David Bourchier was born in Australia and grew up in Sri Lanka, the Soviet Union and Canberra. He studied at Flinders, Murdoch and Monash Universities graduating in politics in 1996. His main academic interest is in the politics of Indonesia and Southeast Asia. He has taught courses on Asian politics and Indonesian language at Flinders University, RMIT, Murdoch University. He has been at UWA since 1998, where he has taught several units relating to modern Indonesia and Southeast Asia as well as all levels of Indonesian.

The Politics of Islamic creationism

Ideology in post-authoritarian Indonesia

David has written on many aspects of Indonesian society and politics, with publications on law, labour, ideology, international relations, human rights and the military. Publications include "Habibie's Interregnum: Reformasi, Elections, Regionalism and the Struggle for Power" in Chris Manning and Peter van Diermen (eds) Indonesia in Transition: Social Aspects of Reformasi and Crisis (ISEAS, Singapore, 2000); "Conservative Political Ideology In Indonesia: A Fourth Wave?" in Lloyd Grayson and Luke Shannon (eds) Indonesia Today: Challenges of History (ISEAS, Singapore, 2001); and, together with Hamish McDonald, Desmond Ball, James Dunn, Gerry van Klinken, Douglas Kammen and Richard Tanter, Masters of Terror: Indonesia's Military and Violence in East Timor in 1999 (Australian National University, Canberra, 2002)

Research on law and politics led to publications including "The romance of adat in the Indonesian political imagination and the current revival” in Jamie Davidson and David Henley (eds) The Revival of Tradition in Indonesian Politics: The deployment of adat from colonialism to indigenism, Routledge, London and New York (2007) and “Positivism and Romanticism in Indonesian Legal Thought” in Timothy Lindsey (ed) Indonesia Law and Society, The Federation Press, Sydney (2008).

Research on ideology has been published in several chapters and articles, the most recent being "Two Decades of Ideological Contestation in Indonesia: From Democratic Cosmopolitanism to Religious Nationalism" in Journal of Contemporary Asia, DOI: 10.1080/00472336.2019.1590620 and “Organicism in Indonesian political thought” in Megan Thomas, Murad Idris and Liegh Jenco (eds) The Oxford Handbook of Comparative Political Theory, Oxford University Press. Online December 2019. Print March 2020.  10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190253752.013.39

His books include (with John Legge) Democracy in Indonesia, 1950s and 1990s; (with Vedi Hadiz) Indonesian Society and Politics: A Reader (Routledge-Curzon, London and New York, 2003) as well as the sole authored Dynamics of Dissent in Indonesia (Equinox, Jakarta 2010) and Illiberal Democracy in Indonesia: The idea of the family state (Routledge, London and New York, 2015).

Google Scholar citations as of December 2019: