Menchik Speaks at NYU on Indonesia’s Upcoming Election

Jeremy Menchik, Assistant Professor of International Relations at the Fredrick S. Pardee School of Global Studies at Boston University, spoke as part of a September 17, 2018 discussion hosted by the New York Southeast Asia Network on the 2018-2019 elections in Indonesia and Malaysia. 

The discussion, entitled “The Power and Perils of Elections: Indonesia and Malaysia in 2018-19,” also featured University of Albany Professor Meredith Weiss.

Menchik and Weiss discussed how Malaysia and Indonesia have been rocked by election politics in recent months including the unprecedented opposition victory in Malaysia’s May 2018 election, and the decision by Indonesian President Joko Widodo to choose a hard line conservative cleric as his Vice President candidate for the country’s April 2019 elections.

The discussion explored what explains these striking developments as well as what these elections mean for the future of the economy, civil liberties, democracy, and identity in these important Southeast Asian states.

Jeremy Menchik’s research interests include comparative politics, religion and politics, Southeast Asia, and the Middle East. His first book, Islam and Democracy in Indonesia: Tolerance without Liberalism (Cambridge University Press, 2016) explains the meaning of tolerance to the world’s largest Islamic organizations and was the winner of the 2017 International Studies Association award for the best book on religion and international relations. He has received numerous awards and fellowships for teaching and research, and his work has appeared in the academic journals Comparative Studies in Society and History, Comparative Politics, International Studies Review, Politics and Religion, and South East Asia Research as well as in The New York Times, The New York Review of Books, The Washington Post, Christian Science Monitor, The Wall Street Journal, and USA Today.

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