PhD Scholarship Vacancies in The Social Sciences at Universities in The Netherlands

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PhD Scholarship Vacancies in The Social Sciences at Universities in The Netherlands

From Clients to Citizens? aims to understand the impact of Indonesia’s democratization process on everyday state- citizen interaction: to what extent is Indonesia’s democratic transition changing the way ordinary Indonesians relate to the state in terms of citizenship? How can we explain both the changes and the continuities?

The program’s seven sub-studies aim to capture the changing norms, practices and discursive strategies that citizens adopt vis-à-vis powerholders as they focus on key citizenship struggles in contemporary Indonesia – such as the anti-corruption mobilization and the campaigns to institute Islamic morality, to secure land rights, to receive adequate public services and to realize social security reform – see the descriptions of the subprojects.

From Clients to Citizens? aims to make three major contributions to a better understanding of democratization and the articulation of citizenship in Indonesia. Firstly, as citizenship is generally studied in the context of a liberal, high-capacity welfare state, this project aims to improve our understanding of how democratic citizenship takes shape in the context of a weakly institutionalized, post-colonial state. For that reason this program focuses on the relationship between citizenship, political clientelism and the institutionalization of the rule of law – in our eyes a vital issue yet largely ignored in the literature on citizenship. We need to understand under what circumstances clientelistic practices may be displaced by successful citizenship claims. Secondly, this program aims to study how historical trajectories of state formation feed into contemporary forms of state-citizen interaction. It examines to what extent currently prevailing norms of citizenship can be traced back to older (cultural) notions of authority and political legitimacy. Thirdly, this project aims to improve our understanding of differences in political practices and attitudes within Indonesia. Using in a comparative way the contrasts between (and within) greater Jakarta, South Sulawesi and Lampung, this program aims to understand how regional differences – for example in terms of the size of the informal economy, the character of local trust networks, a history of indirect rule or the regulatory capacity of the state – affects the strategies and attitudes that citizens adopt vis-à-vis powerholders. To address these questions From Clients to Citizens? engages in both historical and ethnographic studies of everyday interactions between citizens, state institutions and(political) intermediaries.

This four-year long research project (2012-2016) is a collaboration between KITLV, Universitas Gadja Madah, University of Amsterdam and Leiden University. The project is funded by the KNAW More

Deadline for submitting Application : 10 August 2012