Dr. Rakhmat Hidayat

Dr. Rakhmat Hidayat is an Associate Professor at the Department of Sociology, State University of Jakarta, Indonesia, and currently a Visiting Fellow in the SDGs Fellowship at the Department of Southeast Asian Studies, University of Bonn. He obtained his PhD from Université Lumière Lyon 2 (France) and completed a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Tampere (Finland). His research focuses on the sociology of ethnicity and Indigenous peoples in Indonesia.

Dr. Hidayat has held several international academic appointments, including as a Fulbright Visiting Scholar at the University of Wisconsin–Madison (2021), where he conducted research on American Indians in the Menominee reservation; a visiting researcher at the Academy of Korean Studies on Korean Shamanism; and as visiting professor at the University of Foggia (2020), University of Torino (2021, 2023), University of Seoul (2022), University of Salerno (2024).

He has been awarded multiple prestigious fellowships, including the Freedom of Religion and Belief (FoRB) Fellowship (CRCS, Universitas Gadjah Mada, 2020), Asia Peace Innovators Forum (Salzburg Global Seminar, 2020), Interfaith Fellowship SEA-AIR (2019), Global Scholars Academy (Harvard Law School, 2022), and the KAICIID Interfaith Dialogue Fellowship (2022). He was also a MOFA Taiwan Fellow (2023) affiliated with the Department of Anthropology, National Taiwan University, where he studied Indigenous communities in Taiwan as a comparative lens for Indonesia.

Alongside his academic work, Dr. Hidayat is actively engaged in advocacy networks such as the Indonesian Scholars Network on Freedom of Religion or Belief (ISFoRB) and serves on the advisory council of the Association of Teacher Education. His scholarship and activism consistently bridge academia with social movements, particularly in defending Indigenous rights and advancing interfaith dialogue.