Themes

The Indonesian part of the Promoting Pluralism Knowledge Programme focusses on one theme: religious pluralism.
Religious pluralism is not approached as a theological but civic issue, and includes other issues in relation to it such as the issues of gender and ethnicity. The domain of this 'civic pluralism' is politics, not theology.

Civic pluralism is understood as describing the views and social attitudes of an identity group toward the others in the context of a democratic state. Normatively speaking, a civic-pluralist society is one in which its constituents acknowledge the others as equal to them in terms of fulfilment of rights and social obligations, and deal with differences of opinions in a civil way without violence, without the intention to repress differences. Besides the citizens, the state, which deals with the making of policies, laws/regulations as well as law enforcement, is an important factor for the development of pluralist society.

The notion of “civic pluralism” needs to be translated into more concrete, operational terms. By way of introduction, there are several key concepts:

• Citizenship: the common denominator of people with different backgrounds (ethnic, religious, etc.) living in a certain area is that they are all citizens of a state, with equal rights, freedom, and obligation. Minority groups is an important issue since they are the ones usually marginalized or denied basic rights. Rights, therefore, is another important notion in this regard.
• State: what roles can and should the state play? This is directly related to the issues of policy-making (laws and regulations) and law-enforcement.
• Relation between communities in a society: how differences of opinions are resolved; formation of new social consensus; building the ethos to deal with differences in a civil way.
• Relation between the state and its citizens/communities: this is related to the possibility of discrimination based on ethnicity or religion in the making of certain policies (e.g. implementation of local regulations by a local gevernment); should the state be required to also function as a facilitator of the meeting of different communities in the process of consensus making? The state may also be expected to “guard” the space for public reason so as not to be dominated by certain groups and remain accessible to as many citizens/groups as possible.

The Indonesia Regional Team and three local teams of academics and civil society activists (in South Sulawesi, Bali, and Banjarmasin) analyse the following:

• Knowledge about local societies and strategies used in their encounter with diverse groups, especially religious groups.
• Knowledge about promotion of pluralism or movements opposing it among the youth.
• Women and pluralism; gender issues and the use of gender perspective, which are not yet well integrated to pluralism movement.
• Study of policies related to laws and regulations which are unfavourable to pluralism and the responses of the society.
• Studies of Freedom of religion/belief (FORB)
• Studies of Inter-religious dialogue/ cases of inter-religious community relations
• Studies of Communal conflicts/polarization
• Studies of the role of media (positive and negative) in promoting pluralism