Political movements in post-authoritarian regimes

Conveners: Lars Højer, Associate Professor, Dept. of Cross-Cultural and Regional Studies and Morten Axel Pedersen, Associate Professor, Dept. of Anthropology

This workshop invites ethnographic studies of incipient political movements and corresponding economic imaginaries in Asia. More specifically, the aim of the workshop is to explore the aesthetics of emerging political forms in different Asian (including Eurasian) contexts, which could be called "post-authoritarian". This deliberately loose label denotes any society which until recently was considered authoritarian in some way or another, but which has since undergone some sort of significant change (civil war, regime change, revolution, etc) bringing about new political aesthetics and economic logics, which may - or may not - be more liberal, democratic and capitalist than before. What are the political aspirations of neo-Nazis in Outer Mongolia, new environmental movements in Indonesia, Sufi-orders in Pakistan, and hardliner-Communists groupings in Russia or Nepal? Might these political movements be bound up with comparable post-authoritarian dynamics? Or should they all rather be seen as reactions to global market forces perceived to be undermining an authentic national political and economic order? Are distinctions between inalienable cultural-religious values and alienable commodities - between ‘local' livelihoods and the ‘global' market - a common feature of political rhetorics within post-authoritarian Asian contexts?