Species–environment relationships are often studied at large spatial scales, but effective conservation requires an understanding of local-scale environmental drivers and pressures. Widespread degradation and fragmentation of forests have increased the proportion of tropical mammal habitat that is affected by edge effects. Edge effects include greater exposure to anthropogenic disturbance and abiotic changes that synergistically influence how well populations can cope with climate change. We investigated relationships between distance to the forest edge, forest structure, microclimate and terrestrial mammal detections in a selectively logged forest at the boundary of Gunung Leuser National Park in Sumatra, Indonesia. We collected mammal detection data from motion-activated camera traps, microclimate data from automated climate data loggers and forest structure data from vegetation plots. Daily mean and maximum temperatures significantly decreased with distance from the forest edge, whereas tree height and minimum temperature increased. Mammal diversity was lower at the forest edge compared to the interior. Mammals were detected less frequently at the forest edge, although this relationship varied between mammal orders. Mammal detections were best explained by temperature, tree height and tree diameter at breast height. These results demonstrate that abiotic changes in forests brought on by edge effects have negative impacts on mammals, but these effects vary between mammal taxa because of differing sensitivities to human disturbance. Our findings highlight the importance of considering local-scale environmental drivers in determining species–environment relationships to identify key habitat features such as microclimate refuges that should be prioritized in ecosystem management.

Government laws and regulations discriminating against religious minorities are on the rise worldwide. Scholars have debated whether or not society-based discrimination is a pre-condition for government-based discrimination. Examining an original dataset of regulations discriminating against the Ahmadiyah community in Indonesia, this article argues that calls from within society to restrict the freedom of religious minorities are neither a sufficient nor a necessary condition for the rise of discriminatory government regulations. Instead, governments may emulate other governments and adopt laws and regulations discriminating against religious minorities without any immediate societal pressure preceding it. Hence, future research needs to consider the interdependence between jurisdictions as an important driver of laws and regulations discriminating against religious minorities.

Oil palm is one of Southeast Asia’s most common crops, and its expansion has caused substantial modification of natural habitats and put increasing pressure on biodiversity. Rising global demand for vegetable oil, coupled with oil palm’s high yield per unit area and the versatility of the palm oil product, has driven the expansion of oil palm agriculture in the region. Therefore, it is critical to identify management practices that can support biodiversity in plantations without exacerbating negative impacts on the environment. This study focuses on day-flying Lepidoptera (butterflies and moths), which contribute to the ecosystem functioning as pollinators, prey, and herbivore species. We assessed whether density and behaviours of day-flying Lepidoptera varied between different habitats within oil palm plantations and across seasons. We surveyed the density and behaviours of Lepidoptera communities in mature industrial oil palm plantations within the Biodiversity and Ecosystem Function in Tropical Agriculture (BEFTA) Programme sites, in Riau, Indonesia. We surveyed two distinct habitats within the plantations in March and September 2013: Edge habitats, which were bordered by plantation roads on one side, and Core habitats in the centre of oil palm planting blocks. We conducted analyses on the effect of habitat type and season on both the overall density and behaviour of Lepidoptera communities and, independently, on the most common species. In our surveys, we observed 1464 individuals across 41 species, with a significantly higher density in Edge than in Core habitats. While there was no significant difference between overall density in March and September surveys, there was an interaction between season and habitat, with density increasing more markedly in Edge than Core areas in September. There was also a significant effect of habitat and season on behavioural time budget for the community as a whole, with more active behaviours, such as foraging and mating, being recorded more frequently in Edge than Core habitats, and more commonly in September than March. The effect of habitat type, season, and their interaction differed between the six most common species. Our findings indicate that Lepidoptera abundance is affected by habitat characteristics in a plantation and can therefore be influenced by plantation management practices. In particular, our study highlights the value of road edges and paths in plantations for day-flying Lepidoptera. We suggest that increased non-crop vegetation in these areas, achieved through reduced clearing practices or planting of flowering plants, could foster abundant and active butterfly communities in plantations. These practices could form part of sustainability management recommendations for oil palm, such as those of the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil.

A growing body of scholarship has examined the intertwining of ideological polarization and inter-ethnic tensions during the Cold War. In this context, increasing attention has been paid to the experiences of the ethnic Chinese in Southeast Asia, and how they were affected by international and national-level developments. Less scrutiny has been given to the role of sub-national forces, despite the fact that patterns of ethnic conflict sometimes varied markedly between different parts of a single country. This article addresses this lacuna via the case study of West Java, Indonesia. The article analyses the relationship between the Indonesian Communist Party (Partai Komunis Indonesia, PKI), Indonesia’s ethnic Chinese population and anti-Chinese agitation in the 1950s and 1960s. International and national forces encouraged closer relations between the PKI and some ethnic Chinese Indonesians through the 1950s. From the late 1950s to the mid-1960s there were also recurrent episodes of anti-Chinese harassment, driven primarily by anti-communist groups. The strength of the anti-communist coalition within West Java helped make the province the epicentre of anti-Chinese agitation during crises in 1959–60 and 1963. Yet shifts in the configuration of military and political forces in the region meant anti-Chinese actions in West Java during the contentious period 1965–67 were less severe than in some other provinces. Overall the article highlights the need to consider the interaction of not only international and national processes but also sub-national regional dynamics when analysing the relationship between Cold War polarization and inter-ethnic conflict.

Debates on the causes of Indonesia's recent democratic decline have mostly focused on institutional, political and attitudinal–behavioural causes. By bringing the rural political economy dimension into this conversation, this article presents another picture of the illiberal turn in Indonesian democracy. Specifically, it examines the implications of elite control over land and coal resources on democratic quality. Based on in-country fieldwork materials and relevant secondary data, it analyses instances of episodic repression, the contraction of democratic spaces and the corrosive effects of coal-fuelled intra-elite clientelism by looking at the elite control of land resources and the influence of political and economic elites benefitting from the coal industry in elections and the broader political arena. Finally, it also discusses the capitulation of key agrarian social movement actors to state interests and its impact on the movement's ability to resist democratic regression. This elaboration shows how the current contour of elite control over rural resources contributes to the declining quality of Indonesian democracy.

Research on anti-plastics activism in Indonesia and Malaysia, although increasing somewhat in recent years, is sparse and patchy. Interviews with local activists and a review of the existing literature, however, does suggest this activism is intensifying. Activists are educating people of the health and ecological risks of plastics, and operating nonprofit organizations to recycle and repurpose plastics. They are organizing cleanups and advocating for marginalized waste workers. And they are lobbying governments for stricter regulations, exposing illegal operations, and building transnational advocacy networks. Collectively, these strands of activism appear to have the potential to aggregate eco-actions and decrease plastic pollution. In the coming years, however, given the power of the global plastics industry and the nature of politics within Indonesia and Malaysia, pro-plastics corporations and industry allies are likely going to increasingly contest anti-plastics narratives and strive to undermine efforts to address the root causes of plastic pollution, including rising sales of single-use plastics by transnational corporations, the dumping and burning of unrecyclable plastics from high-income countries, and inadequate waste infrastructure and regulatory enforcement. Further research on how this politics is affecting the power and effectiveness of anti-plastics activism, the article concludes, is going to be essential for improving plastics governance.

The adverse effects that conservation can have on Indigenous Peoples and local communities have been known for decades. In recognition, governments and conservation organizations have adopted joint statements of intent and rolled out various individual measures to safeguard human rights. Nevertheless, a gap remains between policy and practice, as evidenced by numerous recent examples of human rights infringements because of the (in)actions of conservation. We present ethnographic research with people living adjacent to Pegunungan Cyclops, an IUCN category I(a) strict protected area in Papua Province, Indonesia, aiming to understand their experiences of conservation and provide some nuance regarding the gap between policy and practice in human rights and conservation. We uncovered feelings of injustice, discontent, confusion, an overall lack of consultation between local inhabitants and park managers and decades of contradictory policies and projects characterized by implementation problems stemming from scant resources. We also show how national struggles over rights and recognition are conflated and intertwined with local ones and how national and provincial policies can alter governance regimes, tenure arrangements and power relations locally. Despite the issues, our informants also recalled favourably instances in which partnerships between local inhabitants and other actors were well received because they were implemented through detailed consultation, producing management actions that better aligned with traditional practices. For people in the Cyclops Mountains today, the emerging avenues provided by the social forestry programme in Indonesia could be the most beneficial way to secure greater access to their lands, and conservationists can play a role in supporting this process.

During the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, many Muslim modernists exhibited mixed records regarding democracy. On the one hand, they articulated cogent arguments that Islam was, at its heart, democratic in nature and worked to counter Islamist claims to the contrary. Some crafted robust visions for Islamic democratic governance. On the other hand, many of the same modernists forged political alliances with military authoritarian regimes. How can we explain this seeming inconsistency between modernist democratic ideals and their not-so-democratic practices? This article argues that this paradoxical pattern stems from a classic dilemma within democratic theory: the tyranny of the majority. After providing a brief history of majoritarian fears in Western political theory, the article investigates two prominent case studies from mid-twentieth-century Pakistan and Indonesia. The first examines Fazlur Rahman’s ties to Ayub Khan’s military regime in 1960s Pakistan, and the second analyzes why a movement of young modernists was willing to collaborate with Suharto’s New Order regime in 1970s Indonesia. Together, the two cases demonstrate that Muslim modernists balance their genuine hopes for an Islamic democratic future with persistent fears of majoritarian tyranny by advocating for constraints on the majority will. While these constraints can be controversial and even authoritarian in nature, they have important parallels in Western democratic thought. Ultimately, this article argues that Muslim modernists’ mixed records are a function of democratic theory itself rather than some Islamic exception to it.

The Russo-Japanese War (1904-1905) attracted more than passing interest in the pages of El Renacimiento in the Philippines and Bintang Hindia in the Dutch East Indies. Both publications featured pieces with editorializing tones that indulged in a significant degree of delight at the spectacle of Russian defeats and humiliations at the hands of the Japanese. This article engages in a close reading of this coverage to insert these instances of colonial schadenfreude into the broader trajectories of shaping communities of readers and nationalist awakenings in both colonies. Filipino nationalists in El Renacimiento dropped clear clues likening Russian aggression against Japan, an archipelagic Asian nation like the Philippines, to that which Filipinos experienced under the Americans, thus engaging in a symbolic displacement of that international event into their own historical present. Mocking Russians was part of a nationalist reading of the war that allowed for delight in the spectacle of White humiliation and the prospects of Japanese aid in anti-colonial struggle. The way the Russo-Japanese War was commented on by Bintang Hindia less than ten years before the ‘national awakening’ period was remarkably similar to the reporting in El Renacimiento. This isomorphism between two different historical contexts allows us to examine the role that mockery of Europeans played in forming a community of readers, nationalism, and the gradual undermining of the ideas of White supremacy on which colonialism was predicated.