Vedi R. Hadiz

Vedi R. Hadiz is an Indonesian political sociologist. He is known for research on the political economy of development, oligarchic power, and the relationship between religion and politics, with a particular focus on Indonesia and comparative cases in Southeast Asia and the Middle East.

He is Professor of Asian Studies at the Asia Institute and a Redmond Barry Distinguished Professor at the University of Melbourne. He has held senior leadership roles at the university, including Director of the Asia Institute.

Early life and education Hadiz studied at the University of Indonesia and completed a PhD at Murdoch University in 1996.

Research Hadiz's research has explored the organisation and reproduction of political and economic power in post-authoritarian contexts. The idea that institutional reforms—including decentralisation initiatives that are frequently marketed as "good governance"—should be examined as part of larger social power dynamics rather than as essentially technical policy design is a recurrent theme in published scholarly discussions of his work.

His book Localising Power in Post-Authoritarian Indonesia: A Southeast Asia Perspective (2010) develops this argument through case-based analysis of local political dynamics after the fall of Indonesia’s New Order regime. In a review in Social Forces, the book’s main contribution is described as a critique of “technical” understandings of decentralisation that overlook entrenched power relations and the persistence of pre-reform political forces after 1998. A review in Bijdragen tot de Taal-,Land- en Volkenkunde discusses the book’s argument that local political competition and institutional change can reproduce older elite configurations rather than necessarily displacing them.

Hadiz is also known for work on oligarchy and political economy in Indonesia, including co-authored research on the reorganisation of elite power after the fall of Suharto. A review of Reorganising Power in Indonesia: The Politics of Oligarchy in an Age of Markets (2004, with Richard Robison) in International Relations of the Asia-Pacific (Oxford Academic) treats the book as a major intervention in debates about Indonesia’s post-authoritarian political economy.

A later strand of his scholarship compares trajectories of Islamic politics and populism across regions. In a review, Islamic Populism in Indonesia and the Middle East (2015) is described as a comparative study of Islamist mobilisation across Indonesia and selected Middle Eastern cases, emphasising political-economic and historical explanations over ideological accounts.

Political economy and oligarchy Reorganising Power in Indonesia has been viewed as an intervention in discussions on post-authoritarian political economy in reviews and subsequent scholarly discourse, emphasising how entrenched politico-business interests can shape political and market institutions rather than displacing them.

In Indonesian studies, the Hadiz and Robison "oligarchy" approach has been the subject of much discussion. In a symposium titled "Beyond Oligarchy?" published in the journal Indonesia, competing conceptualisations of oligarchy and material inequality in Indonesian politics and society were discussed. More recent scholarly commentary has examined the "oligarchy framework" as a significant point of reference in discussions concerning the relationship between political power and economic resources (the "wealth-rulership nexus") in various Indonesian institutions.

Decentralisation, state reform, and local power Another strand in Hadiz’s work concerns the political sociology of state reform, especially decentralisation. Reviews have highlighted Localising Power in Post-Authoritarian Indonesia as a critique of donor- and policy-driven understandings of decentralisation and as an account emphasising the persistence and reconfiguration of entrenched political forces in local politics after 1998. Reviews in other journals have discussed the book in connection with wider debates on populism and political Islam. Selected works Books

Edited volumes