National (in)security and identity boundaries: The rise of Muslim conservative propaganda in Indonesia

Islamist groups have popularized conservative values and narratives in everyday discourse in Indonesia. Since 2014, Islamist hardliner groups have instituted anti-Shi‘a, anti-LGBT, and anti-Chinese propaganda campaigns, which have created moral panic and have led to discrimination and violence against these minority groups. This article interrogates why conservative propaganda has been so effective and appealing to Indonesian Muslims. Using George Lakoff’s theory of metaphor and Fredrik Barth’s theory of boundaries, this article investigates: (1) the selection of metaphors used by radical Muslim groups in their campaigns; (2) how these metaphors introduce or reify boundaries across sectarian, gender, and citizenship identities that are not compatible with the notion of fluid and porous boundaries common to pre-colonial Southeast Asian Muslim societies; (3) how the efficacy of Islamist propaganda has led to increasing discrimination and physical attacks on the Shi‘a, LGBT, and Chinese communities; (4) how this propaganda helps radical Salafi-Takfiri groups to revamp their previous “dangerous-extremist” image into the vanguard of the struggle by Indonesian Muslims to protect both “Islamic purity” and “national security.”
Key words: darurat, propaganda, conceptual frameworks, metaphors, identity boundaries, Shi‘ism