About

Teri Caraway is a faculty member in the Department of Political Science at the University of Minnesota. Her research focuses on the comparative political economy of labor, Southeast Asian politics, transnational labor issues, gender, and comparative politics. She is involved in the creation and transmission of knowledge about politics and political science, promoting original research, creative teaching, and public service. Her work contributes to understanding labor dynamics within a comparative framework, with particular attention to Southeast Asia and gender-related issues.

Research topics

• Sociology
• Political Science
• Political economy
• Law
• History
• Philosophy
• Epistemology

Selected publications

• Editorial

  Global Labour Journal · 2025-05-31

  editorialOpen access

  This issue represents the last to which Claire Ceruti, our managing editor, will contribute.We want to thank Claire wholeheartedly for the highly professional work she has done in the past three

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Organized Labor in Southeast Asia

  Cambridge University Press eBooks · 2023-01-31 · 12 citations

  book1st authorCorresponding

  This Element analyzes the economic and political forces behind the political marginalization of working-class organizations in the region. It traces the roots of labor exclusion to the geopolitics of the early postwar period when many governments rolled back the left and established labor control regimes that prevented the reemergence of working-class movements. This Element also examines the economic and political dynamics that perpetuated labor's containment in some countries and that produced a resurgence of labor mobilization in others in the 21st century. It also explains why democratization has had mixed effects on organized labor in the region and analyzes three distinctive “anatomies of contention” of Southeast Asia's feistiest labor movements in Cambodia, Indonesia, and Vietnam.

  PublisherDOI

• Workers and democracy: The Indonesian labour movement 1949–1957 By John Ingleson. Singapore University Press and University of Hawai'i Press, 2022. 392 pages. Cloth, $68.00 USD, ISBN: 978-0824893606.

  International Journal of Asian Studies · 2023-05-23

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Workers and democracy: The Indonesian labour movement 1949–1957 By John Ingleson. Singapore University Press and University of Hawai'i Press, 2022. 392 pages. Cloth, $68.00 USD, ISBN: 978-0824893606. - Volume 21 Issue 1

  PublisherDOI

• Organised Labour and Autocratisation in Southeast Asia

  2023-02-17 · 1 citations

  book-chapterOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  This chapter analyses organised labour's varying responses to autocratisation in the three countries in the region where the labour movement was in a comparatively strong position to resist it: Cambodia, Indonesia, and Myanmar. In Cambodia and Indonesia, organised labour did not push back strongly against autocratisation, but Myanmar's comparatively young and small labour movement did. The chapter finds that existing theories of civil society resistance to autocratisation cannot explain these varied responses and argues that the pace of autocratisation – incremental versus sudden – is an important overlooked dimension that shapes how organised labour responds to autocratisation. The pace of autocratisation affects both threat perceptions and the ability of autocratisers to preemptively disorganise opponents. Organised labour is more likely to mobilise against autocratisation when union leaders realise that autocratisation is underway, perceive it to be a threat, and unions have not been preemptively weakened. Only Myanmar, where autocratisation happened rapidly, meets these three conditions. In Indonesia, the creeping pace of autocratisation dulled labour's perception of threat, whereas in Cambodia, the government deftly and sequentially disorganised civil society. Consequently, neither labour movement mounted significant resistance to autocratisation.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Labor Standards and Labor Market Flexibility in East Asia

  Palgrave Readers in Economics · 2022-01-01 · 2 citations

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Labor’s reversal of fortune: contentious politics and executive aggrandizement in Indonesia

  Social movement studies · 2021 · 15 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Political Science
  • Sociology
  • Political economy

  Before the presidency of President Joko Widodo (2014 – present), Indonesia’s small but feisty labor movement was remarkably successful in defeating government policies that it opposed and winning pro-labor policies. Labor’s success, however, was quickly reversed after Joko Widodo became president. I argue that social movement and contentious politics scholarship provides insufficient analytic leverage to explain labor’s sudden reversal of fate. The budding literature on democratic backsliding, which analyzes the incremental steps through which democracies become less democratic, provides critical insights to understanding labor’s changing fortunes. This broader regime context of executive aggrandizement, not deficiencies in the labor movement or a mere closing of the political opportunity structure, explains both the rapidity and the depth of labor’s reversal of fortune since 2014.

  PublisherDOI

• Indonesia : Balancing business – Centre tricontinental

  2021-12-01

  articleSenior author

  The presidential elections this time around are a big deal not only for business. They are also a big deal for Indonesia's unions, who have taken sides in the presidential race. Said Iqbal, the…

  Publisher

• Conclusion

  Cambridge University Press eBooks · 2020-03-02

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  This chapter provides a detailed account of the backlash against unions in Jokowi's first term in office and some reflections on the lessons that can be learned from the Indonesian case. These lessons include the importance of geographic and institutional factors in allowing the labor movement to mobilize on a massive scale despite its low density and high levels of fragmentation, the role of the broader regime context in creating a political climate conducive for advancing a labor agenda through street politics, and the conditions under which decentralization can offer new opportunities for unions to pursue prolabor policies at the local level. However, they also include the ways in which the Indonesian labor movement's diffuse, networked forms of power constitute a distinctive type of unionism, one that can compensate for weakness on classic measures of union strength.

  PublisherDOI

• ROUNDTABLE ON TERI L. CARAWAY'S “DE-THAKSINIZING THAILAND: THE LIMITS OF INSTITUTIONAL DESIGN” – TERI L. CARAWAY RESPONDS

  Journal of East Asian Studies · 2020-11-01

  article1st authorCorresponding

  An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content.

  PublisherDOI

• Shifting to Offense

  Cambridge University Press eBooks · 2020-03-02

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  This chapter focuses on the Indonesian labor movement's increasingly assertive and offensive posture in the second decade after Suharto's fall. At the national level, unions learned to lobby more effectively, generate favorable media attention, and leverage judicial institutions to complement street mobilization. They played a central role in the passage of a groundbreaking social security law. They made even greater strides at the local level, where they embarked on an unprecedented round of mobilizations around wages. Having consolidated their networks and their position on the wage councils, they transformed them into institutions that delivered sustained real wage gains. In doing so, they exploited the opportunities presented by direct local and provincial executive elections, leveraging electoral cycles, and harnessing regional patterns of wage-setting to win massive gains. Massive protests in several core industrial areas and stronger coordination among national confederations also allowed unions to nationalize local conflicts. Even after this support vanished, unions in some parts of Indonesia sustained substantial real minimum wage increases through their local organizing efforts.

  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Michele Ford

  University of Sydney

  21 shared

• Stephanie J. Rickard

  London School of Economics and Political Science

  6 shared

• Mark Anner

  Pennsylvania State University

  5 shared

• Oanh Nguyen

  Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (United States)

  4 shared

• María Lorena Cook

  Cornell University

  2 shared

• Michele Ford

  2 shared

• Stephen Crowley

  1 shared

• Stephen Crowley

  Boise State University

  1 shared