Kris Ruijgrok is a political scientist working as a post-doctoral researcher at KITLV on the Cybertroops in South-East Asia project. This research project studies comparatively how social media-based public opinion manipulation is organized in Thailand, the Philippines and Indonesia. To do so, the project brings together an interdisciplinary group of Dutch and South East Asian researchers to conduct computational social media analysis, digital ethnography, and fieldwork. 

Ruijgrok also works as an Assistant Professor at the University of Amsterdam’s political science department. His research revolves around the interaction between digital technology, mobilization and on- and offline repression, with a regional focus on India and South-East Asia. For his PhD research (2018, UvA), he used  a mixed methods approach, including in-depth qualitative fieldwork in Malaysia, to investigate the role of digital technologies in anti-government protest under authoritarian rule. In 2020, as a research fellow with the Open Technology Fund, he conducted a 12-month mixed methods research project on the politics behind internet shutdowns in India. 

Selected Publications

Ruijgrok, Kris, & Marcus Michaelsen, ‘Autocracy’s long reach: Explaining host country influences on transnational repression’, Democratization, 2024.  

Ruijgrok, Kris, ‘The authoritarian practice of issuing internet shutdowns in India: The Bharatiya Janata Party’s direct and indirect responsibility‘,  Democratization, 2022. 

Ruijgrok, Kris, Internet use and protest in Malaysia and other authoritarian regimes: Challenging information scarcity. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2021. 

Ruijgrok, Kris, ‘Illusion of control: How internet use increases anti-regime sentiment in authoritarian regimes’, Contemporary Politics 27-3, pp. 247-270, 2020. 

Ruijgrok, Kris, Marlies Glasius, Meta de Lange, Jos Bartman, Emanuela Dalmasso, Adele Del Sordi, Aofei Lv and Marcus Michaelsen, Research, ethics and risk in the authoritarian field. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018. 

Ruijgrok, Kris, 'From the web to the streets: Internet and protests in authoritarian regimes', Democratization 24-30, pp. 498-520, 2017.