Reforming the Unequal International Order: Three Stages of Indonesian World Making Visions (1873 – 1950)

While scholars of international history connect the crisis of world order in the last century with the unfulfilled demands for justice by different non-European societies, there has been a misrecognition and historical amnesia about the justice-demanding globalist visions of Asian and African intellectuals. Their global-reaching ideas and project were reduced to nationalist, ethnic, and religious demands for independence or autonomy for a single country. Resisting the erasure, critical historians begin to demonstrate a century-long worldmaking vision culminating in the 1950s-1960s. The period witnessed the most audacious form of Afro-Asia internationalism (best seen in the Bandung Conference of 1955), aiming to restructure the world's governance institutions into inclusive and equitable spaces for all nations. This dissertation, however, does not pivot on the Bandung era. Instead, it retraces the Indonesian projects and ideas of global justice from the late nineteenth until the first half of the twentieth century in the context of the Netherlands Indies' colonial rule. It excavates the lineage of international imaginations preceding and enabling the Bandung era Afro-Asian internationalism. Indonesian leaders contended that racial hierarchy and unequal integration underpinning the international order had facilitated Dutch domination over Indonesian since the late nineteenth century. To undo a Eurocentric global structure, they utilized regional, religious, and civilizational universalisms to reform and remake their world order. For the Acehnese ulamas at the end of the nineteenth century, their worldmaking manifested through perang sabil (holy war). Advancing the Acehnese legacy, Indonesian nationalists embraced and mobilized internationalism in the interwar. Their efforts continued in the post-Second World War. They employed the idea of the “Muslim World,” Asian and working-class solidarity to mobilize international support to empower the United Nations to acknowledge Indonesia’s complete independence from the Netherlands. By delineating and linking continuities across the three worldmaking endeavors, I argue that late nineteenth-century Acehnese perang sabil and Indonesian nationalism during the interwar and post-Second World War periods exhibited important continuities over eighty years and, further, became instrumental in shaping Indonesian internationalism in the 1950s and 1960s. This legacy is vital to understanding the current non-European discontent with the existing world order.