Menchik on the Challenges of Democracy
Jeremy Menchik, Assistant Professor of International Relations at the Frederick S. Pardee School of Global Studies at Boston University, studies the challenges faced by democracies in the developing world. He has lent his expertise on the topic to recent conversations on Tunisia and, this week, will offer insight into Indonesia as well.
Menchik will present a lecture at Northwestern University’s Buffett Center for International and Comparative Studies entitled “Productive Intolerance: Godly Nationalism in Indonesia.” The lecture is titled after the July 2014 article Menchik wrote in the journal Comparative Studies in Society and History, which draws from research that Menchik develops in his upcoming Cambridge University Press book Islam and Democracy in Indonesia: Tolerance without Liberalism.
“In this essay, I suggest an alternative reading of intolerance of Ahmadiyah by excavating overlooked aspects of the tangled relationship between religion and nationalism. I suggest that the privileging of religious orthodoxy and the truncated pluralism of the Indonesian state constitute a theoretically neglected form of religious nationalism that I dub “godly nationalism,” said Menchik in his work. “I theorize godly nationalism as an imagined community bound by a common, orthodox theism and mobilized through the state in cooperation with religious organizations in society.”
Menchik will speak on May 7 at noon.
Earlier this spring, Menchik attended a conference at Columbia University entitled The Tunisian Democratic Transition in Comparative Perspective. The title of Menchik’s talk at the conference was “Crafting Indonesia’s Religious Democracy: Inclusion-Moderation and the Sacralization of the Post-Colonial State.”
Jeremy Menchik’s research interests include comparative politics, religion and politics, Southeast Asia, and the Middle East. Learn more about him here.