I am a comparative political scientist by training who favors inductive research to shed light on micro-level, causal mechanisms. In particular, much of my work accounts for the thickness of processes through which disparate groups overcome collective action problems to mobilize violently or politically (or both). I have striven to integrate intimate area knowledge with explicit disciplinal concerns, such as the generation of new hypotheses or the disconfirmation of existing explanations. This type of qualitative, fieldwork-based research has been pursued in different parts of Indonesia for more than twenty years. Predicated on this grounded research, I have written books on ethnic violence, infrastructure development and democracy on Indonesia. A newer comparative project on rice politics has also brought me to the field in the Philippines and Malaysia.