[EN] The Indonesian Experience: Nation-Building in the Era of Populism and the Muslim Intelligentsia

Sukarno once employed the phrase “character building, nation-building” as an ideological framework for public policy intended to mobilize the newly-independent (post-colonial) polity.

The question then becomes: how to revisit the meaning of nation-building while taking into account the diversity of contemporary society. If we wished to frame the problem more generally, we might also inquire whether populism is likely to push Indonesia into an era of uncertainty and whether at this point nation-building has lost its meaning.