The Research Programme Contemporary Ethnography invites all staff and graduate students to the Academic Hour Seminar:

Rethinking the Causes of Democratic Recession: Post-democratic perspective from Indonesia's Riau Archipelago
- by Nick Long (London School of Economics).

• Time: Monday, 22 April, 10.15 pm to 1 pm
• Venue: Meeting room 2.3, Stakladen

Abstract:
An ever-growing number of citizens in Indonesia’s Riau Archipelago are coming to adopt a ‘post-democratic’ subject position. Having once been incredibly enthusiastic about democratisation and the democratic ideal, they now come to see their previous enthusiasm as misguided, arrogant, or naïve and increasingly feel that democracy has no place within either their lives or Indonesia’s future. This resonates with patterns of ‘authoritarian nostalgia’ and ‘democratic recession’ worldwide, which scholars have  typically explained in terms of citizens’ dissatisfaction with the poor governance they receive. However, such an explanatory framework does not do justice to the complexity of the Riau Islands material, where many people abandon democracy due to shame and disgust at what it could make them (or has already made them) become. Moreover, even when the poor performance of the democratically elected government is cited as a reason to oppose democratic systems, this ‘poor governance’ is much more debatable than citizens’ claims might assume. I therefore argue that rejections of the democratic ideal need to be grounded in the personal meanings that democratic citizenship has come to carry for people in this newly democratising  context, through attention to relational ethics, temporality, and domestic political economy, suggesting that this may have broader comparative implications for both how ‘democratic rollback’ is theorised on a global scale, and for evaluating proposed interventions to stem it.

Organizer: Professor Nils Bubandt, Head of Contemporary Ethnography.