Dans le cadre du prochain atelier des doctorant.e.s, nous avons le plaisir d'écouter 

Amanda tho Seeth, actuellement post-doctorante au CASE

pour une présentation intitulée "The Educational Dimension of Indonesia’s Islamic Soft Power Diplomacy— Outline of a Research Project" (détails ci-dessous).

L'atelier aura lieu le mercredi 24 mars de 13-14h dans notre salle BigBlueButton https://webinaire.ehess.fr/b/sch-7pg-nzq

Résumé:

Conventionally perceived as a geographical and civilizational periphery of the Muslim world, Indonesia has recently pursued an Islam-based diplomatic narrative that aims to promote its model as a democratic Muslim-majority country, upholding religious pluralism and tolerance, thereby aiming to increase its religious, cultural, and political authority within the Muslim world. This diplomatic strategy is a form of Islamic and cultural soft power, which includes an educational dimension that existing research has not yet analyzed. Indonesian political authorities as well as private civil society actors have started to export national, home-grown concepts and approaches of  Islamic primary, secondary, and higher education abroad—for instance to Singapore and to the USA—and seek to attract Muslim university students from all over the world to pursue their studies on Islam in Indonesia, especially at the newly created International Indonesian Islamic University (UIII). A government-led narrative is created that globally promotes a “national Indonesian Islam” through Islamic educational institutes and its staff as inherently positive and peaceful, thus aspriring to further Indonesia’s attractiveness in the global arena, but also trying to curb the Islamist opposition at the domestic level. 
The talk will present the outline of my recently started research on the educational dimension of Indonesia’s Islamic soft power diplomacy and discuss some first findings from a forthcoming article in “TRaNS: Trans-Regional and -National Studies of Southeast Asia”, co-written with Prof. Delphine Allès (INALCO). 
 
 
Biographie :

Amanda tho Seeth is currently a postdoctoral fellow at Centre Asie du Sud-Est (CASE) in Paris. She studied political science, Islamic studies and Indonesian studies at the University of Hamburg and at Universitas Islam Negeri Syarif Hidayatullah Jakarta. In 2020, she completed her dissertation in comparative politics and international development studies at Philipps-University Marburg with a study on the role of Islamic universities in the democratization processes in Indonesia and Tunisia. For the summer semester 2021, she will be 50%-acting chair of Transregional Southeast Asian Studies at Humboldt-University Berlin. In addition, she will be working at the German Institute for Global and Area Studies in Hamburg in a research project that aims to find out how religious actors in Indonesia relate to the sustainable development goals.