Research Projects

This project problematises the assumed gender-neutral conception of democratic consolidation and seeks to reinterpret the notion of democratic consolidation from a feminist lens. It argues that the mainstream concept of democratic consolidation and its measurements have been constructed and modelled based on men’s activities and domination in political spaces.  

The format of this project’s output is a monograph thesis, comprised of 4-5 substantive chapters excluding the introduction, literature review and conclusion chapters. I currently have two working papers based on some of my chapters: 

• A Gendered Critique of the Two-Turnover Test as an Indicator of Democratic Consolidation

This paper has been presented at the 2025 PSA Annual Conference and the 2025 ECPR Joint Sessions, as well as an internal work-in-progress seminar in the Department of Government, University of Essex. It was recently nominated for the 2025 ECPR Rudolf Wildenmann Prize.

• Protecting Institutions, Sidelining Inclusion? A Feminist Rethinking of Democratic Consolidation's Behavioural Dimension

This paper will be presented at the upcoming Dated Hardware? Rethinking Paradigms, Paradoxes and Assumptions in Democracy Research Workshop hosted by the Polish Academy of Sciences in Vienna. 

Please email me for the full drafts. 

Aside from my PhD, I am trying to make sense of Indonesians’ conceptions of democracy and resistance against autocratisation. Given the constraints of time, this is not yet a comprehensive project and my analyses are preliminary. The LSE Southeast Asia Centre, The Diplomat and East Asia Forum recently published some of my thoughts:

• Denial of Democratic Agency as an Authoritarian Tactic: Reflections from Indonesia

• Contesting Prabowo Subianto’s Polite Democracy

• Indonesian Democracy Takes Another Hit

You can read my other publications on Indonesian democracy here.

This project seeks to understand the challenges that media workers in Southeast Asia face and how they navigate them. While mass surveys and large-scale indices have examined the overarching trends in press freedom, they often gloss over the fact that experiences among media workers may vary across race, gender, and specific geographic locations even among those within the same country, or that there are commonalities which transcend borders.

I contributed to the project from August 2021 to May 2022, and I was the lead author of the project’s first and second research reports. View the reports here:

• Envisioning Media Freedom and Independence: Narratives from Southeast Asia

• Beyond the Absence of Killing and Arrests