digital repression, which focus on either regime type, state adaptability to digital environment or civil society capacity theory (Feldstein, 2021a; Han, 2018; Sinpeng, 2013; Yangyue, 2014b) . It argues that the rise of digital repression is driven by the ongoing conflict among fractions of the Indonesian oligarchy over access to political and material wealth, in which control of public institutions have been paramount in the said battle. It is more than just a result of the state’s adaptability to digital technology, which has provided autocrats with a new repertoire of social control tactics, or simply a reflection of how regime types behave in cyberspace. Informed by Gramsci, it posits that the cyberspace has now become a new site of struggle for political hegemony. My preliminary findings corroborated my argument that the deepening intra-oligarchic conflicts ahead of electoral contestations contributed to the rampant abuse of online defamation laws, the rise of computational propaganda and a spike in digital attack incidents.

The Construction of Imagined Communities through Bilibili Danmu Commentaries: Case Studies of Year Hare Affair and Yao-Chinese Folktales 

Qiong (Sharpay) Wu 

The recent scholarship pays more attention to how Bilibili Danmu, a unique commenting system on Bilibili, constructs bottom-up digital identities and fan communities. This article focuses on how youth Bilibili users apply the digital practice in relation to collective expressions reflecting the concept of “imagined communities”. Furthermore, this research explores the discursive texts of commentaries in which users can respond to their national and cultural identity on Bilibili. Drawing on the Year Hare Affair (2015-2019) and Yao-Chinese Folktales (2023), this research conducted qualitative, discourse analysis to address digital interaction with content videos and other commenters. This article argues that the content and discourse of the Danmu commentaries on selected videos and plots demonstrate the influence of state-navigated nationalist sentiments. The responses shared in Danmu bullet comments not only constitute a form of digital nationalism, shaped partly by the values and interests of the Chinese state government, but also create more grassroots expressions of “imagined communities”, cultural identity and a sense of belonging. This paper presents a cultural approach to studying the latest online commentaries of videos related to Chinese animation on Bilibili, which contributes to a better understanding of the status quo of digital culture and associated nationalist zeal.

Re-imagining and Gendering Democracy: The Life and Works of Jahanara Shahnawaz in Postcolonial Pakistan 

Aalene MahumAneeq 

In what ways can a gender-centred approach within South Asian studies generate new insights on democracy and authoritarianism in postcolonial states? When it comes to Pakistan, existing scholarship has predominantly used a military and security lens to emphasise authoritarianism in the nation. Yet, while arguing for the failure of democracy, scholarship has missed out on prominent voices in the past that have also contested and fought authoritarianism. 

This paper studies the life of a prominent woman legislator  - Begum Jahanara Shahnawaz in early Pakistani politics. Positioning gender within the history of Pakistan’s democracy, this paper shows how her advocacy for democracy in assembly debates in the 1950s and her activism to fight chauvinistic dictatorial attitudes make her important to study. Shahnawaz’s ideas of social justice, equality, public participation, and freedom left a legacy. Yet, her work, by virtue of her gender, has received scant historical attention. This paper argues that it is important to reclaim these critical progressive voices and to understand their diverse ways of practicing, enacting, and fighting for democracy. If alternative histories have the potential of perpetuating a different future, then this paper emphasises how remembering these voices can help us imagine a better future of democracy in South Asia.

The Problem and the Model: Tracing the Global History of the Region in South India 

Anand Sreekumar 

Despite a belated regional turn in international relations, I argue that there have been limited attempts to theorise the role of the ‘global’ in forging the ‘region’ both in IR and beyond. This is a deficit I seek to address using the example of the region of Kerala in southern India.  With the world's earliest democratically elected Communist government and limited penetration of Hindutva in electoral terms, the region of Kerala has always been a region of scholarly fascination. I'm primarily concerned with the puzzle of two prevalent yet radically different formulations of the region of Kerala as a problem state  (1950s) and the Kerala model to be emulated by the ‘Third World’ (1970s-90s). I argue that beyond mere formulations, they ought to be treated as hegemonic projects. Drawing from Jessop, I treat the global as a series of ‘discursive’ and ‘structural’ factors which differently enabled or constrained various national/regional elites in terms of the political projects they advanced. Thus while the ‘problem state’ project was embedded in the immediate global context of Cold War narratives and structures, the 'model state' was conditioned by a radically different context of certain idiosyncratic global developmentalist debates and practices in the seventies.