In times of crisis, civil disobedience becomes not only legitimate but necessary. As Arendt understood, it is not a threat to democracy but one of the essential conditions for its renewal. Ultimately, ...

When Indonesian parliamentarians wanted to curtail the powers of the Corruption Eradication Commission (KPK), social media was suddenly awash with messages suggesting that the KPK was full of ...

The collapse of the New Order during the Asian financial crisis paved the way for many political and economic reforms in Indonesia. In exchange for development aid, multilateral donor agencies such as ...

Still from the film Prologue of a nation by Bibi Fadlalla in the exhibition Our Colonial Inheritance/ Bibi Fadlalla reproduced with permission Amsterdam ...

Pro-reformasi demonstrators in Solo, May 1998 / Sunaryo Haryo Bayu, Solopos, 1998. Hearing about my mother's experiences in May 1998 became a pivotal moment that has shaped my life. ‘Every second, I ...

Over half of the world’s palm oil supplies are sourced from Indonesia, where monocrop oil palm plantations today cover an estimated 16.38 million hectares of land. The expansion of oil palm monocrops ...

In 2021 the West Sumatran photographer Muhammad Fadli and journalist Fatris MF, published an innovative documentary project called The Banda Journal. Through photography, textual narratives and film, ...

Dido Michielsen’s remarkable novel, Lichter dan Ik (Lighter than Me, translated into Indonesian as Lebih putih Dariku) was first published in 2019. It tells the fictional story of an Indonesian woman, ...

In 1778 the Bataviaasch Genootschap voor Kunsten en Wetenschappen or Batavian Society of Arts and Sciences was established in Batavia, now Jakarta. The exclusively male Board of Directors, was ...

In the past two years race and racism has come to the forefront of political and social debate in many countries, including Indonesia. America’s #BlackLivesMatter movement resonated globally and ...

In the early 2000s, I was working as a volunteer for an NGO in Jakarta, assisting West Papuan students in Java and Bali in their quest for legal justice. These efforts followed several cases of human ...

Pasung is the practice of restraining people – particularly individuals with severe mental illness – using wooden blocks and chains, or confining them in a small room, in order to limit their freedom ...