Step Vaessen was based as a correspondent in Jakarta from 1997 until 2019. She arrived when president Soeharto was still firmly in power but would soon witness one of the most turbulent transformations to democracy seen in recent history.
The rapid expansion of oil palm plantations in Indonesia has numerous conflicts between rural communities and companies over (compensation for) access to land. In March 2019 KITLV started a research project to study these conflicts, with the aim to support rural communities, local authorities and the palm oil industries to find more effective ways to resolve these conflicts
In 1961, filmmaker Robert Gardner organized the Harvard Peabody Expedition* to Netherlands New Guinea (current day West Papua). Funded by the Dutch colonial government and private donations,
The European Association for Southeast Asian Studies (EuroSEAS) will hold its 11th conference at the Palacký University in Olomouc, Czech Republic from 7-10 September 2021. As an international
Printed Islamic booklets disclose important sources for Africa Indian Ocean intellectual history, ones that scholarship has neglected but are still known by local people.
The end of authoritarian rule in 1998 ushered in an exhilarating but unsettled period of democratization in Indonesia. A more open political climate converged with a rapidly changing media landscape
In this webinar, Chelsea Schields will discuss her current book project, Offshore Attachments: Oil, Intimacy and the End of Empire, which tells the unlikely story of how the rise of oil and the end
The international symposium Inward Outward brings together archival practitioners, artists, academics, and researchers to explore the status of moving image and sound archives as they intertwine with questions of coloniality, identity and race.
Land tenure issues in Timor-Leste are complex and deeply shaped by the nation’s history. In this presentation Bernardo Almeida will summarize the main findings of his PhD thesis where he, taking an insider’s perspective, studies the development of the Timorese formal land tenure system from independence in 2002 to 2018.
An online book talk by Professor Nira Wickramasinghe (Leiden University), author of Slave in a Palanquin: Colonial Servitude and Resistance in Sri Lanka, organised by the Leiden Centre for Indian Ocean Studies
