Paper short abstract:

The paper traces the loose, global links between a Scottish Sufi movement and a project for traditional revival in Indonesia. It argues that such 'alternative' globalisations may only be small eddies in the larger stream of global flows but that they may be central to an understanding of the global situation.

Paper long abstract:

The paper traces the loose, global links between a Scottish-based Sufi movement and a project for political renewal in eastern Indonesia.

In the wake of violent conflict and 30 years of Indonesian state-centrism, the Sultan of Ternate and his staff have embarked on a political project that seeks to revive local tradition to make it the moral basis for their visions of a just society. Combined with a grand if idiosyncratic design for a new economy based on the Islamic gold dinar, local traditions are to provide divine, ancestral and mystical legitimacy for the reinvention of 13th century sultanate rule. To sultanate adherents, the combination of traditional values and Islamic economic principles provide an explicit, and mystically validated, political alternative to both Western modernity and capitalist globalization.

If the Ternatan political vision can be said to constitute a 'global assembly' in Collier and Ong's sense, it is an 'uncommon' one. The paper argues that this and other similarly 'heterotopic' globalist projects, which form eddies in the mainstream of global political flows are, nevertheless, central to an understanding of the global situation.