Adab as Mass Political Culture
This paper explores two uses of the term adab in contemporary Indonesian and Malaysian politics. Both imply a non-specific notion of “civilized,” but one draws inspiration from Islamic understandings of proper individual behavior while the other invokes a more general notion of ethical behavior. Critics of contemporary politics, both in democratic Indonesia and in authoritarian Malaysia, invoke adab as a rhetorical move. Such discourse reflects a common view in Indonesia and Malaysia that political culture is the core of ethical politics. This differs from the experiences of the West, and also from many views of contemporary political scientists.
Biography
Thomas Pepinsky is Associate Professor in the Department of Government at Cornell University. He specializes in comparative politics and international political economy, with a focus on emerging markets in Southeast Asia. Among other works, he is the author of Economic Crises and the Breakdown of Authoritarian Regimes: Indonesia and Malaysia in Comparative Perspective (Cambridge University Press, 2009), and articles such as “The Institutional Turn in Comparative Authoritarianism,” “Trade Competition and American Decolonization,” and “Context and Method in Southeast Asian Politics.” He serves as a member of the steering committee for the Association for Analytical Learning on Islam and Muslim Societies (aalims.org), and recently helped to found a new organization called the Southeast Asian Research Group (seareg.org) to highlight the best new contemporary research on Southeast Asian politics in North America. He regularly teaches the Southeast Asian Politics course at Cornell, as well as general courses on comparative politics and political economy.