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

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

It is with great pleasure that we present Journal of Asian Social Science Research (JASSR) Volume 2, Number 2, 2020. The articles gathered in this issue reflect the vitality and range of contemporary social science scholarship, while also speaking to a set of concerns that are both intellectually significant and publicly urgent. Read together, these contributions offer a richly textured account of how power is organized, contested, and lived across modern and historical settings, particularly through religion, electoral politics, gendered institutions, and colonial knowledge.

What gives this issue its coherence is not thematic uniformity, but a shared attentiveness to the ways authority takes shape in social life. Across the articles, authority appears not as a fixed possession of the state or of formal institutions alone, but as something continually negotiated through political mobilization, public narratives, religious networks, everyday hierarchies, and inherited cultural forms. In this respect, the issue as a whole invites readers to consider how legitimacy is built, how it is challenged, and how it is sustained through practices that are at once symbolic and material.

Several contributions in this volume engage directly with the changing relationship between Islam and politics in contemporary Indonesia. The article on the political crossover of Islamic conservatism in the 2019 presidential election offers an important analysis of the post-212 landscape, showing how religious activism, social grievance, and political aspiration converged in the construction of an imagined ummah. Its significance lies not only in its account of electoral mobilization, but also in its broader insight that contemporary Islamic activism cannot be understood solely in theological terms. It is equally shaped by dissatisfaction with governance, perceptions of injustice, and the search for moral and political community. This concern with democratic contestation is taken further in the article on local elections in post-Suharto Indonesia, which examines the emergence of new political dynamics through pilkada, including coalition-building, local strongmen, business interests, political consultants, and voter disengagement. Together, these two articles capture the promise and complexity of Indonesia’s democratic transformation, where expanded participation has opened new opportunities for representation while also generating new arenas of competition, brokerage, and political improvisation.

The issue also turns, with admirable care, to questions of gender, voice, and institutional inequality. The narrative inquiry into the experiences of Muslim women academics in Indonesian state Islamic higher education offers a quietly powerful intervention into the study of higher education and gender. By foregrounding the lived experiences of women navigating unequal structures of academic advancement, the article reveals how institutional barriers continue to shape careers, recognition, and access to leadership. Its contribution is especially valuable because it restores human depth to a problem too often described only in statistical or administrative terms. Read alongside the article on the women of Tablighi Jamaat in Pesantren Al-Fatah, the issue presents a more nuanced picture of Muslim women’s roles within religious institutions and movements. While one article highlights gendered constraints within academic life, the other shows women’s active participation in organizing and expanding religious propagation through masturah networks under highly structured conditions. Considered together, these studies resist simplistic assumptions about Muslim women as either passive subjects or fully emancipated actors. Instead, they reveal lives shaped by negotiation, discipline, commitment, and agency within complex institutional worlds.

Historical depth is provided by the final article, which examines Haji Hasan Mustapa’s Malay guidebook on etiquette for Acehnese people in their dealings with the Dutch colonial authorities. This contribution offers a particularly illuminating reminder that colonial power was exercised not only through force and administration, but also through efforts to regulate conduct, speech, and notions of civility. By tracing how native officials were enlisted in the production of colonial etiquette, the article draws attention to the subtle politics of cultural mediation and the moral language of empire. Its inclusion in this issue broadens the temporal horizon of the volume and enriches its central concern with authority by showing how projects of rule are often embedded in seemingly ordinary practices of instruction and behaviour.

Taken as a whole, this issue offers a compelling reflection on the many arenas in which social and political order is made. Elections, academic institutions, religious communities, and colonial texts may appear quite different in scale and character, yet each of the articles demonstrates that power is never merely imposed from above. It is interpreted, enacted, contested, and reproduced through networks of meaning and practice that deserve close and careful attention. That, in many ways, is the enduring strength of social science, that it helps us see how large structures become real in lived experience, and how human actors respond to them with creativity, accommodation, resistance, and hope.

As editors, we are grateful for the range, seriousness, and intellectual generosity represented in these pages. We hope this issue will be read not only as a collection of strong individual studies, but also as a thoughtful contribution to wider conversations about democracy, religion, gender, history, and the changing forms of social authority in Asia and beyond. We extend our sincere thanks to the authors for their scholarship, to the reviewers for their care and discernment, and to our readers for sustaining this journal as a shared space of inquiry, reflection, and dialogue.

Best regards,
Asep Iqbal