Conflict, Religion, and Culture

A collection of selected papers from the international workshop ""Conflict, Religion, and Culture: Domestic and International Implications for Southeast Asia and Australia,"" held in Manila in August 2007. Since 9/11 much has been written about U.S. and European responses to terrorism, to Iraq and Afghanistan, and to tensions between Islam and the West. But countries in Asia Pacific have attracted much less attention -- yet their responses reveal much not only about their respective foreign policies, but also about their internal electoral politics, the tensions of plural societies, the sway of ethnic-cultural stereotypes, the perceived sociopolitical roles that religions play, the conditioning of the mass media, and the international implications of internal armed conflicts. Mindful of the interconnections between the global and the local, and their impact on different policy areas, the authors of this collection examine contemporary developments in four multiethnic, multifaith societies, which are also significant middle powers in Asia Pacific: Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, and Australia. Although making regional coordination a real challenge, the commonalities and differences of these four countries are useful for comparative analysis. Some of the questions tackled in this book are the following: To what extent have state responses to the War on Terror been shaped by domestic politics? How do Muslim political leaders position themselves vis-a-vis the United States and their own domestic constituencies? What has been the role of Islam in relation to internal ethnic tensions where it is the majority religion and where it is the minority religion? To what extent is the conflict in the southern Philippines a reflection of historic grievances, localised feuds, and global fault lines?