Saskia Schäfer

I study a question that keeps coming up in different forms: when institutions promise „rights,“ „democracy,“ or „order,“ who actually decides what those words mean — and who gets left out? I’ve traced this in courts and constitutions across Indonesia and Malaysia, in how „democracy“ itself gets used to justify resource extraction, and increasingly in Germany, where I now research civic education and responses to rising antisemitism and racism.

My path here started with an M.A. spanning Southeast Asian Studies, Political Science, and German Literature, a Dr. phil. from the Otto Suhr Institute at Freie Universität Berlin, and postdoctoral fellowships at Columbia University (2013–2015) and the Chinese University of Hong Kong (2016).

From 2018 to 2025, I led the research group Secularity, Islam, and Democracy in Indonesia and Turkey. Since 2025, I have been leading a research group on civic education and religion at Humboldt University. Both groups were funded by the VolkswagenStiftung, together securing €2.4 million in competitive funding.

My book, Mobilizing Mainstream Islam (Cornell University Press, 2026), explains the rise and transformation of religious nationalism in post-Suharto Indonesia.

I also serve on the boards of the German Journal of Comparative Politics (ZfVP), the Annual Review for the Sciences of the Democracies, and Muslim Politics Review.