Vol. 2 No. 1 (2020): Journal of Asian Social Science Research

Editors’ Preface
JASSR, Vol. 2, No. 1, 2020

It is with great pleasure that we present Journal of Asian Social Science Research (JASSR) Volume 2, Number 1, 2020. The articles assembled in this issue reflect the breadth and seriousness of contemporary social science scholarship while sharing a deeper common concern: how communities respond to inequality, negotiate authority, and articulate claims to dignity, justice, and social transformation. Read together, these contributions offer a thoughtful and compelling account of societies shaped by historical wounds, contested identities, religious reform, and enduring debates over the meaning of development.

What gives this issue its coherence is not thematic uniformity, but a shared attentiveness to marginalization and agency. Across different national and analytical settings, the articles show that exclusion is never merely a matter of abstract structure. It is lived in everyday forms of poverty, gender hierarchy, political neglect, cultural domination, and uneven access to voice. Yet the issue is equally attentive to the ways individuals and communities respond creatively and critically to such conditions, whether through activism, reinterpretation, resistance, or institutional reform.

The opening article, on the Roma in post-communist Bulgaria, sets an important tone for the volume by examining the persistence of social marginalization despite the language of policy intervention and democratic transition. Its analysis of discrimination, poverty, and the limited implementation of anti-exclusion measures offers a sobering reminder that formal commitments to equality are rarely sufficient on their own. The article invites us to reflect more broadly on the political limits of multicultural inclusion when public sympathy is weak, institutional will is inconsistent, and marginalized communities continue to bear the burden of longstanding social prejudice.

Questions of exclusion and transformation take a different but equally significant form in the issue’s two contributions on Islam and Muslim women’s movements in Indonesia. The article on Rahima and Fahmina highlights how feminist engagement rooted in community experience and pesantren life can generate a grounded and socially responsive reinterpretation of Islamic knowledge. In a related vein, the article on liberal-progressive Muslim reformism shows how theological renewal, especially through the reopening of ijtihad and dialogue with modernity, has helped create intellectual and moral space for Muslim women to participate more fully in the production of religious knowledge and in struggles for gender justice. Considered together, these articles are among the distinctive strengths of this issue. They show that religious reform is not only a matter of doctrine, but also a lived and collective process through which women claim authority, challenge inherited inequalities, and construct more just ways of being Muslim in contemporary society.

Historical memory and collective struggle emerge with particular force in the article on Sasak resistance in nineteenth-century Lombok. By focusing on the role of Tuan Guru Umar Kelayu, the article deepens our understanding of anti-colonial resistance as a movement shaped not only by economic grievance, but also by religious leadership, cultural identity, and social solidarity. Its contribution is important because it restores moral and historical texture to local resistance, showing how struggles against domination are often carried by figures whose authority is at once spiritual, communal, and political. In doing so, the article reminds us that local histories remain indispensable to any fuller account of power and emancipation in the region.

The issue concludes with a broader conceptual reflection on development practice in the Global South. The article comparing top-down and bottom-up approaches offers a measured and timely intervention into a debate that has too often been framed in overly categorical terms. Rather than endorsing one model at the expense of the other, it argues for a more integrated view that recognizes both the participatory strengths of bottom-up initiatives and the continuing relevance of wider institutional and financial frameworks. This balanced perspective resonates with the issue as a whole, which repeatedly shows that durable social change rarely emerges from a single source. It is usually forged through negotiation among actors, scales, and forms of knowledge that must remain in conversation, even when they stand in tension.

Taken together, the articles in this volume offer a rich and humane portrait of social inquiry at its best. They move across questions of minority exclusion, Islamic feminism, religious reform, anti-colonial memory, and development strategy, yet all are animated by a shared commitment to understanding how people confront structures of injustice while seeking more equitable futures. In this sense, the issue speaks not only to specific empirical debates, but also to larger concerns that remain central to social science today, namely how power is reproduced, how it is challenged, and how more inclusive forms of collective life may still be imagined.

As editors, we are grateful for the care, range, and intellectual generosity represented in these pages. We hope this issue will be read not simply as a collection of individual studies, but as a meaningful contribution to ongoing conversations about justice, social change, and the diverse ways communities make claims upon history and the present. We extend our sincere thanks to the authors for their thoughtful scholarship, to the reviewers for their time and discernment, and to our readers for sustaining this journal as a shared space of reflection, dialogue, and critical inquiry.

Best regards,

Asep Iqbal