MSc Development studies, School of Oriental and African Studies

B.A. Economics, University of California, Irvine

I am a Ph.D. Candidate (ABD) interested in international relations theory, historical sociology and Indonesia and southeast Asia. My dissertation is tentatively titled ‘Social, national, and passive revolution in Indonesia: The geopolitical origins of the modern Indonesian nation-state and authoritarian developmentalism, 1300-1972’ and makes the case that the Indonesian revolution was both a social and a national revolution made in conditions of uneven and combined development. I challenge the dominant view that the Indonesian revolution was merely a ‘national’ or political revolution by situating it within the long-run interaction between western capitalist and Indonesian tributary societies, which I argue produced a project of ‘defensive accumulation’ on the part of the colonial state that sparked a revolutionary reconstitution of the relationship between state and society in the mid-twentieth century. This served as the precondition of postcolonial state-led capitalist industrialization under the auspices of Suharto’s New Order. My dissertation work makes important contributions to international relations theory, revolution theory and Indonesian historiography by showing how existing methodological internalist conceptions of revolution in general and the Indonesian revolution in particular perform a ‘violence of abstraction’ against the specificities of state formation in Indonesia and southeast Asia, and by suggesting a non-internalist framework through which to write truly global histories of decolonisation and nation-state formation in the region. I have published in academic journals such as Review of African Political Economy, Philosophy and Global Affairs, International Critical Thought, and Monthly Review.