Rethinking policbuilding

Please read my piece on policing and interventions here.

German foreign policy under Merkel and the rise of China

Please read my article here.

EU ASEAN Counter terrorism cooperation

Please read my piece on EU ASEAN counter terrorism cooperation here.

State disintegration and power politics in post-Suharto Indonesia

'State disintegration and power politics in post-Suharto Indonesia' is basically my PhD thesis extended and then crammed into 8,500 words for an article published in a recent edition of Third World Quarterly. Click here to view the piece.

The article is part of a really interesting special issue on state fragility as a political concept. Click here for more information.

SSR in Southeast Asia - From Policy to Practice

... is the title of a book I've edited. It has just been published through Palgrave MacMillan's 'Critical Studies of the Asia-Pacific book series'. Click here for more information.

New Conference Paper on EU Police Missions

I just presented a paper on EU police missions at the BISA / ISA Joint Conference in Edinburgh in June 2012. The paper traces the causal beliefs behind EU police assistance from the formative years of the EU's CSDP in the late 1990s and early 2000s all the way to 2011. Based on a theoretical framework drawing heavily on discursive institutionalism, the paper argues that from the beginning two diverging sets of ideas persisted over the objectives and operational aspects of EU police missions: one set of ideas perceived police assistance as a way to help other countries attain European best practices of democratic, civilian policing, while the other set of ideas perceived police assistance in a more robust sense as a way to stabilize state institutions and quell disorder.

Between a rock and a hard place - radical Islam in post-Suharto Indonesia ... article in IJCV

The article just came out in the International Journal of Conflict and Violence, Vol 6, No 1 (2012).

Here's a short abstract:

Indonesia provides a fruitful case study of differences between radicalization processes in liberal and authoritarian regimes. Political Science hereby tends to emphasize regime type as the determinant of Islamist political strategy (radical, militant or moderate) and therefore as the main explanatory factor for radicalization
processes.

Although this is true of the role of Islamists in various Middle Eastern countries, where electoral participation has moderated political programs and strategies, it is of little relevance to Indonesia. The democratic opening in 1998 provided Islamists with new opportunities to participate in electoral politics, and even become co-opted by formally “secular” forces, but at the same time opened up spaces for militant, radical Islamist groups.

Whereas radical Islam faced severe state repression under Suharto’s New Order, we now find a highly ambiguous relationship between the state and radical Islamists, expressed in operational terms as a parallelism of repression and cooptation. This article tries to make sense of the relationship between the post-authoritarian
state and radical Islam in Indonesia by transcending the institution-centered understanding of the role of Islam through an examination of the configurations of social forces that have determined the shape, scope, and practices of radical Islam within Indonesia’s new experiment with democracy.