Indonesians have forgotten the genocidal violence of 1965. Or have they? In this town in Central Java, locals and officials recently gathered for a remarkable commemorative service to the 1965 dead. Gerry van Klinken investigates. "Every time I visit Indonesia...
On the 13th of March, historian Cees Fasseur passed away in a Leiden hospital at the age of 77. We lost an important historian and a friend.As a colonial historian, Fasseur carried out ground-breaking research on the Cultivation System in nineteenth century...
What’s not to love about a big Indonesian wedding? Food, socialization, and the chance to pull on your best kebaya. But, writes Jacqueline Hicks, for Indonesia’s political and economic elites, they are much more than that....
(Also in Dutch) Leiden University Libraries has started the project Maps in the Crowd. Nearly 7,000 digitized maps of the Dutch East Indies will be unlocked with help from visitors, students and others who are interested...
Het krijgt in Nederland nog weinig aandacht, maar wat in New Delhi begon als een studentenprotest is uitgelopen op een dagenlange grote demonstratie voor vrijheid van meningsuiting. Ward Berenschot (KITLV), politicoloog en India-kenner...
As from 1 February Adriaan Bedner is the new KITLV professor (by special appointment) of Law and Society in Indonesia at the Van Vollenhoven Institute (VVI), ...
On 5 January 1949, the Sumatran city of Rengat was occupied by Dutch paratroopers, at the cost of large numbers of civilian casualties. NRC Handelsblad published a report on this massacre written by KITLV...
This weekend Anne-Lot Hoek reports for NRC Handelsblad and Reporter Radio KRO-NCRV about the forgotten bloodbath in Rengat, Sumatra. The idea was to find out what happened. But what happened was not what struck her most. Every year a memorial service ...
'Informal Politics Is Real Politics; A Research Blog on the Machinations of Power in Asia and beyond'. By Ward Berenschot. How do governments actually work? Informal politics – the ways in which people draw on personal ...
Earthquakes resulting from the extraction of natural gas for decades on end are now taking a heavy toll on the people of Groningen in the north of Holland. Typically, according to Willem van der Molen, the Dutch government reacts to the demand...