New Research on the 1965 Killings: Implications for Contemporary Indonesia: Panel discussion and launch of ‘the Army and the Indonesian Genocide: Mechanics of Mass Murder’ by Dr Jess Melvin

At this seminar, Dr Jess Melvin, Professor Vedi Hadiz, Associate Professor Kate McGregor and Dr Ken Setiawan discussed new research on the 1965 killings and their implication for understanding contemporary Indonesia.

For the past half century, the Indonesian military has depicted the 1965-66 killings, which resulted in the murder of approximately one million unarmed civilians, as the outcome of a spontaneous uprising. This formulation not only denied military agency behind the killings, it also denied that the killings could ever be understood as a centralised, nation-wide campaign.

A new book by Dr Melvin, The Army and the Indonesian Genocide: Mechanics of Mass Murder was also launched at this seminar.

This seminar/book launch was co-hosted by the Centre for Indonesian Law, Islam and Society and the School of Historical and Philosophical Studies.

SPEAKERS

Before joining the Asia Institute in 2016 as Professor of Asian Studies, Vedi Hadiz was Professor of Asian Societies and Politics at Murdoch University’s Asia Research Centre and Director of its Indonesia Research Programme. An Indonesian national, he was an Australian Research Council Future Fellow in 2010-2014. Professor Hadiz received his PhD at Murdoch University in 1996 where he was Research Fellow until he went to the National University of Singapore in 2000. At NUS, he was an Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology until returning to Murdoch in 2010. His research interests revolve around political sociology and political economy issues, especially those related to the contradictions of development in Indonesia and Southeast Asia more broadly, and more recently, in the Middle East.

Professor Hadiz’s books include Localising Power in Post-Authoritarian Indonesia: A Southeast Asia Perspective (Stanford University Press 2010), Workers and the State in New Order Indonesia (Routledge 1997) and (with Richard Robison) Reorganising Power in Indonesia: The Politics of Oligarchy in an Age of Markets (RoutledgeCurzon 2004,), as well as the co-edited Between Dissent and Power: The Transformation of Islamic Politics in the Middle East and Asia (Palgrave Macmillan 2014) and the edited Empire and Neoliberalism in Asia (Routledge 2004). His articles have appeared in such journals as Development and Change, New Political Economy, Democratization, Journal of Development Studies, Pacific Review, Pacific Affairs, Third World Quarterly, Journal of Contemporary Asia, Critical Asian Studies, Indonesia, Inter-Asia Cultural Studies and Historical Materialism.

Professor Hadiz has been a visiting scholar in the School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences (EHESS) in France, the International Institute of Social Studies in the Netherlands, the Centre of Southeast Asian Studies in the University of Kyoto and the Department of Sociology in the University of Indonesia, where he is also an Adjunct Professor.

Associate Professor Kate McGregor is a historian of Indonesia. Her research interests include Indonesian historiography, memories of violence, the Indonesian military, Islam and identity in Indonesia and historical international links between Indonesia and the world. She teaches in the areas of Southeast Asian history, the history of violence and Asian thematic history.

In February 2014 Kate commenced a four year Australian Research Council Future Fellowship on the project: Confronting Historical Injustice in Indonesia: Memory and Transnational Human Rights Activism .

Kate co-founded the Historical Justice and Memory Network and was part of the organising committee for the network's first international conference in Melbourne 2012. The network under the name Dialogues on Historical Justice and Memory is now being run by Columbia University.

She has organised a range of workshops, conferences and events related to the 1965 Violence in Indonesia and is co-editor with Dr Jemma Purdey of the Translating Accounts of the 1965 Mass Violence in Indonesia Series sponsored by the Herb Feith Foundation. She is a member of the Herb Feith Foundation Working Group.

She has previously Convened The University of Melbourne's Indonesia Forum. She now co-ordinates with Dr Edwin Jurriens and Professor Thomas Reuter the Faculty of Arts Indonesia Initiative.

Jess Melvin is a Postdoctoral Fellow with the Sydney Southeast Asia Centre at Sydney University. She was Henry Hart Rice Faculty Fellow in Southeast Asian Studies and Postdoctoral Associate in Genocide Studies with the MacMillan Centre at Yale University between 2016-2017. She received her PhD from the University of Melbourne in 2015. Her research interests include the Cold War in Southeast Asia, Indonesian military history, comparative genocide studies and political violence.

Ken Setiawan is a McKenzie Research Fellow at The University of Melbourne’s Asia Institute and an Affiliate Researcher at the Institute for the Study of Human Rights (ISHR), Columbia University. She holds a PhD in Law (2013), Master of Arts (2004) and an undergraduate degree in Indonesian languages and cultures from Leiden University, The Netherlands. Ken’s research, teaching and engagement interests are at the intersection of legal anthropology, history, politics and society in Asia, with an emphasis on Indonesia. In her research, she is interested in the promotion, manifestation and contestation of human rights at global, national and local levels, particularly with regard to coming to terms with past human rights violations. Ken is author of Promoting Human Rights: National Human Rights Commissions in Indonesia and Malaysia (Leiden University Press, 2013) and she has published in journals including the Journal of the Humanities and Social Sciences of Southeast Asia and Global Change, Peace and Security.