Vedi R. Hadiz’s research while affiliated with University of Melbourne and other places

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Publications (23)


Still the “Opium of the Masses”? Religion and Labour Struggles in Indonesia
  • Article

February 2024

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9 Reads

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1 Citation

Journal of Contemporary Asia

Vedi R. Hadiz

Precarity and Islamism in Indonesia: the contradictions of neoliberalism

November 2022

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135 Reads

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9 Citations

Critical Asian Studies

This article investigates the link between growing precarity – associated with the process of neoliberal economic globalization – and growing Islamist tendencies in Indonesian society, through a case study of app-enabled transport workers. It applies a Gramscian notion of common sense to understand workers’ responses to their experiences of socio-economic marginalization and the articulation of their grievances. The combination of the near hegemony of a neoliberal worldview that encourages individual entrepreneurial prowess and an Islamist focus on moral self-cultivation inadvertently contributes to workers’ normalization of their precarity, furthering the atomization of the workforce. It also helps provide the setting for mobilizations of the urban precariat under Islamic banners, without challenging the imposition of neoliberal ideology on work and life.


Indonesia's "Third-Wave" Democratic Model?
  • Chapter
  • Full-text available

January 2022

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175 Reads

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5 Citations

This chapter examines the persistence of illiberal politics in Indonesia, the world’s third most populous democracy. It does so in broad historical terms, but also specifically in relation to the rise of an Islamic variant of populist politics and to the way the government uses oppressive measures to respond to Islamic- oriented challenges – which, in turn – have further accentuated the illiberal features of Indonesian democracy. As discussed below, such accentuations have to do with conservative and reactionary impulses in Indonesian politics, including statist versions of secular nationalism and Islamic populism. We argue that Indonesia’s highly celebrated two- decade old democracy has not become the cornerstone of a liberal social order in the way envisaged by liberal- pluralist theorists or proponents of the once- dominant democratic transitions paradigm (O’Donnell and Schmitter 1986; Huntington 1993; Diamond 2009). This is so despite the holding of regular free and fair elections since 1999.

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Social Resilience Against COVID-19 Masks Indonesian Class Divide

January 2021

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147 Reads

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8 Citations

Georgetown Journal of International Affairs

The COVID-19 pandemic in Indonesia has proven to be a golden opportunity for politico-business elites to pursue their predatory interests, thereby contributing to the worsening of the public health crisis and the deterioration of democratic politics at the same time. This has been possible because of the relative absence of significant challenges to the way the public health crisis has been handled and exploited. The focus on social resilience as a virtue contributes to weakening any such challenge. While significant to provide short-term relief for the most vulnerable members of society, it masks the real problems of power relations and of social inequalities. Obscuring these issues only benefits powerful politico-business elites and their allies and ensures that the poor continue to bear the brunt of a contagion that still looks far from being under control. Simply put, it is tantamount to advocating an apolitical solution to address fundamentally political (and systemic) issues. These are issues that cannot be ignored in order to respond more adequately to the current public health crisis—or others that have yet to occur.


Contesting Working-Class Politics in Turkey: Social Transformations, Islam, and the Left

June 2020

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44 Reads

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8 Citations

Critical Sociology

This article examines transition in Kocaeli, an industrial city in the north-western part of Turkey, away from left-wing politics and trade unionism in the early 1970s, and toward Islamic politics from the mid-1990s onwards. It does do by investigating the ideological, political, and social transformation of the working class. Based on fieldwork involving in-depth, semistructured interviews conducted with current and former workers and trade union leaders, the article analyzes the various aspects of, and limits to, the hegemonic relationships between workers and left-wing politics on the one hand, and with Islamic politics, on the other.


Indonesia’s missing Left and the Islamisation of dissent

June 2020

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88 Reads

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16 Citations

The demise of Leftist political traditions in Indonesia has come to facilitate newer Islamic expressions of socio-political discontent accompanying socio-economic modernisation in localities that used to be dominated by communist and radical nationalist organisations. Because social grievances related to endemic issues like social injustice are increasingly being framed through Islamic cultural references, there will be implications for the workings of Indonesian democracy, premised on secular state institutions. But this does not lead to the sort of post-Islamism associated by Bayat with Iran, where the imperatives of running a modern state and economy once purportedly enabled pluralist social inclinations, albeit within an Islamised polity. Nor does it lead to the generalised ‘Islamisation of radicalism’ envisaged by Roy. Rather, what is witnessed is the substantial, though by no means uncontested, mainstreaming of social grievances through the lexicon of Islamic politics within Indonesian democracy even if there has been no take-over of the state by Islamic forces. The adoption of such framings even in the former bastions of the Indonesian Communist Party, once the third largest in the world, provides important insights into how hegemonic contests have taken place in the Muslim world after the end of the Cold War.


Populism in Southeast Asia: A Vehicle for Reform or a Tool for Despots?

March 2020

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167 Reads

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8 Citations

This chapter explains the rise of populist politics and why it takes different forms in Southeast Asia – specifically in Indonesia, the Philippines and Thailand. We see populism as an integral part of larger conflicts over power and wealth that accompany the advance of global capitalism. The failure of governments and elites to deal with structural crises confronting their societies provides the circumstances in which populism can emerge. Populist movements are shaped by different forces and interests operating within cross-class alliances in particular contexts. This explains why populism can sometimes be a vehicle for long-supressed popular demands for the redistribution of wealth and social justice and, elsewhere, effectively protect the interests of established oligarchies by diverting such demands into a politics of identity and culture.


Two Decades of Reformasi in Indonesia: Its Illiberal Turn

July 2019

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232 Reads

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114 Citations

Journal of Contemporary Asia

There has been an accentuation of Indonesian democracy’s illiberal characteristics during the course of reformasi. The religious and nativist mobilisation that surrounded the controversial 2017 Jakarta gubernatorial elections was only one manifestation of the sort of pressures leading to such accentuation. This article surveys the impacts of a stronger recent turn towards illiberalism across diverse areas of policy making in Indonesia, including decentralisation, civil–military relations, economic and foreign policy, as well as in the approaches to recognising past abuses of human rights. We find clear variation in its impacts, produced by differing constellations of old and new forces and what is at stake politically and economically in each arena of competition, as well as the salience of coherently expressed public pressure for reform. In particular, where the state and market have failed to address social injustices, more illiberal models have emerged, some under the guise of populist discourses that nonetheless continue to serve predatory elite interests and shift attention away from the inequalities in society. Such developments could be observed all the way to the 2019 presidential contest.


Citations (20)


... Dalam kehidupan bernegara, Pancasila juga merupakan sebuah Ideologi Bangsa Indonesia (Ubaedillah, 2018;Hadiz, 2024). Pemilihan Pancasila sebagai Ideologi dan Pandangan hidup bukanlah sebuah konsensus saja, namun hal tersebut dikarenakan Pancasila memiliki nilai-nilai yang mencerminkan kepribadian dan juga adat istiadat dari masyarakat Indonesia terdahulu, artinya nilai-nilai Pancasila merupakan nilai-nilai hidup dan berkembang dalam kehidupan masyarakat sejak bangsa ini ada. ...

Reference:

Nilai Religius dalam Pembelajaran Pancasila di tingkat SMA/MA
Still the “Opium of the Masses”? Religion and Labour Struggles in Indonesia
  • Citing Article
  • February 2024

Journal of Contemporary Asia

... Neoliberal capitalism, although criticized by proponents of Islamic populism, is nonetheless accepted as long as it aligns with the interests of the ummah. This is evident in the political imagination of ADI supporters, for instance, who, despite opposing "secularism, liberalism, and capitalism", also endorse a state based on market capitalism (Rakhmani & Hadiz, 2022;Yasih & Hadiz, 2023). ...

Precarity and Islamism in Indonesia: the contradictions of neoliberalism
  • Citing Article
  • November 2022

Critical Asian Studies

... Moreover, in Indonesia, the floating ummah owed its formation to the popularity of conservative Islamic teachings provided by an array of online Islamic preachers (Akmaliah, 2020), who were not formally schooled or part of the traditional Islamic boarding schools (pesantren). Their popularity rose through the promotion of algorithms and digital monetisation, providing a kind of preacher market for the floating ummah to inform them on the kinds of Quranic verses and Hadith that help them navigate political and economic life (Rakhmani & Hadiz, 2022). ...

Meaning Matters: The Political Language of Islamic Populism

... Selain karena ada potensi seringkali muncul dalam program JPS adalah distribusi yang seringkali tidak tepat sasaran (Mufida, 2020: 164), dalam beberapa hal "kemurahatian" negara dalam program JPS dinilai malah mereduksi etos kerja, mengurangi dorongan untuk bangkit, meruntuhkan ikatan komunitas, hingga membebani keuangan negara dalam jangka panjang (Runde, 2020). Tidak hanya itu, Mudhoffir & Hadiz (2021) Panggungharjo sendiri merupakan salah satu desa penyangga kawasan perkotaan. Pertumbuhan ekonomi di sekitar Kota Yogyakarta dan Kabupaten Bantul terutama pada sektor industri, jasa, dan perdagangan yang cukup pesat, dalam banyak hal telah menggantikan sektor pertanian dan agrobisnis. ...

Indonesia's "Third-Wave" Democratic Model?

... The vagueness supported measures that saw migrants being pitted against poor citizens, not least as those confined in crowded dormitories, camps, and shelters were simultaneously blamed for constituting a breeding ground for the virus. Poor people, rather than the enabling political conditions of poverty, were blamed for their own vulnerability and higher mortality rates as well as the spread of the virus (Mudhoffir & Hadiz, 2021). ...

Social Resilience Against COVID-19 Masks Indonesian Class Divide

Georgetown Journal of International Affairs

... This statement shows that increasing the number of women in the political arena is an issue that has always been a concern. As explained in the previous chapter, since 2002, the majority of political activists, women leaders in political parties, academics and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) have agreed on the need to increase women's political participation in Indonesia, based on the realization that all political priorities and agendas must be deconstructed from the traditional political system (Diprose et al., 2019). This means that women can emerge to hold various public positions if they build new social and economic values that suit their interests. ...

Two Decades of Reformasi in Indonesia: Its Illiberal Turn

Journal of Contemporary Asia

... However, labour activism re-emerged in the 1990s and 2000s. Workers in various sectors, from textile factories to automotive plants, travelled the streets to demand better working conditions, higher wages, and job security (Bekmen et al., 2020). Student activism has also been a significant force in Turkey's contentious politics. ...

Contesting Working-Class Politics in Turkey: Social Transformations, Islam, and the Left
  • Citing Article
  • June 2020

Critical Sociology

... It's just that the two approaches above do not consider discursive power in the practice of modular parties. Discourse is communicated and innovated by free agents and political between, on the one hand, the materialism of authors who study the organizational processes pf money politics and the political economy of parties (Nordholt 2015;Hadiz 2021) and on the other hand, the Habermasian or Foucauldian analyses of discourse (Hatherell and Walsh 2021;Wilson 2015). ...

Indonesia’s missing Left and the Islamisation of dissent
  • Citing Article
  • June 2020

... Asian dictators such as Park Chung-hee in Korea and Chiang Kai-shek in Taiwan have sought to curb corruption to maintain their power (Carothers 2022). After democratization, many Asian democratic leaders also made combating political corruption a central pledge to uphold their political legitimacy (Chang and Chu 2006;Hur and Yeo 2024;Robison and Hadiz 2020). This suggests that Asians may tolerate illiberal practices if political elites show dedication to the public good and avoid corrupt practices. ...

Populism in Southeast Asia: A Vehicle for Reform or a Tool for Despots?
  • Citing Chapter
  • March 2020

... There is a paucity of literature related to the discussion of legal constraints surrounding reorganization in Indonesia although legal framework, as argued by Hadiz & Robison (2014), is a key aspect of governance. This aligns with findings reported by Chua (2014), and the trend evident in the literature on Southeast Asian countries when discussing socio-legal issues. ...

The Political Economy of Oligarchy and the Reorganization of Power in Indonesia: Wealth, Power, and Contemporary Indonesian Politics
  • Citing Chapter
  • December 2018