The Bureaucratisation of Islam and its Socio-Legal Dimensions in Southeast Asia: Outlines of a Collaborative Research Project

In this talk, Dominik Mueller will present the conceptual framework of a newly established collaborative research project studying "The Bureaucratisation of Islam and its Socio-Legal Dimensions in Southeast Asia". It investigates contemporary dynamics of Islamic bureaucratisation with an analytic focus on the state's exercise of classificatory power and its workings on the micro-level. The project views the bureaucratisation of Islam in Southeast Asia not just as an empirical fact to be examined in singular national contexts, but aims at theorising its underlying patterns from a comparative perspective.

Dominik M. Mueller is Director of the Junior Research Group "The Bureaucratisation of Islam and its Socio-Legal Dimensions in Southeast Asia" at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology, funded by the German Research Foundation’s prestigious Emmy Noether Programme. After obtaining his PhD at Goethe-University Frankfurt in 2012, he was a Post-Doctoral Fellow in Political and Legal Anthropology in Frankfurt (2012-2016) and held visiting positions at Stanford University (2013), the University of Brunei Darussalam (2014), St Antony's College, University of Oxford (2015), and the National University of Singapore (2016).