Islamic Soft Power in the Age of Trump: Public Diplomacy and Indonesian Mosque Communities in America

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article examines how Indonesia’s governmental and civil society Islamic organizations are trying to rebrand the world’s largest Muslim-majority country through combined efforts of bilateral, multi-lateral, and Track II diplomacy. This research explores the multiple sites, discourses, and actors involved in the constitution – and contestation – of the claim that Indonesia is the exemplar of ‘moderate Islam’. In doing so, the article contributes to a burgeoning academic literature about religion, diplomacy, and soft power. Understanding such soft power strategies – originating both within and beyond the state – can shed light on the cleavages, conflicts, and coalitions of religious authority, community, and identity both in Indonesia and on the global stage. Grand projects of diplomacy inevitably have unintended consequences, and the afterlives of public diplomacy are always played out in local, on-the-ground contexts. The article suggests that an ethnographic approach to the study of religion and diplomacy affords a unique understanding of Track II public diplomacy on the ground, providing understandings from the elite meeting rooms of foreign ministries to the basement gatherings of Indonesian Muslims near Washington DC.