The rapid digitalisation of criminal justice promises greater efficiency and accessibility but also creates procedural risks when technological innovation outpaces safeguards for individual rights. Despite expanding scholarship on digital courts, comparative evidence remains limited on how different institutional trajectories shape the relationship between judicial technology and procedural protection in emerging Asian legal systems. This study examines how digital criminal proceedings affect individual rights in Indonesia and Uzbekistan and identifies the institutional conditions required for rights-sensitive digital justice. Using a qualitative comparative socio-legal design, the study analyses legislation, judicial and policy documents, official materials, and relevant scholarly literature through thematic content analysis and structured comparison. The findings reveal contrasting trajectories: Indonesia combines relatively established digital judicial infrastructure with fragmented criminal-specific regulation, whereas Uzbekistan pursues a more centrally coordinated Digital Court transformation while procedural safeguards continue to evolve. Across both systems, electronic evidence, remote hearings, digital case management, and AI-assisted tools generate efficiency and transparency gains but also risks concerning evidentiary reliability, meaningful participation, digital inequality, and human oversight. The study conceptualises this mismatch as institutional asynchrony, providing a comparative framework for designing accountable, contestable, and rights-sensitive digital justice beyond technologically consolidated jurisdictions.
Digital platforms are reshaping how religious authority is performed, circulated, and encountered, yet increased online visibility cannot be assumed to constitute religious legitimacy. This study examined how religious rhetoric and platform visibility intersected in the negotiation of religious authority through the case of Mama Gufron, a controversial Indonesian preacher whose sermons gained substantial social media attention. Using qualitative content analysis combined with rhetorical analysis, the study analyzed six purposively selected videos from the official Pondok Pesantren Uniq Nusantara YouTube channel, focusing on argumentative structures, speech acts, and metaphorical expressions. The findings revealed four interrelated rhetorical patterns: the invocation of lineage, sanad, and kiai status; performative use of distinctive linguistic expressions; claims of supernatural authority; and emotional dramatization. These patterns showed how established markers of Islamic authority were rearticulated through digitally mediated performance and intensified platform visibility. The study interpreted this process through performative-mediated authority and advances viral piety as an analytical proposition linking religious performance, digital circulation, and authority negotiation without equating visibility with legitimacy. The findings contribute to international digital religion scholarship by explaining how culturally embedded religious authority interacts with transnational infrastructures of digital visibility.
Fiscal capacity in natural resource-dependent regions is often constrained by fiscal persistence, structural inequality, and economic shocks. This study examines whether social assistance strengthens local fiscal capacity through local tax revenue while controlling for inflation and fiscal persistence. Using balanced panel data from 17 districts/municipalities in Southeast Sulawesi, Indonesia, for 2014–2023, the study applies two-step System GMM with Windmeijer-corrected standard errors to address dynamic persistence and potential endogeneity. The final estimation comprises 136 observations and 12 internal instruments. The results show that lagged local tax revenue positively and significantly affects current tax revenue (β = 0.3401; p < 0.001), confirming fiscal persistence. Social assistance also has a positive and significant association with local tax revenue (β = 0.0706; p = 0.0186), suggesting that social transfers may strengthen fiscal capacity through household purchasing power and local economic activity. Inflation is positively associated with local tax revenue (β = 0.0524; p = 0.0086), indicating nominal expansion of the tax base rather than necessarily improved real fiscal capacity. The study contributes by conceptualizing social assistance as a potential component of fiscal resilience, with implications for integrating social protection, local economic development, and tax administration in resource-dependent regions.
This study examines the growing influence of business oligarchs on Indonesia's 2024 presidential election by analyzing the relationship between corporate financing, political coalitions, and state institutions. Although previous studies have extensively explored money politics, campaign financing, and oligarchic networks, limited attention has been paid to the institutional mechanisms through which corporate actors transform economic resources into long-term political influence. Using a qualitative approach, this study draws upon reports, academic publications, news articles, and other documentary sources, which are analyzed through thematic analysis. The findings reveal that presidential candidates rely heavily on financial support from business elites and large corporations throughout the electoral process. Corporate actors strategically distribute their support across competing political coalitions to preserve access to political power and influence policymaking processes, particularly in the extractive sector. These relationships contribute to the concentration of economic and political power, reinforce oligarchic networks, and create conditions that facilitate state capture. This study contributes to the literature on oligarchy, corporate political participation, and democratic governance by demonstrating how economic power is institutionalized through formally democratic processes. The Indonesian case also offers broader insights into contemporary debates concerning democratic accountability, institutional integrity, and the relationship between political and economic power.
The growing prominence of engagement-oriented social media environments has created new tensions between Islamic communication ethics and digitally mediated practices, yet the relationship between platform-mediated visibility and ethical communication remains insufficiently understood. This study examined how algorithmic logic was related to violations of Islamic communication ethics and the negotiation of moral authority on social media. Employing a multilayered qualitative case study, the research analyzed 30 highly engaged publicly accessible content items from Instagram, X, Facebook, and TikTok, complemented by semi-structured interviews with 10 active social media users. Data were examined through thematic analysis and triangulation of content, audience interactions, and user perceptions. The findings highlighted three recurrent ethical concerns: impolite speech, privacy violations, and misleading information, which were associated with observable patterns of audience interaction and platform-mediated visibility. Rather than demonstrating direct algorithmic causation, the findings showed that Islamic communication ethics was negotiated through the interaction of communicative practices, audience responses, and engagement-oriented platform conditions. By integrating Islamic communication ethics, mediatization theory, and algorithm studies, this study extends ethical analysis beyond individual responsibility toward the structural conditions of digital communication and contributes to broader debates on digital religion, platform governance, and responsible digital citizenship.
