The Memory of Asian-African Conference as a Public Diplomacy

2011

This is a self-translation from Chapter IV. Future of Indonesian Museums of 2011 published a book of the History of Indonesian Museums (Sejarah Permuseuman Indonesia) available in its original Indonesian version here: https://www.academia.edu/88509715/Sejarah_permuseuman_di_Indonesia

In the aftermath of the devastating terrorist attacks in US and Europe, most notably the 9/11 attacks on New York, there has been renewed interest in the role of cultural diplomacy in international relations as a strategic platform for engaging with other nations and for wielding ‘soft power’ on the international stage. Central to this renewed interest on cultural diplomacy is that culture can provide a critical platform for contact and negotiations when political relations are in jeopardy or for recalibrating relationships with emerging powers. This study provides an analysis of cross-cultural museum exchanges as an instrument of ‘soft power’ and cultural diplomacy by considering Singapore’s motives and outcomes of engaging in the Singapore-France cultural collaboration. The study demonstrates that while cross-cultural museum exchanges can serve as symbolic gestures of political goodwill, their effectiveness in shaping the preferences of other nations through exerting ‘soft power’ on the international stage is limited. These exchanges are often apolitical in their initiation because museums seldom take their nations’ political goals into consideration in selecting their prospective partners and the subject of collaboration. While cross-cultural museum exchanges are apolitical in their initiation, their consequences are nonetheless political due to inherent unequal power relations between the collaborating parties.

Routledge, 2019

Global Trends in Museum Diplomacy traces the transformation of museums from publicly or privately funded heritage institutions into active players in the economic sector of culture. Exploring how this transformation reconfigured cultural diplomacy, the book argues that museums have become autonomous diplomatic players on the world stage. The book offers a comparative analysis across a range of case studies in order to demonstrate that museums have gone global in the era of neoliberal globalisation. Grincheva focuses first on the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, which is well known for its bold revolutionising strategies of global expansion: museum franchising and global corporatisation. The book then goes on to explore how these strategies were adopted across museums around the world and analyses two cases of post-Guggenheim developments in China and Russia: the K11 Art Mall in Hong Kong and the International Network of Foundations of the State Hermitage Museum in Russia. These cases from more authoritarian political regimes evidence the emergence of alternative avenues of museum diplomacy that no longer depend on government commissions to serve immediate geo-political interests. Global Trends in Museum Diplomacy will be a valuable resource for students, scholars and practitioners of contemporary museology and cultural diplomacy. Documenting new developments in museum diplomacy, the book will be particularly interesting to museum and heritage practitioners and policymakers involved in international exchanges or official programs of cultural diplomacy.

Sosiohumaniora, 2020

This paper is a museum study from an anthropological perspective. Generally, the museum is an institution that stores and preserves particular material cultures. On the other side, a museum can also be critically seen as a space for the production of cultural discourse that narrates a particular ideology through exhibition strategies and display systems. The cultural ideology discourse always develops over time following the existing regime. During Indonesia New Order, the museum was used to be a political tool to shape the national identity. In the reformation era, within the escalation of global culture, many museums are no longer monopolized by the state. There are various private-based museums that exhibit specific themes by implementing edutainment and amusement park concepts. Thus, this paper proposes a case study of the Museum Angkut in Batu, East Java, one of the most popular private museums in Indonesia that exhibits transportation system and world civilization themes assem...

ASEASUK Conference, School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), London, UK, 2016

In Indonesia and elsewhere, museum serves to give a narrative of the past. But in some cases, there are museums that convey 'different stories' even though they are telling the same topic in the past. This article is about the contestation of the 1965 Tragedy, one major narrative in Indonesian history. It examines the role of Monumen Pancasila Sakti from the period of the New Order and two temporary museums: Museum Bergerak 1965 and Rekoleksi Memori from the period of Reformasi. This article focuses on the role of these museums and how the three museums communicate the 1965 tragedy. I argue that each museum has its own potentials, but the temporary museums still lack the capacity to speak more of the narrative of 1965. I suggest for the need to establish a permanent museum of the 1965 tragedy from the victim's point of view.

Conjoining cultural heritage and diplomacy Cultural heritage is an essential element in transmitting values, establishing narratives of historical and contemporary connectivity, and creating subjective and collective identities and a feeling of belonging. During the past decade, the potential of cultural heritage for state foreign policy and in international heritage governance has attracted increasing interest among heritage scholars. This potential, however, remains under-researched in the broader spectrum of international cultural relations. This special issue focuses on international cultural relations dealing with cultural heritage and culture in terms of heritage diplomacy. The contributors discuss the potentials and limitations of heritage diplomacy and how it could or should be approached in theory, policy, and praxis. The aim of the issue is to critically explore the previous research of heritage diplomacy, develop its theoretical basis and scope, and thereby extend the discussion to new topics and themes. To recognize the potential of cultural heritage for international cultural relations, it is helpful to conceptualize heritage as a presentist and future-orientated process through which realities are constructed from the selected elements of the past (e.g. Ashworth, Graham, and Tunbridge 2007; Harrison 2013a; Lähdesmäki et al. 2020). In this conception, cultural heritage is not an essentialist 'fact' but emerges when something is narrated, defined, and/or treated as such in a specific sociocultural context (van Huis et al. 2019). The conception underlines how all heritage includes dissonances regarding the stories told through it, the ways the past is represented, and how memories are used in public spheres (Tunbridge and Ashworth 1996). This dissonance is not undesirable, but intrinsic to the very nature of heritage (Smith 2006, 82; Graham and Howard 2008, 3; Kisić 2016, 25) and crucial to its potential to look to the future. In this orientation to the future, cultural heritage has an active role: it 'does' things when actors discuss, manage, and use heritage for different purposes (Harrison 2013a, 2013b; Whitehead et al. 2019; Lähdesmäki and Čeginskas 2022). This capacity makes cultural heritage favourable ground for political projects; different meanings are attributed to heritage in diplomatic engagements, from the material and tangible to ideational structures (see also Giulia Sciorati 2023). Critical heritage scholars have often underlined the political dimension of cultural heritage. It functions as an arena for both manifesting and negotiating (dissonant) meanings, values and identities (e.g. van Huis et al. 2019; Kisić 2016; Harrison 2013a; Mäkinen et al. 2023). It may promote established worldviews and power hierarchies but also question them by offering space for deconstructing power asymmetries and creating novel dialogic connections between people. These different approaches to cultural heritage explain its utility for diplomacy. Diverse definitions have been attributed to diplomacy in scholarship and practice. The use of terms such as 'cultural diplomacy', 'public diplomacy,' 'new public diplomacy,' and '(international) cultural relations' reflect the development of the term throughout time. While all terms foreground the relevance of culture in diplomatic endeavours for creating (chiefly positive) engagements between states and people to negotiate mutual interests, to maintain peaceful relations and a geopolitical status quo, the concepts may diverge on understandings of the roles in, governance and aims of diplomacy (see also Dâmaso 2021, 7-8). In this issue, the contributors predominantly take one of two approaches, to frame heritage diplomacy in terms of cultural diplomacy or (international) cultural relations. Cultural diplomacy can be understood as a more traditional approach to diplomacy, which assumes that the state remains the central actor and is preoccupied with advancing its foreign policy goals and using culture for nation-branding. In contrast, (international) cultural

African Arts Magazine, 2020

Museum Cooperation Between Africa and Europe: A New Field for Museum Studies is a signi cant contribution to the critical discourse on a fundamental question: What is a museum? e compendium comprises papers presented at the December 2016 conference of the Swiss Society for African Studies (SSAS) and the Swiss Anthropological Association (SAA), Museum Cooperation between Africa and Europe: Opportunities, Challenges and Modalities. Organized and hosted by the Ethnographic Museum at the University of Zurich, it was convened for the presentation of papers by academics and museum practitioners on critical issues and theories detailing a wide range of varying transcontinental cooperative projects over several decades. e editors, Laely, Meyer, and Schwere, selected thirteen case studies by sixteen contributors. e assembled chapters demonstrate detailed outcomes and proposals documenting a number of cooperative projects in Africa springing from, or in response to, distinct political and cul...

International Journal of Advanced Multidisciplinary, 2023

The research is a derivative program of the Defense Heritage Dissertation by Dr. Jeanne Francoise, with a novelty idea, namely the establishment of the Indonesian Defense Museum. The establishment of the Indonesian Defense Museum aims to narrate the history of Indonesia's national defense in a complete, unified, and comprehensive manner with exhibitions of historical artifacts or objects, sequences of events, involvement of actors, and narratives based on the period of the defense heritage of the Indonesian nation, from 1511 to 1949. This study uses qualitative research methods with analysis obtained from the enrichment of defense heritage theory, cultural diplomacy, defense science, humanities, and museum science, as well as the Focus Group Discussion in Republic of Indonesia's National Defence Council (WANTANNAS RI) in July 2022. It is hoped that this research can become the main blueprint for the establishment of the Indonesian Defense Museum one day, especially in terms of presenting historical stories in a more interesting and contemporary way, as well as preparing digital literacy to store their collections so that they can continue to be accessed by the public and provide benefits in the academic field.

Journal of Responsible Tourism Management, 2022

This study aims to provide a review of previously conducted research studies about museums and their recent development in Southeast Asia. The bibliometric analysis of Web of Science database revealed that the number of publications related to museum was in an increasing trend and majority of the studies focusing on museums are publications from and within the context of the People’s Republic of China. The visualization of similarities viewer software analysis showed that China is the most relevant keyword with the highest occurrence. It further revealed that museums are understudied in Southeast Asia. Basing on the number of museums and their cultural offerings in Southeast Asia, museum visitors are foreseen as a potential market for heritage tourism development. While the pandemic forced the closure of a number of museums globally, the industry rebounded quickly by establishing a digital presence, thereby offering new opportunities for those in the heritage tourism industry.

SPAFACON2021, 2021

ndonesia marked a new era, known as the Reformation Era, in 1998 after the downfall of Suharto, the main face of the regime called the New Order (Orde Baru) and ran the government from 1966 to 1998. This long-run government creates certain structures in many sectors, including the museum sector in Indonesia. Suharto leads the government in a totalitarian manner, his power control over many layers, including the use of museums as regime propaganda tools. The propaganda in the museums such as a standardized storyline, the use of historical versions that are approved by the government, and the representation of violence through the military tale with the nation’s great enemy is made for the majority of museums from the west to east Indonesia at that time. Thus, after almost two-decade after the downfall of the New Order regime how Indonesian museum transform into this new era? In the new democratic era, museum management is brought back to the regional government. The museums are encouraged to writing the local history and deconstruct the storyline from the previous regime. Not only just stop there, but there are also many new museums open to the public with new concepts or storylines to revive the audience. Even, the new museum was also erected by the late president’s family to rewrite the narration of the hero story of Suharto in Yogyakarta. This article aims to look up the change in the Indonesian museum post-New Order regime. How they adjust curatorial narration to present the storyline, is there any change to re-write the new narrative, or they actually still represent the New-Order idea along with the violence symbolic that never will deconstruct

Public Economics: Miscellaneous Issues eJournal, 2016

The increasing number of citizen activities in building relations between countries cannot be ignored in the globalized world. People-to-people contact had obscured the domestic and international issues and put them in a similar role and activities. The significant role of citizens was attached to diplomacy activities by providing a large space in Indonesian Foreign Affairs for them through public diplomacy office formation. The institution was established by the Directorate General of Information and Public Diplomacy in 2002. This article is the result of research on the activities of IACS (Indonesian Arts and Culture Scholarship) that involve participants from diverse background countries. IACS program was one of public diplomacy projects in Indonesia. The methodology used in this research was qualitative research methodologies through in-depth interview methods with the IA CS participants years 2012-2014 as subject of research. In-depth interviews was conducted to find out not on...

The purpose of this study was to examine the relationship between service quality that affected the behavioral intention to re-visit low cost airline. Self-administered questionnaires had been distributed to 400 samples who had taken low-cost airline services at least two times. Descriptive statistics such as frequency, percentage, mean, and standard deviation as well as, multiple regression analysis had been used. The result from hypothesis testing showed that the relationship between service quality and behavioral intention to re-visit was positive with 0.05 statistical significance. The coefficient value (R) was 0.817, coefficient value R 2 was 0.667, coefficient Adj. R 2 was 0.663, and deviation was 0.8206. Reliability and empathy dimensions of service quality showed significant effect on behavioral intention to revisit. In conclusion, it has been recommended for those low-cost airline operators to increase service quality, especially in reliability and empathy dimensions as both have the impact on intention to re-visit in order to gain competitive advantages and profitability.

Tourismos: an International …

2011

Museum was a man-made thing, a culture. This situation made the museum polluted with many tension, especially for the museum founded or managed by the government. This paper tried to evaluate the appeareance of the State Museum of DIY "Sonobudoyo" as a general museum and Jogja Kembali Monument as a tematic museum, and found some political aspects involved in their buildings, collections, exhibitions and other things.

The impetus for this book came from a symposium that we organized at the Tropenmuseum in Amsterdam in September 2011. The symposium was the fi rst in a series that we envisaged under the rubric of 'Critical Conversations in Culture and Development'. While many claims have been made concerning the importance of culture in international development interventions, we were conscious that there was very little in the way of critical refl ection or evaluation of these claims. We were also conscious of the lack of understanding that often exists between the worlds of academic critique, policy making and development practice. Our objective, therefore, was to create a forum in which to bring together different stakeholders and interlocutors in an attempt to foster constructive dialogue and interchange. The challenges of bridging academic critique and theorization, on the one hand, and policy development and implementation, on the other, are well known, and it would be naïve of us to imagine that the meeting brought about any signifi cant breakthrough. We remain committed, however, to the idea that there is a need for such critical conversations: a need to explore, refl exively and dialogically, the relationships not only between different actors and their various perspectives but, even more so, the very concepts of culture and development.