Indonesia’s Interfaith Scholarship: A Soft Power Test in a Shifting Global Landscape
On a humid November evening in Yogyakarta, an Austrian delegation of religious leaders, academics and policymakers watched Javanese dancers perform to a backdrop of mosque minarets and church spires sharing the same skyline. They were in Indonesia not for tourism, but as guests of the Indonesian government’s Interfaith Scholarship (IIS), a short-term program designed to immerse foreign opinion-shapers in the country’s everyday religious pluralism.(UIN Walisongo)
On paper, the idea is elegant: invite influential Europeans and other partners to see Indonesia’s version of religious harmony up close, and let their impressions travel back into parliaments, newsrooms and universities. In practice, the program is running a larger experiment. At a time when the effectiveness of soft power is being questioned – amid wars, geopolitical bloc politics and intensifying identity conflicts – Indonesia’s Interfaith Scholarship is testing whether curated exposure to “lived pluralism” can still shift narratives in a hardening world.(ResearchGate)
Origins of a niche but strategic program
The Indonesia Interfaith Scholarship emerged in the early 2010s as a collaboration between the Ministry of Religious Affairs and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, with the Indonesian Embassy in Brussels as an early anchor. The core idea was to offer short, intensive visits for European parliamentarians, journalists, NGO workers, researchers and faith leaders to travel across Indonesia, meet religious communities and officials, and then return home with a more nuanced understanding of the country’s religious landscape.(EIAS)
Participants typically move through a circuit that includes Jakarta, Yogyakarta, Semarang and Bali, among other cities, visiting mosques, churches, temples and schools, and engaging in roundtables with civil society and government agencies. Their journeys have been documented not only in official publications but also in personal reflections that underline the contrast between media coverage of Indonesia and day-to-day encounters with pluralism and Pancasila—the state ideology that formally enshrines religious diversity.(EIAS)
By 2019, the program had completed at least six rounds and was already recognized in diplomatic materials as a key instrument to “introduce and promote Indonesia to the European community.”(Kemlu) Like many exchange initiatives, it slowed during the COVID-19 pandemic, but recent reporting from Indonesian and foreign missions confirms that it has been reactivated and expanded.
A revived tool in a tenser global climate
The 2025 edition of the Indonesia Interfaith Scholarship, themed “Harmonizing Culture and Religion in Indonesia,” brought a multi-sectoral delegation from Austria for a program spanning several cities and institutions.(UIN Walisongo) Local coverage emphasized familiar objectives: showing how religious communities cooperate on social issues, how universities teach religious moderation, and how state agencies manage interfaith relations. The Ministry of Religious Affairs has packaged IIS as part of a broader soft-diplomacy push to position Indonesia as a global model of religious harmony.(RRI)
This is notable because it happens against a very different backdrop from a decade ago. Globally, soft power tools – cultural exchanges, education programs, interfaith initiatives – now operate in an environment shaped by several overlapping pressures:
- Intensified great-power competition and proxy conflicts, which crowd out “middle power” narratives.
- The securitization of religion and migration in Europe and beyond, including rising far-right politics and debates over Islam in public space.
- Digital information economies that can both amplify and instantly challenge carefully crafted diplomatic messaging.
It is within this more adversarial ecosystem that Indonesia is using IIS to project an image of the “world’s largest Muslim-majority democracy” as a calm center of religious coexistence and moderate Islam. That goal aligns with a wider strategy where education and scholarship programs – from the Darmasiswa cultural scholarships to the KNB (Developing Countries Partnership) scholarships and newer Indonesian AID schemes – are treated as key channels for promoting a positive national image and building long-term networks.(repository.unpar.ac.id)
What exactly is being projected?
The Interfaith Scholarship program functions as “in-shore” public diplomacy: rather than sending Indonesian students abroad, it brings foreign actors into Indonesia’s domestic religious ecology. The message is multi-layered.
First, it foregrounds everyday pluralism. Delegations see not just iconic temples or historic mosques, but mixed neighborhoods where churches and mosques share walls, interfaith youth groups organize social work, and local leaders describe pragmatic solutions to potential flashpoints—such as joint security arrangements around religious holidays.(EIAS)
Second, it showcases institutional moderation. Participants meet officials from the Ministry of Religious Affairs, interfaith councils, and Islamic higher education institutions that position themselves as producers of “moderate” Islamic knowledge. Recent scholarship notes that Indonesia’s Islamic academia has become a central site for “Islamic peace diplomacy,” explicitly competing with traditional centers such as Cairo, Qom and Riyadh in defining global Islamic discourse.(GIGA Hamburg) IIS essentially turns this academic ecosystem into a diplomatic exhibit.
Third, the program tries to insert Indonesia into European debates on religion, radicalization and social cohesion. By deliberately inviting stakeholders from EU institutions and member-state parliaments, the scholarship is not just about mutual understanding; it is about gently nudging policy and media narratives in Europe away from seeing Muslim-majority societies through the lenses of extremism or authoritarianism alone.(EIAS)
Strengths: credibility, timing and network-building
Several features give IIS a degree of credibility that many state-run “charm offensives” lack.
The first is that Indonesia’s pluralism is grounded in a dense history. Interfaith cooperation here is not a newly scripted spectacle for foreign guests; it is embedded in the country’s founding narrative and institutional design, and has been stress-tested by episodes of violence and reconciliation since the late 1990s.(GIGA Hamburg) When participants walk through streets in Yogyakarta or Semarang, they are, in effect, moving through decades of negotiated coexistence, not a recently constructed showcase district.
The second strength is the choice of grantees. By targeting journalists, parliamentary staffers, religious leaders and academics, IIS focuses on people who are both opinion-makers and bridge-builders. Their write-ups, lectures and informal briefings often outlast official communiqués. European-based reflections from scholarship alumni show that many did adjust or refine their mental map of Indonesia after the visit, particularly on the role of state institutions in mediating religious difference.(EIAS)
The third is timing. In a moment when global audiences are saturated with images of sectarian conflict—from West Asia to South Asia and across the Sahel—there is an appetite, especially in policy circles, for examples of how multi-faith societies can keep functioning. Indonesia’s soft-power strategy openly banks on this, presenting the country as a “positive outlier” whose lessons may be transferable, even if imperfectly, to partners grappling with polarization.(RRI)
Limitations: echo chambers, domestic contradictions and measurement
Yet the Interfaith Scholarship is also constrained by structural limits that test how far soft power can travel in today’s climate.
One challenge is the echo-chamber problem. Many of those willing to join a short-term interfaith program in Indonesia are already, by disposition and career, sympathetic to dialogue and pluralism. Changing the marginal participant’s perception – rather than reinforcing existing beliefs – is difficult. The program’s reach into more skeptical or oppositional constituencies in Europe remains limited.
A second challenge is domestic contradiction. Indonesia’s own record on religious freedom and minority rights is not without controversy, whether on blasphemy prosecutions, local-level discrimination against minority sects, or broader human rights concerns such as abuses in Papua. Critical observers argue that highly curated interfaith tours risk under-playing these tensions, offering an “edited” image of harmony that may clash with the more critical reports that policymakers and journalists also receive.(GIGA Hamburg)
A third is measurability. Governments like to justify diplomatic spending by pointing to concrete outcomes. Yet the impact of a program like IIS is diffuse and long-term: altered media frames, more nuanced parliamentary debates, informal advocacy in favor of Indonesia’s positions on issues ranging from trade to human rights. Such effects are real but hard to quantify, especially when set against the loud, visible instruments of hard power and economic leverage.
Soft power in an era of hard choices
The Interfaith Scholarship sits within a broader rethinking of Indonesian soft power. Recent academic work on the KNB scholarship, which brings students from developing countries to Indonesian universities, describes a move “beyond hard, soft, and smart power” toward what is framed as “sentient power”—emphasizing empowerment, mutual learning and intellectual equity rather than one-way cultural projection.(Medium)
Applied to IIS, this would mean treating visiting delegations not merely as audiences, but as co-producers of new knowledge on interfaith practice. Indeed, some alumni have used their experience to critique European approaches to interfaith dialogue, noting that Indonesia’s model, rooted in everyday negotiations and local initiative, contrasts with more bureaucratized, grant-driven projects in Europe.(European Network Against Racism) That kind of “reverse learning” turns the scholarship into a two-way mirror, in which Indonesia is not just selling its narrative but inviting comparison.
However, this more ambitious framing also raises the stakes. If Indonesian institutions claim global relevance as laboratories of moderate Islam and plural democracy, they will be judged more closely – not only on symbolism, but on their ability to handle domestic challenges, from social media-driven hate campaigns to localized violence. Interfaith scholarships cannot be a substitute for consistent rule of law, inclusive policymaking and protection of vulnerable minorities at home.
A soft power test in motion
So is Indonesia’s Interfaith Scholarship “working”? The answer depends on expectations.
If the goal is to instantly rebrand Indonesia in European publics, the program is too small and too elite-focused to shift mass opinion in the short term. It is also competing with more dramatic headlines – about climate vulnerability, economic competition, or regional security – that often overshadow religion-focused diplomacy.
But if the metric is more modest and targeted—deepening the understanding of a few hundred strategic individuals over a decade, and weaving them into informal networks that connect Brussels, Vienna, Jakarta and Yogyakarta—then IIS looks more promising. It offers a relatively low-cost platform for Indonesia to demonstrate, rather than merely assert, how a complex multi-faith society manages its diversity. It also helps position Indonesia not as a passive object of global debates on Islam and democracy, but as an active contributor to those debates.(Kemlu)
Ultimately, the Interfaith Scholarship is a test not only of Indonesia’s soft power, but of soft power itself in an era of hardened geopolitics. Can carefully curated encounters, shared meals and long conversations in university seminar rooms still matter, when algorithms and battlefields dominate public imagination? Indonesia is betting that they can – and that the quiet work of interfaith diplomacy may pay its biggest dividends precisely when louder instruments of power reach their limits.