The International People’s Tribunal addressed the many forms of violence during the period of the massacres of 1965–1966 in Indonesia. It was held in The Hague, The Netherlands, in November 2015, to commemorate fifty years since the killings began. The Tribunal, as a people’s court, holds no jurisdiction and was an attempt to achieve symbolic justice for the crimes of 1965. This book offers new and previously unpublished insights into the types of crimes committed in the 1965 genocide and how these crimes were prosecuted at the International People’s Tribunal for 1965. Divided thematically, each chapter analyses a different crime – enslavement, sexual violence, torture – perpetrated during the Indonesian killings. The contributions consider either general patterns across Indonesia or a particular region of the archipelago. The book reflects on how crimes were charged at the International People’s Tribunal for 1965 and focuses on questions relating to the place of people’s tribunals in truth-seeking and justice claims, and the prospective for transitional justice in contemporary Indonesia. Positioning the events in Indonesia in 1965 within the broader scope of comparative genocide studies, the book is an original and timely contribution to knowledge about the dynamics of the Indonesian killings. It will be of interest to academics in the field of Asian studies, in particular Southeast Asia, Genocide Studies, Criminology and Criminal Justice and Transitional Justice Studies.

This collection of essays by Indonesian and foreign contributors offers new and highly original analyses of the mass violence in Indonesia which began in 1965 and its aftermath. Fifty years on from one the largest genocides of the twentieth century, they probe the causes, dynamics and legacies of this violence through the use of a wide range of sources and different scholarly lenses. Chapter 12 of this book is available open access under a CC BY 4.0 license at link.springer.com.

This book examines the theme of privatised violence in different political settings by focusing on the Indonesian case. It argues that the persistence of privatised violence is not solely related to the historical formation of the institutions of state power and authority; it is also intricately related to predatory forms of capitalist development. Within such contexts, privatised violence is not an obstruction, but instrumental for the capital accumulation process, constituting a state of disorder. The book contributes to understanding not only Indonesia’s privatised violence but also the nature of Indonesian politics and the state.

This is the first book to analyse how civil society tribunals implement and develop international law. With multi-disciplinary contributions covering tribunals in Europe, Latin America and Asia, this edited collection will interest scholars of law, criminology, human rights, politics, sociology, anthropology and international relations.

'Local Responses to Global Challenges in Southeast Asia — A Transregional Studies Reader' is a collection of multidisciplinary essays, predominantly derived from papers presented at EuroSEAS 2019, the leading academic conference on Southeast Asian Studies, hosted by Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. It brings together a variety of scholars from Southeast Asia, Europe and North America, allowing for multiple flows and directionalities of knowledge productions and exchanges, be it between the Global South and North as well as within the Global South. The reader presents empirically-oriented, theoretically grounded analyses of local responses to global challenges such as knowledge-productions; notions and practices of building diverse communities; neo-populisms and contentious politics; resources and sustainability; urbanization; labor, livelihoods and mobilities. Each section starts with an introduction reviewing the state of the art. Authors will take cue from a transregional perspective understood as a distinct and alternative perspective on multi-lingual and transcultural spaces of contact, exchange and transfer. This includes a contextualization of phenomena in terms of diverse (cross) linkages and entanglements, including motilities on different scales, i.e. ranging from the local, regional to national and/or global levels. Container-based notions of place and space are addressed in a critical manner, where space and area are understood as notions beyond established systems of ordering and meta-geographies. A key goal is to allow for a consistent conceptual advancement of New Area Studies, which are critical, decentred, decolonial, diversified, and multi-disciplinary in nature.

People’s Tribunals are independent, peaceful, grassroots movements, created by members of civil society, to address impunity that is associated with ongoing or past atrocities. As such, they offer society an alternative history and create a space for healing and reconciliation to take place that may otherwise be stifled by political agendas and legal technicalities. Since the 1960’s, People’s Tribunals have grown and developed to address many kinds of situations, from genocide to environmental degradation. This book presents a balance of academic and practitioner perspectives on People’s Tribunals. It explores key questions relating to their formation and roles and discusses what they can offer to victims and survivors. The volume provides an introduction to the subject, theoretically informed discussion reflecting different perspectives, and a range of contributions focusing on different types of People’s Tribunals and various aspects of their operation. The authors analyse advantages and disadvantages of these movements in a variety of contexts. The impact and contribution they have in the international criminal law and international human rights context is also discussed. The book will be welcomed by those interested in international criminal law, human rights, environmental justice, transitional justice and international relations.

This book investigates the importance of gender and resistance to silences and denials concerning human rights abuses and historical injustices in narratives on transnational memories of three violent conflicts in Indonesia. Transnational memories of violent conflicts travel abroad with politicians, postcolonial migrants and refugees. Starting with the Japanese occupation of Indonesia (1942–1945), the war of independence (1945–1949) and the genocide of 1965, the volume analyses narratives in Dutch and Indonesian novels in relation to social and political narratives (1942–2015). By focusing on gender and resistance from both Indonesian and Dutch, transnational and global perspectives, the author provides new perspectives on memories of the conflicts that are relevant to research on transitional justice and memory politics.

Detention camps in Asia have held hundreds of thousands of people – political dissidents, prisoners of war, and civilian populations. This volume examines why states detain, the conditions of detention, and the effects of detention systems on society as a whole.

Does the proliferation of post-atrocity remedies over the past 25-plus years—the human rights movement, reparations and other justice schemes, and memorials and counter-memorials—suggest promising alternatives to retributive criminal proceedings? Or does it mean that very little so far is working? This collection of essays, written by scholars with ties to Bangladesh, Bulgaria, Canada, Ghana, Indonesia, Iraq, and the United States, argues that a new post-atrocity framework is taking root. In search for a more reliably favorable post-atrocity succession, the volume’s contributors weigh the merits of practices circumventing the state, whose anemic performance has failed to manage large-scale violence and restore confidence in social stability and security. This ascendant phase includes citizen activism, historical dialogues, and witnesses’ accounts. Into the breach where state actors prevailed, citizens “from below” are seizing opportunities for independent intervention. While all transitional frameworks are vulnerable, this volume provides a thoughtful, requisite evaluation of citizen activism for scholars, non-governmental organization practitioners, government and think-tank policymakers, and teachers at all levels.

In Infrastructures of Impunity Elizabeth F. Drexler argues that the creation and persistence of impunity for the perpetrators of the Cold War Indonesian genocide (1965–66) is not only a legal status but also a cultural and social process. Impunity for the initial killings and for subsequent acts of political violence has many elements: bureaucratic, military, legal, political, educational, and affective. Although these elements do not always work at once—at times some are dormant while others are ascendant—together they can be described as a unified entity, a dynamic infrastructure, whose existence explains the persistence of impunity. For instance, truth telling, a first step in many responses to state violence, did not undermine the infrastructure but instead bent to it. Creative and artistic responses to revelations about the past, however, have begun to undermine the infrastructure by countering its temporality, affect, and social stigmatization and demonstrating its contingency and specific actions, policies, and processes that would begin to dismantle it. Drexler contends that an infrastructure of impunity could take hold in an established democracy.