Chris Chaplin is a postdoctoral researcher at the Royal Netherlands Institute of Southeast Asian and Caribbean Studies (KITLV), where he is investigating the influence of conservative Islamic movements on ideas of citizenship and civic activism within Indonesian society. His research is part of the KITLV program ‘From Clients to Citizens? Emerging Citizenship in Democratizing Indonesia’.

Chris has spent seven years living in Indonesia, researching and consulting for a number of international development institutions and human rights NGOs on issues of village development, capacity-building, elections, and security sector reform, and he has been fortunate enough to have spent extensive time living in Java, Sulawesi and West Papua. Prior to joining the KITLV, Chris completed his PhD concerning the dynamics of the Salafi Islamic movement in Yogyakarta, Indonesia, at the Department of Sociology, University of Cambridge.