Mary McCoy

University of Wisconsin-Madison, Communication Arts + Center for Southeast Asian Studies (CSEAS), Faculty Associate/CSEAS Director of Advancement and Outreach

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Mary E McCoy currently works at the Department of Communication Arts, University of Wisconsin–Madison. She does research in Social Movements, Revolutions, Media, Elections, Public Opinion and Voting Behavior, Religious Intolerance, Demagoguery, Authoritarian Populism, Fascism, Comparative Democratization and Comparative Politics. Her most recent publication is "Piety, Purity and Nationalism: The Convergence of Nation and Islam in Contemporary Indonesia."

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Sarah Pink

Monash University

Muqtedar Khan

University of Delaware

Martin van Bruinessen

Universiteit Utrecht

Remo Caponi

University of Cologne

John Tasioulas

University of Oxford

Leslie Green

Queen's University at Kingston

Armando Marques-Guedes

UNL - New University of Lisbon

Michael W Charney

SOAS University of London

Noe Cornago

University of the Basque Country, Euskal Herriko Unibertsitatea

francesco clementi

Università degli Studi "La Sapienza" di Roma

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Papers by Mary McCoy

Piety, Purity, and Nationalism

Oxford University Press eBooks, Feb 27, 2020

In the post-Suharto era, freedom of speech, particularly the press, quickly gained stronger legal... more In the post-Suharto era, freedom of speech, particularly the press, quickly gained stronger legal protections in the constitutional reforms of the early 2000s. Its exercise by citizens and journalists alike has been a key force in warding off a democratic reversal. Yet, following the unshackling of religious expression, a rise in Islamic fundamentalism and a backlash against Western liberalism have inspired new religious intolerance that has circumscribed certain forms of speech and threatened the embrace of diversity long central to Indonesia’s identity. Chapter 6 examines the intersection of religious tolerance, freedom of speech, and political pluralism to understand the relationship between regulating blasphemy and the future of Indonesia’s new democracy. Specifically, it studies the way Indonesia surged forward economically and politically in establishing a more modern democracy while atavistic elements from its past continue to complicate its transition.

Scandal and Democracy

Cornell University Press eBooks, Oct 21, 2020

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The media in democratic transitions : institutionalizing uncertainty in post-Suharto Indonesia

UMI Dissertation Services eBooks, 2005

Purifying Islam in Post-Authoritarian Indonesia: Corporatist Metaphors and the Rise of Religious Intolerance

Rhetoric and public affairs, Jun 1, 2013

Following a democratic uprising in 1998, the Muslim-majority nation of Indonesia embarked on a tr... more Following a democratic uprising in 1998, the Muslim-majority nation of Indonesia embarked on a transition from four decades of authoritarian rule to become the world's third largest democracy. A recent surge in religious intolerance, however, has sparked concern over an apparent backlash against the political and religious pluralism of the new democratic era. As the world looks to this vast country of 237 million as a model for other Muslim nations now rebelling against their own dictatorships, it is important to understand this political turn marked by a growing incapacity to deal with otherness. This article examines public discourse surrounding accelerating attacks on religious minorities in Indonesia to provide insight into a similar rise in intolerance worldwide, and to address a pressing question for many rhetoric scholars: how does religion work to legitimate or eliminate violence?

Purifying Islam in Post-Authoritarian Indonesia: Corporatist Metaphors and the Rise of Religious Intolerance

Rhetoric and Public Affairs, 2013

Free Speech

Encyclopedia of Global Studies

Encyclopedia of Global Studies Free speech refers to verbal and other symbolic expression absent ... more Encyclopedia of Global Studies Free speech refers to verbal and other symbolic expression absent external constraints, whether such constraints are governmental or societal. In a globalizing world, different approaches to protecting or controlling speech create the potential for both greater homogeneity and sharper divisions among the nations increasingly interconnected in an international community. This entry surveys a wide terrain of issues relevant to understanding differences in conceptions of free speech across time and cultures. History The earliest references to free speech, or freedom of speech, in the Western historical record date from the Golden Age of ancient Greece. Most famously, at his trial for sedition in 399 BCE, the philosopher Socrates responded to an offer of freedom by his judges on condition he no longer spread his ideas and teachings with the words: "I am grateful and I am your friend, but I shall obey the god rather than you." Socrates was executed for speech deemed to dishonor the gods of Athens and corrupt the minds of its youth. In every country, in every century, people have faced similar fates for crimes related to the exercise of free speech. While the yearning for free expression appears to be a human universal, formal protections for such expression, as the historian Leonard W. Levy (1960) has noted, "remained nearly unknown to legal or constitutional history and to libertarian thought on either side of the Atlantic before 1776" (p. 5). England's Bill of Rights, passed in 1689, broke new ground by guaranteeing the right of members of parliament to speak during

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Activist Archives: Youth Culture and the Political Past in Indonesia. By Doreen Lee. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2016. xvi, 278 pp. ISBN: 9780822361527 (cloth, also available in paper and as e-book)

The Journal of Asian Studies, Aug 1, 2018

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Activist Archives

Activist Archives: Youth Culture and the Political Past in Indonesia. By Doreen Lee. Durham and L... more Activist Archives: Youth Culture and the Political Past in Indonesia. By Doreen Lee. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2016. Softcover: 278pp. Almost two decades after the fall of the Suharto regime in May 1998, we still know very little about the student movement that was the driving force behind Indonesia's turn to democracy. In the post-Suharto era, the student movement lost the limelight to other actors better equipped for the game of politics, and thus moved ever deeper into the realm of collective memory as a feverish episode in history, aligned with the longer history of pemuda (youth) activism in Indonesia. Yet, as Doreen Lee persuasively argues in Activist Archives, it is from the edges of history that "pemuda fever" continues to "infuse the present with urgency and legitimacy" (p. 3), animating a "youthful culture of democracy" that firmly established radical styles and ideas within the political and cultural landscape of Jakarta. Remedying the dearth of literature on post-New Order student activism, Activist Archives offers a sophisticated ethnography of "Generation 98", ingeniously structured around key tropes of the "material and ideational spaces" that student activists inhabit. With a keen eye for detail and paradox, Lee delves deep into the micropolitics of these spaces, starting with the "Archive". She shows how activists' feverish "drive to document, consign, and assemble signs of pemuda nationalism" (p. 11) served as an "authenticating practice" to compete with state discourse, which was, however, complicated by the concurrent need for secrecy, epitomized by the tacit rule: "Burn after reading". By highlighting the social life behind the documentation, Lee uncovers significant findings that many other researchers might have overlooked. A charming example is a scene reconstructed from scribbles found on the back of official statements used during the 1997 subversion trials; it shows how two activists, waiting for their turn to testify, exchanged insolent jokes, conveying "the undercurrent of youthful nonchalance and puerile lightheartedness even during the gravity of the subversion trial" (p. 55). Youthfulness also pervades the chapters on "Street" and "Style", which show how the performativity of protest and the carefully cultivated pemuda look helped to make subversive symbols of the left trendy and less threatening, thus creating "a new model of citizenship for Indonesian youth by making political participation desirable and accessible" (p. 91). In an engaging section on the production and circulation of protest T-shirts, Lee further illustrates how this visual economy served purposes of collective identity as well as propaganda. But while she properly contextualizes the iconography in political history, crucial differentiations in style between different activist communities, which symbolize the deep fractures in the post-Suharto student movement, are neglected. Not all student activists identified with the appearances of the Molotov cocktail-throwing urban warrior pictured in two illustrations (pp. 92--93). Though this image dominated protest scenes and media reports in the early years of reform, it was acceptable to certain groups only, and rejected by others opposed to their mode of protest. Leaving the image unproblematized risks making a caricature of negotiated self-presentation, as happened with the cliched image of the revolutionary pemuda of 1945 that many Indonesia scholars uncritically accepted. The chapter on "Violence" presents a more careful analysis, introducing the notion of "student counterviolence" as a dynamic practice that solidifies and simultaneously disrupts students' moral superiority over the state. This is illustrated by various fascinating vignettes. But most gripping is the story of former student activist Iblis, who was abducted and tortured by the military in the 1990s. With great sensitivity, Lee recounts his sense of devastating defeat at realizing his nothingness as a sacrificial scapegoat subjected to his torturers' whims. …

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Losing Control: Freedom of the Press in Asia

Pacific Affairs, 2002

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Dark alliance: news repair and institutional authority in the age of the Internet

Journal of Communication, 2001

... that the epidemic was the product of a dark alliance between a local African American deale... more

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Scandal and Democracy: Media Politics in Indonesia

The warmth and generosity of all of those who helped me in my research and writing continually am... more The warmth and generosity of all of those who helped me in my research and writing continually amazed me, and I apologize to anyone I fail to mention here. In particular, I would like to thank my advisers at Northwestern University-Jim Ettema, Tom Goodnight, Jim Schwoch, and Jeff Winters-for their encouragement, suggestions, and careful readings of diff erent drafts of this project. As the work continued, friends and colleagues

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Piety, Purity, and Nationalism

Oxford University Press eBooks, Feb 27, 2020