Courting Violence: Opportunistic Parties and the Politics of Religion

Zahra Amalia Syarifah

2018

Abstract

In 2016, the Islamic Defenders Front, Front Pembela Islam (FPI), a violent Islamic group, managed to gather hundreds of thousands of people in a series of rallies in the Indonesian capital city. The rallies had two important consequences: on one side, they influenced the election by swaying the voters’ preferences; on the other side, they marked a turning point in the interactions between violent Islamic organizations and political parties. Although FPI had campaigned and organized similar rallies to oppose the Christian governor since 2014, only in 2016 that this issue was picked up by the public, which helped FPI to mobilize them in large numbers. This suggests that there are conditions under which FPI is able to mobilize the public, which were not there in 2014 but evidently were there in 2016. In this paper, I used network analysis and computational content analysis on more than 25.000 news articles published between 2008 and 2018 to examine why the same issue championed by FPI saw different levels of public and political party engagement in 2014 and 2016. Furthermore, I employed network analysis to illustrate the changing relationship between FPI as a violent group with political parties over the years.

Paper Citation

in Harvard Style

Syarifah Z. (2018). Courting Violence: Opportunistic Parties and the Politics of Religion. In Proceedings of Airlangga Conference on International Relations - Volume 1: ACIR, ISBN 978-989-758-493-0, pages 176-185. DOI: 10.5220/0010274800002309

in Bibtex Style

@conference{acir18,
author={Zahra Amalia Syarifah},
title={Courting Violence: Opportunistic Parties and the Politics of Religion},
booktitle={Proceedings of Airlangga Conference on International Relations - Volume 1: ACIR,},
year={2018},
pages={176-185},
publisher={SciTePress},
organization={INSTICC},
doi={10.5220/0010274800002309},
isbn={978-989-758-493-0},
}

in EndNote Style

TY - CONF

JO - Proceedings of Airlangga Conference on International Relations - Volume 1: ACIR,
TI - Courting Violence: Opportunistic Parties and the Politics of Religion
SN - 978-989-758-493-0
AU - Syarifah Z.
PY - 2018
SP - 176
EP - 185
DO - 10.5220/0010274800002309